Paratrooper Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), wheelchair-bound after one of the wars on Earth, is sent into space on the planet Pandora to replace his twin brother, killed in an accidental skirmish with a mob. The brother was part of Project Avatar and was preparing to control the body of the Pandora aboriginal Na’vi – a mining company on Pandora is quite concerned about skirmishes with the local three-meter tall blue Indians and is trying to study them. The technology is great: while the earthling sleeps, his blue avatar scurries through the jungle, while the avatar sleeps, the earthling hobbles around in his barracks. Except that no one imagined that the former paratrooper would fall in love with the jungle and decide that the blue Indians were closer to him than the distant Earth. And when the company sends the air force to bomb villages and sacred groves, three-foot blue Jake Sully will be the one to lead the Na’vi flying dragon saddlers into battle.
The discussion of Avatar, which takes place amidst the quiet buzz about “breakthroughs” and “the cinema of the future,” is somewhat confused, the film slipping away like Teflon from intelligible analysis. The main questions are whether Cameron screwed up (no), whether this is a great movie (was Titanic great?), whether the film will make a billion dollars (unknown), whether it’s a technological breakthrough (oh, yes!), whether it’s on par with The Watchmen (2009) and The Dark Knight, The (2008) (no), whether it’s worth watching (of course). The stunning effect of this film seems to be that “Avatar” is an average smart blockbuster, only a blockbuster circa 2020. It is as hard to judge today as “Transformers” (2007) was in ’50.
The simplest plot constructions are crammed into 162 minutes of epic dreaming – Cameron’s goal was clearly to drag the viewer, like Jake Sully chained to a wheelchair, only not a medical one but an audience one, to a place where no man has ever set foot. “Adventure,” a beautiful word, though moth-eaten by hot tourist offers, takes on its original meaning here: the battle with predators in the jungle, the taming of dragons, the grand final battle in the clouds. “Avatar” is first and foremost an experience, James Cameron’s dream of what the cinema of the future might be like: consciously naive, passionate, scouring the newest technical means to tell the oldest stories in the world. Cameron has always told only stories that never end, whether it’s the tale of Death, who follows a man (even if in the form of a robot), or of lovers who are not meant to be together. This time he told perhaps the oldest fairy tale of all, about a lost paradise.
Paradise is a Pandora’s Jungle, copied from the Miyazaki cartoons. But not because the cliffs soaring in the sky are incredibly beautiful, just like the flying dragons and six-legged horses, not because the blue Na’vi live in bucolic harmony with nature, and nature is all united by a single nerve – in Harrison’s The Untamed Planet the same unified nature looked like hell. Ecology, the new age skimping in the cold embrace of the noughties, politics, dystopian futuristic predictions – all this is ultimately nonsense that touches Avatar tangentially.
Paradise is simple and straightforward answers to questions about where your avatar wanders while you sleep and whose side you should take when the bombs fly.