The money is on the screen in Avatar, James Cameron's mega-3-D, mondo-CGI, more-than-a-quarter-billion-dollar baby, and, like the Hope Diamond waved in front of your nose, the bling is almost blinding. For the first 45 minutes, I'm thinking: Metropolis! — and wondering how to amend ballots already cast in polls of the year's best movies. Then the 3-D wears off, and the long second act kicks in.
Avatar is a technological wonder, fifteen years percolating in King Cameron's imagination and inarguably the greatest 3-D cavalry Western ever made. Too bad that Western is Dances With Wolves. The movie opens brilliantly with an assembly line of weightless mercenaries disembarking at planet Pandora's earthling (that is, American) base — a fantastic military hustle, with the paraplegic volunteer Jake (Australian actor Sam Worthington) wheeling through a sea of Jeeps, trucks and galumphing robots. Every shot is a fascinating study, thanks to the plethora of depth-complicated transparent monitors, Kindle-like devices and rearview mirrors that Cameron has positioned throughout the frame.
The Sky People, as the native Pandorans or Na'vis call them, are on a mission to strip-mine this lushly verdant planet to save their own despoiled world. As preparation, the Sky People are attempting to infiltrate the Na'vis by linking human consciousness to Pandoran avatars. Thus, an all-American jarhead like Jake finds himself inside a twelve-foot-tall, blue-striped, yellow-eyed, flat-nosed humanoid with an elegant tail and cute little goat ears — and he can walk!
Beside himself with joy, Jake bursts out of the hospital and, before too long, finds himself alone in a mad jungle surrounded by six-armed neon tetra lemurs, flying purple people eaters, hammer-headed triceratopses, and nasty leather demon dogs. Jake is saved by the jungle girl Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña), known in pidgin English as Pocahontas, and brought back to the Na'vi village to meet her father, the king (full-blooded Cherokee Wes Studi, here playing a good Indian). The Na'vis think that investigating Jake will allow them to understand the Sky People. (Little do they know...heh, heh, heh.)
The Sky People are divided into hawks and doves, with Jake as a sort of double double agent, simultaneously reporting back to the most militant Marine meanie (Stephen Lang) as well as the tough but tender biologist (Sigourney Weaver, in full Ripley mode). The former wants him to find out "what the blue monkeys want." The latter knows that the Na'vi are ultra-green — a new-age matriarchal eco-friendly culture spiritually connected to Every Living Thing.
Avatar seamlessly synthesizes live action, animation, performance-capture and CGI to create what is essentially a non-participatory computer game: Jurassic Park's menagerie running wild in The Matrix's double eXistenZ. When, waking up back in the lab, Jake realizes that "out there is the true world and in here is the dream," you know that it's time for him to go native, complete with tender blue-monkey sex ("We are mated for life"). As in a Jack Kirby comic book, the muscular, coming-atcha visuals trump the movie's camp dialogue and corny conception, but only up to a point. Jake's initiation rites notwithstanding, Avatar itself doesn't reawaken until the bang-up final battle — aerial cavalry incinerating holy sites and bombing the bejesus out of the blue-monkey redskin slopes, Jake uniting the Na'vi clans with inspirational martial music.
Long before the third act, however, the ideologically sensitive will realize that Twentieth Century Fox has taken a half-billion-dollar risk. The rampaging Sky People are heavy-handedly associated with the Bush administration. They chortle over the failure of diplomacy, wage what is referred to as "some sort of shock-and-awe campaign" against the Na'vis, and goad each other with Cheney one-liners.
Let no one call so spectacular an instance of political correctness run amok "entertaining." I look forward to the Limbaugh-Hannity take on this grimly engaging development. At least Avatar won't win James Cameron a Nobel Peace Prize — but then again, it just might.
