Should Have Sent A Poet: A Review of 'Avatar'

“It’s the biggest, the most spectacular, the most expensive, and it will reign supreme,” they said. And yet the crew of the H.M.S. Titanic barely had time to warm up the toasted sandwich makers before everything went aft side up. Big, brazen, bold, declarative: these things speak of folly, the debunked legacy of an infinitely scaled modernist perfection. Such monoliths tear through neighbourhoods, crush the individual, and perpetuate themselves at the altar of capitalist production. It is human nature to want to see them fail. So what to make of the most expensive film ever made?

‘Avatar’ cost a reported $500 million. Whether this fully takes into account the staggering marketing budget, the cost of creating new camera equipment and digital effects programs, or the tertiary expenses of kitting out half the cinemas of the Western world with projectors capable of coming within spitting distance of the reels, is all immaterial. Taking the figure as a given, the math works out as follows: ‘Avatar’, running at 162 minutes, costs $3 million per minute. Yet, in a world where David Schwimmer gets a cool mil every time he acts like a berk for twenty minutes, that isn’t all that staggering. So phrase it this way: my annual salary could buy me just over half a second of this film. A first class flight to Australia converts to less than a single frame. (And if the factoid that each of these frames involved no less than fifty-seven man-hours of work is accurate then the average wage of someone working on the production was $37 an hour.) Maybe the scariest part is that a Tom Cruise cannot be blamed for gobbling up forty or so million of it – whatever you may say about stars Sam Worthington and Zoe Saldana, ‘box office sure things’ would not be top of the list.

So what has all this been spent on? The film is screened, where available, in 3D, and was filmed using cameras designed by the writer, director, producer, and contributing editor James Cameron. Much of it takes place in what can only be an entirely digital environment; but unlike the glazed-over narco-scapes of Jar-Jar-period George Lucas, the world of ‘Avatar’ is competently, comprehensively and wholly realistically drawn. The result is something somewhat staggering to behold.

In the 2150s humanity has found a far-off planet with an incredibly valuable natural resource. Eager to mine as much of it as possible, a base is set-up on what is tellingly labelled Pandora, and the local inhabitants – blue humanoids called the Na’vi – are dealt with first diplomatically then combatively. Our guide is Jake Sully, a marine who by a strange turn of fate is called in to pilot “a remote-controlled avatar”, his consciousness downloaded into a Na’vi body with which he can explore the hostile climate of the planet and interact with the even more hostile inhabitants.

If an audience member were themselves hostile, they could criticise the film for being the dry run for a computer game. The environment of Pandora seems, on the surface, like what we have seen before, with its lush forests, cascading waterfalls, exotic creatures, floating islands and the like. But Cameron – an aficionado of deep-sea diving and the life forms that can be found there – has created a nearly-believable eco-system based on tropical climates, energy transference, and bioluminescence (although personally I could have done without the six legged horses). These images are so breathtaking as to edge towards indescribable. The fact that they start to feel almost pedestrian towards the end of the film is its own strange achievement.


When Aragon took to the fields before Minus Tirith to fight the good fight in ‘Return of the King’ he always seemed to bob on top of the ground below him, and his interaction with his foes was somewhat wobbly. No such criticisms here, the digital environment an integrated part of the world on display, rather than a show-stopping splurge as in the ridiculous ‘2012’. For all the “breakthroughs” and “bar-raisings” of the past fifteen years, Cameron has offered the first genuine revolution in the extensive use of CGI.

That he links this revolution to the 3D format is particularly canny. ‘Avatar’ was my first 3D film, and indeed the first of its kind to offer the entire running time in three dimensions, rather than just selected, ‘Wizard of Oz’-esque moments. From the first scene of the marines being woken from hyper-sleep, medical technicians drifting across the frame and the corridor they’re all in seeming to extend out the back of the cinema screen, the audience is immersed in a way that could not previously be experienced. For all the knives shoved towards the camera and swooping through tree canopies it is the quiet moments in which people just sit in a room and chat that the format is most engaging, allowing you time to absorb what amounts to a wholly fresh cinematic experience.

