Avatar
by patricklee on Dec.29, 2009, under Patrick Lee
While it’s not a book, it really merits a mention given the week’s topic, and given that tens of millions of people have experienced it during this same week, myself included.
It also serves as a great jumping-off point for discussing another means of world-building: forging parallels to familiar aspects of our own world.
Avatar takes place on a moon orbiting a planet more than four light years away from Earth, about a century and a half from now. Why, then, can we relate to it so easily? Because it’s a metaphor for Earth, and because its central story is one that’s played out right here, in real life, time and again.
(MILD SPOILER ALERT–Maybe catch the movie before reading more of this post, though I won’t give away too much.)
It’s the weak versus the strong. It’s patience and understanding versus arrogance and bullying. Everything about life on Pandora, both among the natives and among the human intruders, serves these overarching themes. In the human encampment, everything is metal and concrete and glass — hard and cold. Among the Na’vi, everything is alive and organic, swimming with bioluminescent color.
This clash is also reflected in the final showdown between hero and villain: two humans, each in control of larger and more powerful forms. The hero’s vehicle is a living body, which he’s naturally and organically synced with. The villain’s vehicle is a hard-edged, multi-ton metal machine. That showdown pretty much encapsulates the whole movie.
All of these details represent the processes of world-building and storytelling, perfectly combined. It’s impossible to say where one ends and the other begins. And while it’s true that world-building is a more obvious process in a movie than in a book (note that I didn’t say “easier”), since the filmmaker is showing you the fictional world in the background of every single frame… it would still be pretty screw-up-able, to put it mildly, in the hands of a bad storyteller. Suffice it to say that Avatar isn’t even remotely screwed up.
The point is just this: you can build a world and tell a story at the same time, and a good way to do it is to make your fictional world a strange twin of our own. If it’s similarity lies in some primal aspect of real life (weak vs. strong… evil winning because it’s unhindered by rules… good winning because it never has to question its motivation…), then you can let the finer details suggest themselves as means of supporting the theme.
I should probably mention that the book I have coming out takes place in the present day, right here on good ol’ planet Earth. But I read all types of fiction (well, almost all types) and hopefully my thoughts on the construction of imaginary worlds haven’t been too far off the mark. And obviously the world of my story is as imaginary as any other: it’s populated by people who’ve never existed, doing things that have never been done. Characters and circumstances are, by far, the biggest and most important aspects of the world you create. That’s probably why storytelling and world-building mesh so well: when done correctly they’re almost one and the same.
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December 29th, 2009 on 3:15 am
One of my absolute favorite things about Avatar is similar to something you said: everything ties into each other and feeds off of it. Aspects of the world building affect the characterization, and the characterization in turn changes the way the world is seen. And it had Mechs, and I always love Mechs.
It was also nice to see fantasy world building froma filmakers perspective - Pandora was a helluva lot more fully realized than a lot of other sf/f movies recently (though at times it was a little too expository, whereas a film like Alien left a lot up for speculation and made the mystery count for a lot more suspense).
December 29th, 2009 on 11:25 am
I’m sorry but, as far as I’m concerned, that movie sucked. It should have been called “Wishful Thinking”. Primitive natives with literally bows and arrows beating super-high future tech. Yeah, right. A resource so valuable and yet no government trying to get control of it … just the Hollywood typical “evil” corporation. Hollywood just cannot make Big Government out as a bad guy as it loves it too much. No suspense. Everything … and I do mean everything telegraphed beforehand that only a child that has never seen a movie would be surprised by anything in this movie … and maybe not even then. Not a SINGLE original character, plot point, or anything. The “evil” corporate executive ripped from Aliens (and countless other movies), know-nothing down-on-his-luck bad-to-turn-good nobody as central character (throw dart at any movie and you’ll hit one that has this), crazed military leader (my eyes rolled when I saw that one), tough-as-nails-but-will-assuredly-become-a-softie female lead (I wanted to throw my soda at the screen when I saw that one), and the list goes on and on. NOTHING original. “Running With Wolves” in space. Not science fiction but space opera.
Not one person involved in the movie knows anything about what probable future tech will be like then. Nanotechnology could have extracted the resource without the natives even knowing (without help from some unbelievable supernatural force) that anything was being done. No strip mining needed. Oh wait. Sorry, that would totally destroy the conflict. Can’t have that. I guess nanotechnology never gets developed in the future.
And think about it. If you can remotely control biological bodies, shouldn’t you be able to remotely control … oh say … combat robots from orbit? Like the US military is literally developing TODAY! Same goes for any mining needing to be done. No need to have a single human on that inhospitable hostile moon. Just an orbiting space station filled with wimpy geeks operating bad-ass robot avatars on the moon’s surface. No big show-down where the humans die. Oh, you destroyed my robot? Here. I’ll send down another one.
