Up until recently, I had been under the impression that industry giant James Cameron was reduced to making a movie adaptation of this. This misconception was finally shattered when I saw the trailer for Avatar and it piqued my interest.

Fast forward to a few months later, I have watched the movie in cinema four times and now believe it to be one of the defining works of the decade. Though not perfect, (is anything ever?) Avatar is an awe-inspiring viewing experience that far exceeds any other productions of similar scale. And though it has done remarkably well in the box office, I still consider it to be a highly underrated title.

Keeping alive my tradition of writing about things only after everyone stops talking about them, here are my thoughts on James Cameron’s Avatar.

Story

Avatar has a pretty typical soft sci-fi kind of story. Large future corporation wants to exploit newly-discovered resource on an alien planet and intrudes upon and screws up the life of the native indigenous inhabitants. Maybe it’s influence from American history, but this kind of setting seems pretty common. In the movie, the planet is Pandora and the indigenous people are the Na’vi, a race of 3m-tall wide-eyed blue-skinned elfish-looking people who live in tribes harmoniously with nature. (Where have we heard that one before?)

The name “Avatar” comes from a science experiment being conducted as a side project by the mega-corporation, where human and Na’vi DNAs are combined to create Na’vi-like bodies that a human operator is able to remotely control. The goal of this experiment is to find a way to negotiate with the Na’vi and steal their planet’s resource legally, with Plan B being to blow every shit up. Of course, beyond the liberal tree-hugging scientist folks who seek knowledge and coexistence and all that jazz, the rest of the human colony on Pandora consists of former US Marines who seem to overwhelmingly prefer Plan B. America, fuck yeah!

The main character Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) is a crippled ex-Marine who ends up operating an Avatar due to the death of his brainier twin brother. He (or rather his Avatar) is sent to live among the Na’vi and learn from them. His love interest is Ney’tiri (Zoe Saldana), the daughter of chief of the Omaticaya Clan. Their romance follows the textbook boy-meets-alien-girl trope that is common in Hollywood and absolutely pervasive in anime.

The story is without a doubt the weakest part of Avatar. Highly predictable and formulaic, it is serviceable but nothing ground-breaking. The perceived liberal bias underlying the story has also drew criticisms from conservative commentators ever vigilant for Hollywood propaganda, who accuse the movie of being anti-technology, anti-humanity and anti-capitalism.

Personally, I find nothing wrong with the message of the story. It doesn’t preach against technology, but merely the abuse of it — after all the Avatars are themselves products of bio-engineering. It is also rather far-fetched to accuse it of being anti-humanity, considering not all human characters in the story behave selfishly.

Everyone cheered for the triumph of the human spirit over the technological might of the resource-hungry aliens in Independence Day (or was that movie anti-technology too?), so why not for the Na’vi who, in their brave stand against human colonists, display the very same spirit that we as sentient beings value so highly. To me, it is no different from cheering for the Allied victory over Nazi Germany in a WW2 flick. No one would accuse those films of being “anti-German”, and for good reason.

That said, I do think that the story could have presented a more balanced perspective of the conflict, particularly the fear and anxiety of the human colonists who find themselves besieged in a foreign land. In a way, in its current form, Avatar resembles an early WW2 movie where the moral superiority of the Allied forces is undisputed and the viewer knows exactly who the “bad guys” are. WW2 movies have since moved on and taken on subtler approaches in depicting the emotions of war. Perhaps the Avatar franchise will last long enough to do the same.

Visual

The main selling point of the movie has to be the visuals. Instead of filming in exotic tropical jungles and throwing in a few CGI alien creatures, James Cameron decided to digitally create the entire planet of Pandora. Such an undertaking is pretty insane compared to the industry-standard practice of digitally enhancing live-action footages (à la Lord of the Rings), a much cheaper method that usually produces more realistic results. The fact that James Cameron chose to do it all digitally at great expenses is testament to the strength of his vision.

That said, though the amount of effort that went into conceptualizing and animating the flora and fauna is impressive to ineffable extends, the alien-ness of the setting is somewhat dampened by the fact that almost every one of the critters has an Earth-bound equivalent. And don’t even get me started on how every planet in Hollywood history has two-eyed bipedal humanoid aliens. Still, the creature designs in Avatar were creative and detailed enough to make me overlook this fairly standard complaint.

More impressive is how the life-action footages and motion captures are integrated with the purely CGI environment. Actress Sigourney Weaver talked about her experience during a recent appearance on The Daily Show and from what I understand, Na’vi expressions were animated using facial data captured by head-mounted cameras on the actors. So not only do the actors do motion captures and voice overs as in traditional CG methods, they actually have to act out the scene with real expressions. I’m not sure how much of this is promotional hype and how much of it is actual working technology, but it does point to the future direction of such productions. (Are we looking at the primitive ancestors of Holodecks?)

Traditionally, there is a stigma against CGI characters amongst actors (somewhere between “they took our jobs!” and “they are destroying our artform!“), but Avatar’s filming technique presents a possible solution to this age-old conundrum, an opinion that is apparently shared by Signourney Weaver. In fact, not only does this technique help to mend the bruised egos of actors who are given CGI roles, it has the excellent advantage of overcoming the uncanny valley effect that is all to prevalent in such productions. Though not entirely perfect, the facial expressions of the Na’vi are very convincing and occasionally allow the audience to forget the fact that they are merely 3D models.

