Thanks, I Hate It: Avatar

Well, here we are at the end of this year’s Week of Loathing, and what better note to end on than a movie that shattered every box office record of note to become the highest-grossing film of all time and now, just a decade later, might as well never have come out at all for all the impact it had on popular culture. James Cameron’s Avatar is a McMansion in the form of a film, a blandly extravagant way for Cameron to tell the world that the most exciting thing he can imagine is Disney’s Pocahontas but with robots and anime cat people. The sheer amount of money poured into realizing that mediocre vision is enough to make you cry.

The far-reaching scope of Cameron’s dull as dirt film only makes it worse. Every uninspired piece of creature design that lumbers onscreen, every would-be wonder that falls flat; it all hammers home that whatever well Cameron drew from to make homerun action movies like Aliens and Terminator 2 is now drier than Death Valley at noon. Avatar is an eco-political fantasy of compassionate colonialism, its moral landscape as uncomplicated as the insipidly virtuous and conflict-free society it presents on the fictional world of Pandora. 

Now I’m going to spoil Jordan Peele’s Get Out, which you ought to see if you haven’t

Essentially, Avatar does the plot twist from Get Out—the transplant of a white brain into a young, vigorous black body—in complete earnest. It then doubles down on that thoughtless ugliness by having the white guy (Sam Worthington) escape his lower-body paralysis as part of the process. The movie presents him less as a disabled person than an able one suffering a grotesque and unacceptable inconvenience. But anyway, dissecting the ethical content of a movie which so plainly thought none of its subject matter through is a game of diminishing returns, so let’s leave it there.

Avatar’s Na’vi, a race of ten-foot-tall blue aliens with genital tentacles inside their hair, are a focus-grouped horde of indistinct faces. The only character to give us their perspective is Tough Princess Zoe Saldana, who instructs Jake in her people’s ways. Everything the Na’vi do is wonderful and sensible and feels great to be a part of. Their entire civilization is connected via a kind of biological internet, which also allows them to plug-and-play wild animals as mounts and to fuck each other in a way far superior to any human concept of sex by braiding their hair-dicks together. The whole thing is so clean and bloodless, so devoid of genuine emotion or struggle, you could vomit just looking at it. 

The script is an afterthought, a collection of sounds for the cast to make while Cameron’s magnum opus plays over them. The characters—with the exception of the always wonderful Stephen Lang’s hardass father figure Colonel Quaritch—are so ill-defined they might as well be casting notices for their general type. What’s Jake Sully like? Name one quality that Jake Sully has. Try to imagine a single line he said during the film Avatar, which raked in more during its theatrical run than some small countries make in a year. If there is one reason to believe in our ability to make it as a species, to act with discernment and foresight, it is our rejection of Sam Worthington as a movie star.

Avatar is a movie with all its questions answered, all its corners explored, all its moral quandaries resolved on-screen so neatly that nobody could possibly misinterpret any of it, which is fine because everything it has to say is infantile anyway. The whole thing boils down to “be nice to savages and you get to save them and then become one of them! The most special and accomplished one!” It’s a story a high school student wrestling with their guilt at learning about colonialism would tell, a paving over of everything icky and uncomfortable in the narrative with forced smiles and stirring tales of heroism.

This is a movie for people who want to be comfortable. It’s a movie for people who don’t want to think, or be confronted with ambiguity, or have any of their beliefs or emotions challenged. It’s a movie for people who don’t want to remember dialogue or close their eyes and savor the recurring image of a single shot, a movie for people who don’t want to encounter even the possibility of becoming upset while engaging with art. If creation and the consumption of that creation is a kind of spiritual spacewalk, viewer and artist meeting in the void between their disparate perspectives, then Avatar is the vomit comet—the plane NASA uses to dive in and out of the upper atmosphere so astronauts get used to weightlessness during momentary brushes with a cheap imitation of the real thing. 

Thanks for joining me for The Week of Loathing, which ends today and will, I think, happen again next year. In the meantime Thanks, I Hate It will continue to run every Friday for Patreon subscribers pledging $1 or more!

Also I forgot Sam Worthington’s name FOUR TIMES while writing this, even after I’d typed it out.