Avatar: Dances with JakeSully

Finally got to see the film, Avatar. We certainly will see it again. The next time in 3D. Really – the whole point is the movement into the body and eyes of the avatar. So looking through those eyes is like looking through 3D glasses. It makes sense. And the concept works for me: a real contemporary technology example of form and content.

The film is gorgeous. Pandora is gorgeous and the animation truly outstanding. It is a voluptuous experience for the eyes and ears.

For the mind, the story is a bit ‘echo-ish’ – in the sense that technology zooms into a whole, biologically pantheistic world where all things are connected via a biological network.

Sounds a bit like ‘Dances with Wolves.’ (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099348/) And it was. Totally. The visual metaphor of the Na’vi was akin to native Americans, horses, war trill, and arrows. Jake Sully is adopted by the Na’vi when they discover he is a ‘warrior.’ Indeed, Jake Sully must earn his place and learn the tribal ways. In the end, he also becomes a source of betrayal. The cavalry does attack.

Still, I was with it; so beautiful and mythic in its grandeur.

Until … well, think meta-gaming. You don’t want to throw your users out of the game, right? Remember games like that? Back in the Zork days: or,  Flight Simulator? Chances are the user will not return?

Fiction is like that, too. Coleridge calls it the ‘willing suspension of disbelief.’ Authors need to write in a way that keeps readers inside the created world, even if it that world is fantasy. The writer’s job is to make readers believe that world is possible  or to make them willing to ‘suspend their disbelief’ that it is not.

What was the breach for me? I was trying to hold it together as the plot thinned with the war/marine/machine. But the phrase ‘Shock and Awe’ threw me out of the film. What was a beautiful and sad fantasy became a cheap political crack.

Everyone ‘got’ what the film does. Technology versus nature, objectification versus participation, war versus love. But that crack made the film at that point about one thing: America in Iraq. And believe me, as a complete metaphor, it doesn’t work.

So, in the end, the plot did not completely serve the film’s end. But worthwhile? Major YES. Going again? Yes! Watching the 3D version? Amen! Bring on the glasses.