As a result, though the scenery of Pandora and the aerial battles are all very visually extravagant, I personally find Ney’tiri’s facial expressions and body gestures to be the most well-animated part of the entire movie. Zoe Saldana did an excellent job depicting the character and every single one of her facial nuances is perfectly captured by the fluid animation. Having watched the movie four times (once in 3D), Ney’tiri’s close-up shots always manage to fascinate me in how well they manage to naturally engage the audience without being conspicuous. Animation technology has come a long way since Gollum and the ill-fated Polar Express.

CGI characters have traditionally been relegated to take on the roles of villains and sidekicks, because the audience finds it difficult to empathize with animated characters bearing uncanny expressions. James Cameron challenged and defeated the status quo by not only making the Na’vi people believable and likeable, but having the audience emotionally associate itself with their struggle against human invaders. For that feat alone, Avatar deserves a ton of recognition.

Of course, the technology still has some way to go. Though the 3D environment and the characters look extremely realistic and believable during the daytime shots, night-time lighting still feels like a video game, partly because real-life night lighting is pretty much non-existent.

There are also very few scenes in the movie where both human and Na’vi characters appear on-screen at the same time because there still exists a jarring contrast between the two that serves to disillusion and emotionally distant the viewer from the Na’vi. This effect is most noticeable in three scenes: when Jake first wakes up in his Avatar body, when Ney’tiri touches the face of Jake’s human body and when Grace is being carried by Jake’s Avatar body.

This problem will have to be resolved by future technology advances if any Avatar sequel or prequel is to go into the intricate back-stories of human-Na’vi relations, where physical contact between the two races (and not just through Avatar medium) are inevitable. Actually, I wouldn’t be surprised if the whole concept of “Avatar” was born to bypass this particular technical limitation by giving the story a reason to minimize contact between humans and Na’vi.

Setting

For a sci-fi epic, the back-story of Avatar is currently not very well developed. It is quite clear that a lot of planned content had to be cut from the movie due to its already lengthy 162-minute runtime. Although a few lines in the movie hint at the current state of Earth and past interactions between humans and Na’vi, much is left unexplained. However, I chalk this up to the limitation of the feature-film format rather than a lack of planning.

For example, the humans are on Pandora to mine for a mineral called Unobtainium. Though not explained in the movie dialogues, unobtainium is apparently a superconductor at room temperature, which explains the floating mountains of Pandora and their magnetic interference on electronic equipment. When considered in that context, it can be deduced that the giant artificial-looking ring structures that surround the Tree of Souls are in fact the hardened form of molten metals shaped by an underground magnetic field.

From such unmentioned details, it’s quite clear that a lot of background planning went into creating the world of Pandora and I can only hope that the subject will be further explored in future works.

Some questions that I have off the top of my head:

• Are the night-time lighting effects real light as perceivable by human eyes or a visual representation of Na’vi extra-sensory perceptions? I’m leaning towards the latter due to the fact that their footprints “glow”.
• Did the symbiotic relationship between the Na’vi people and their mounts evolve naturally? It’s hard to see how they manage to retain their inter-compatible organs through years of natural selection, especially in the case of the predatory flyer who has no survival incentive to enter such a relationship. That said, the concept is actually not that far-fetched.
• What happened to the English school that Grace founded for the natives?
• How did humans first discover and come to Pandora?
• What happened to Earth?

Another thing that absolutely fascinates me is the Na’vi language. Created by Paul Frommer, a Linguistic PhD at USC, it is a fully functional language that the actors had to learn for their roles in the movie. Based on a few interviews and articles by Dr. Frommer and the dialogues found in the movie, language enthusiasts have already assembled a partial learning guide to Na’vi.

Due to contractual issues, the full grammar and vocabulary of Na’vi are unlikely to be made available until a licensed language guide is published (which it eventually will be), but it’s amazing how much progress has been made so far by reverse engineering. For example, we know that the Na’vi have an octal number system as they only have four fingers on each hand. (By the way, the Avatars, being a mix of Na’vi and human genomes, have five fingers.)

A rich and imaginative back-story is the hallmark of any successful sci-fi epic. Although the movie Avatar has an apparently simple story, it can be seen from the examples above that there is much potential for the franchise to expand into a proper fictional universe, much as how Star Wars grew from Episode 4 into a full-fledged epic.

James Cameron mentioned that he has enough materials planned for three movies. I can certainly see potential for at least a prequel and a sequel to Avatar.

Conlusion

Avatar is a ground-breaking piece of work in its ability to create believable CGI characters that the audience can emotionally invest in. James Cameron has managed to break down a long-held line between live action and CGI and it is this achievement that Avatar should be remembered for. The movie was a huge gamble on the prowess of modern animation technology and its high-risk production method probably forced James Cameron to be more conventional in its other aspects (i.e. typical Hollywood blockbuster story-telling).

Hopefully, with its now established credentials and matured production techniques, the franchise can move on to more subtle storytelling and further explore the intricate history and culture of the Avatar universe.

By the way, I recommend everyone watch Avatar at least twice, especially if you watched the first time in 3D. In my opinion, the lost of visual fidelity and details for such a beautiful movie is not worth the gimmicky 3D effect that is only really effective in a few “long hallway” scenes. Watch the movie in 2D and take some time to appreciate the amazing details found in Ney’tiri’s every expression.

P.S. I want to learn Na’vi. Who’s with me?