This has always been one of Cameron’s strengths, from the groundbreaking T-1000 of ‘Terminator 2’ to the sinking titular ship of ‘Titanic’. It could be expected of such a man that his stories would be clinical devices for the delivery of his brand new toy, and indeed when scripting ‘The Terminator’ he made a list of the ten things the biggest grossing films ever made had in common (presumably including #3. The violent death of Bill Paxton and #7. Comedy Austrian accents). Yet the quasi-Proppian formalism such thinking breeds has led to narratives constructed with such care that they cannot fail to entertain, even as they wholeheartedly fail to surprise. Perhaps the vital ingredient amongst this almost ceremonial deployment of story elements is that of the feminine: from Sigourney Weaver’s amped up heroine in ‘Aliens’ to Jamie Lee Curtis tearing the sleeves off her dress in ‘True Lies’ (and all via Linda Hamilton’s conversion from 80s airhead to 90s Unabomber in the first two Terminators), women tend to have their say around James Cameron. Here it is the Na’vi Jake falls in love with, the hunter-warrior Neytiri, whose portrayal by Saldana is one of the hidden strengths of ‘Avatar’: expressive, gestural, and invested with a dignified emotionality, she is a brilliant counterpoint to the occasionally dim-witted and goofy Sully. Just as Ed Harris’ anguished screams when confronted with the corpse of his ex-wife in ‘The Abyss’ make up for much of the stilted nonsense in that film, so the gale-force drama on display here is considerably more convincing than the expositional necessities.


The most bluntly entertaining character in the film is inevitably the villainous Colonel Quaritch, a military man in the mould of Duvall’s surf-obsessive in ‘Apocalypse Now’ or Nick Nolte’s Homer-reading megalomaniac in ‘The Thin Red Line’. The role is oversized and ridiculous, but at the same time entirely believable. As played by Stephan Lang (in a second stand-out part of the year, after playing the man who shot Dillinger in Michael Mann’s ‘Public Enemies’), Quaritch is fearsomely single-minded and bullish individual unburdened by the cognitive dissonance that affects other Cameronian antagonists. Drinking from a metallic coffee cup he congratulates his brigade’s efforts at genocide by saying “the first round’s on me tonight.” The wider cast of human extras is also impressive, looking as they do like real people in real roles rather than central-casting professionals, or embarrassed day-players larking in front of a green screen.

There are qualms with some of the subtexts. The film encodes imperialism as a wholly white male pursuit, while the Na’vi are played entirely by Black and American-Indian actors, as though spirituality and Gaia-awareness were solely the privilege of the under-privileged, and Sully’s journey were not so much learning about another culture as shucking off the burden of white power and ‘going native’. Two of the converts to the needs of the Na’vi among the human classes are even conspicuously non-white. (Indeed, when considering the infinitesimal role of racial minorities in Cameron’s films a simplistic pattern evolves, and that is before one gets to the white-marines-against-black-aliens Vietnam allegory of ‘Aliens’.) There is also the disturbing lack of irony in the presentation of a movie that could only be created by a massive corporate entity like Twentieth Century Fox pedalling a message of eco-awareness and anti-imperialism.

As my viewing companion underplayed after the screening: “there’s certainly a lot there”. ‘Avatar’ may be a behemoth of spectacular construction which worships technology and by-the-numbers story-telling, but it is also a genuinely pioneering work of art. Whether it will usher in the new age of a new medium (if not a new message) we can only wait and see. For now, go see it, and let yourself be amazed.

Notes Towards an Exploration of Space in Contemporary Action Cinema

Space has become fragmented. Blame Jason Bourne. Or possibly Jean Baudrillard. Jittery shots, quick editing, the desired response of dazzled confusion. Renowned (but occasionally doddery) film theorist David Bordwell calls it “intensified continuity” – the phenomenon whereby contemporary films feature a considerably shorter average shot length than ever before. More shots, more cuts, more action. As a result, the environment through which characters move becomes increasingly difficult for the spectator to map.

Some films respond by collapsing their existence towards a singularity. Paul Greengrass, a British director formerly involved in painstaking you-are-there recreations of such tragedies as Ireland’s Bloody Sunday, uses intensified continuity as a precision-tool of great dramatic and artistic effect. The set-piece in Waterloo station in Greengrass’ The Bourne Ultimatum is the nadir of this form, the splintered world created through meticulous but frantic shooting and cutting a demonstration of the protagonist Jason Bourne’s lack of history (thanks to amnesia), but total grasp of his immediate situation even in the face of extreme pressure (thanks to relentless government indoctrination). The train station becomes his entire world, and the film depicts an attempt to grasp this vast space with something close to simultaneity. Attention is fleeting, jumping from this face to that, from the security camera to the exits. Waterloo station is depicted as fragments of vital concentration, not a coherent or meaningful entirety.




This is the postmodern environment as sensory barrage. There is a similar tendency in the television series 24, with its incessant and unenlightening split-screens gesturing towards an awareness of the wealth of incident, character, and information that accompanies the most cursory event. However, the constant pandering to the lowest attention span undoes such efforts – entire episodes seem to consist of a chain of people phoning each other and re-iterating the same conversation, without the creators or writers suggesting an awareness of the ‘Chinese-whispers’ potential of such a scenario. Space for Jack Bauer may not be highly structured, but it is entirely manageable.

