Recently, a movie called Avatar is very popular all over the world.With its incredibly stunning visuals and compelling story line, James Cameron’s “Avatar” is memorable and meaningful. It’s so much more than a film that looks cool with a 3-D treatment.
Avatar was extraordinary only because of its special effects. So congratulations should go to the geniuses at Weta Digital, the company responsible for producing them over the course of two years. Instead, last night the Golden Globes judges named Cameron “Best Director” and – mind-bogglingly – Avatar the “Best Drama”.
It’s a environmental parable, in other words, and a clumsy one at that. I’ve written at length about Avatar’s patronising and racist subtext: how the blue-skinned Na’vi, a pastiche of this planet’s “ethnic” races, are utterly powerless without the help of a principled white man. And how I was disgusted that the Na’vi – like the Africans in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness – demonstrate a “triumphant bestiality”. (Cameron is so obviously 2009’s worst lefty.)
What I have yet to hit home, however, is Avatar’s overall failure as a film. But you know what? The Vatican newspaper already has that spot on . It’s “bland”, a reviewer wrote in L’Osservatore Romano last week. “It has a great deal of enchanting, stunning technology, but few genuine or human emotions. Its significance is in its visual impact rather than in the story, and in its messages, despite the fact that they are hardly new.”
Finally, the review lays into Cameron who, “concentrating on the creation of the fantasy world of Pandora, chooses a bland approach. He tells the story without any profound exploration.”