Detailed mapping and navigation in this sort of drama seems impossible. Plots packed with incident keep moving, flitting from place to place, offering neither characters nor audience purchase on the surrounding environment. Nowhere better is this trend examined, and indeed parodied, than the most recent outing for James Bond, Quantum of Solace. Concluding in a bizarre hotel in the middle of the desert (indeed, there are few scenes in the film that do not take place in hotel rooms, lobbies, anonymous corridors or sleek performance spaces), the setting is a meaningless, depopulated postmodern space. As the hotel itself is unconnected from a metropolitan, or even rural surrounding, so too the sections of the hotel itself fail to cohere. The central space of the hotel, across which walkways are suspended in mid-air, is like something from a science-fiction film.

Even the destruction of this site by multiple explosions, previously such an easy fallback pleasure of action films in the 80s and 90s, is undercut by the nonsensibility of the devastation. In the finest shot of the film, if not the entire series, the villain flees from an explosion as it bursts through a wall and shatters a room-spanning sheet of glass; the space may be hollow, but the only way to understand it is through action. What was previously inert and functionless (the room, the glass, the hotel itself) becomes dazzling in its beauty and its dynamism. Spectacle and excitement become tools with which to explore the meaning of architecture, and our interaction with it.




This re-examination of a space once inert made ferocious is used to great effect in the thriller The International. Extended sequences in Milan, New York and Istanbul successfully ingrain themselves with the cities they visit without excessive sequences of “local colour”. The centrepiece in Frank Lloyd Wright’s coiled Guggenheim museum (shot for the most part inside a 98% to scale replica built in Germany) offers initially the use of architecture-as-backdrop, as detectives follow an assassin up the rotunda where he is to meet his handler. The installation on display is a plethora of cinema screens showing occasionally stagey, occasionally vibrant scenes. The backdrop of the set itself is littered with further backdrops.

When the bullets start to fly the space is radically transformed. Balconies become shooting galleries, walls become shields, punters become collateral damage, and museum pieces become deadly weapons. The audience is rushed away from the ramp, into a staircase, then back to the rotunda. Our awareness of the environment, previously one of quiet (museum-like?) contemplation becomes one of life-or-death sensory necessity. The last shot of the space is a slow track forward and pan up, asking us to see how our awareness of the building has changed, progressed, clarified. Unlike the shifting mass of people and camera movement of Waterloo, this architecture is built from the ground-up within the structure of the scene and the shots that compose it.



Creating his own environments to explore, James Cameron frequently offers a meticulous recomposing of these spaces as his films cross their halfway point. In The Abyss, set almost entirely aboard an oil platform based on the ocean floor, a tour of the intricacies and layout of the rig is interwoven with the narrative during the first hour and a half. When an accident cripples the vessel, and a visiting Navy SEAL team turn against the blue-collar crew, this knowledge is redeployed as a potential for salvation. Reviewers often term this sort of action “hard-earned” – those who paid attention earlier are rewarded by a comforting feeling of awareness and security. Inversely, it is the cardinal sin of any narrative for a solution to be offered that has no preceding conditions for its existence (the plotting equivalent of the fight scene in which the hero triumphs at the moment their plight seems most dire by kicking their attacker in the genitals). Titanic actually shows the sinking of the ship twice, first in one of the early scenes aboard a salvaging vessel in the modern day, as an aged survivor is lectured using a rudimentary computer program as to what damage the iceberg did, and how the subsequent flooding of the compartmentalised sections of the hull led to the front of the ship sinking, the rising of the rear section, the tearing of the ship in two, then subsequent vertical dragging down of beneath the waves. Later, when a far more advanced computer program depicts the same events, there is no need for an over-calm character explaining what is occurring, or expositional shots of the hull under water. “What’s going on!” asks Rose to her lover: “I don’t know” he replies. But we do. The spectacle of action is only offered after forensic enquiry and two hours of dramatic action exploring every deck, engine room and cabin.

Space, then, does not have to be fragmented to be explored. The Waterloo Station of The Bourne Ultimatum exists in shards, while the hotels on Quantum of Solace seem not to exist at all. The Guggenheim of The International is scrutinised and given a new life, while the self-created spaces of James Cameron films exist as lined-up dominoes for thrilling set pieces. The action film offers a method of dynamically exploring architecture, turning what could be merely a backdrop into a tangible environment which can be mapped in a variety of unexpected ways.