Or if you want to take out the mother tree, what ever happened to long-range missiles? We have the bomb and missile tech TODAY that could do the job no sweat. Oh wait. That wouldn’t result in a prolonged bombing scene that shows how evil the corporation and soldiers are (not to mention how oppressed the natives are) but just a split second, a flash, and ashes.
And poor little main character. He’s a cripple. Oh, you can just feel the sympathy factor surround him like a halo. And yet, we’re told he’s extremely valuable to the corporation as the reason this literal know-nothing is recruited and sent on this mission. Hmmm. Let me get this straight. He’s so valuable but the corporation cannot afford to fix his legs before he goes? Wouldn’t they want to do that to insure he works as best as he can for them and be grateful to them for doing so? Wouldn’t they at least hold that out as a carrot to come work for them? Oh wait. We need that carrot to be dangled by the “evil” military leader so the idiot becomes a momentary turncoat. And then there’s the idiot himself. Could he be more dumb? He has the corporation over a barrel. They need him more than he needs them. Is he so dumb that he cannot say, “Here’s the deal. You fix my legs now and I’ll go off on this mission for you.” No, that would eliminate the sympathy factor. We cannot have that.
And then there are the natives. They could be cast for “Dumb and Dumber 2″. They never once think, “Hmmm. Our bows and arrows don’t do much against these humans and their machines. Hmmm. I did kill one and here is his weapon resting on the ground here. Hmmm. I wonder what would happen if I picked it up and used it against them.” You know like how American Indians did. But then that would make the moon’s natives less pure and natural. Nope, we cannot have that. We have to be rescued by the PLANET becoming a sentient being! Gaia comes to life!!! Every tree-hugger’s dream come true. I felt like vomiting at this point.
No, “Avatar” was nothing more than just another unrealistic eco anti-capitalism dumbed-down fantasy movie that manipulates everything with a sledgehammer to produce everything in it.
December 29th, 2009 on 12:46 pm
I think there were two levels of world building taking place in AVATAR: the technical, and the story-level.
The technical world building was great. The CGI interaction of the characters on the screen was essentially flawless — watching the characters move through the forest, interact with the flora and fauna, and the alternate interaction of the humans with the same, was a pleasure. There was a TON of work involved in building that world, and it shows. In technical terms, AVATAR draws a line: there will be CGI before this movie, and CGI after this movie. It was easy to lose yourself in the world and the characters such that you forget they were computer generated.
It is at the story level that the movie’s world building falls down. The natives, while visually stunning, are largely the idealized “noble savages” we’ve seen portrayed in our literature and media in one form or another for centuries. Little imagination was put into the Na’vi culture in terms of its interaction with their world, or what they garner from it. Bows and arrows? Really? Given the indigenous life forms we saw, I would have hoped that the writers could have come up with more inspirational and imaginary uses for the natives. Cultures are inspired by their native surroundings — given what we saw in the movie, I and my 11 year old son were able to come up with over a dozen more interesting and original “primitive” technologies and strategies in ten minutes for the Na’vi to use both in both peaceful and war-like pursuits.
Understand, I don’t have problems with an eco-based premise — that’s a standard trope. It will work as well or as poorly as the writing used to portray it. What I have issue with is what was essentially lazy world building and story telling. We have seen/read this story in the same essential setting before. When it came right down to it, except for the flying beasties, the flux field (which didn’t turn out to be as much of a hindrance as it had been billed), and the tapping into the neural network of the planet, we didn’t see a lot that wasn’t something we’ve already seen, only with a nice glossy coat of CGI paint on top of it. In a story that centers on cultural immersion in, and acceptance by, a non-human race as the main motivator for the protagonist, it is disappointing when that alien culture (and its interaction with the world) turns out to be based largely on a number of well-worn Western European cliches. Think about it: without the CGI, this would be a so-so SF effort at best.
If Cameron & Co. had put even half as much work into developing the Na’vi’s culture as they did in constructing the technical world around them, we would have seen a truly ground-breaking SF movie, instead of a mediocre SF movie plot that has amazing special effects. Like I aid at the beginning of this comment: this film’s lasting impact will be the impact it has on the technical side of the the ledger; on the story-telling side, it will end up as barely a blip. I, for one, am eagerly awaiting someone to come along in the next few years and use what Cameron has done to blow us out of the water by truly blending the potential of CGI with a strong and original story.
December 30th, 2009 on 12:06 am
I think it’s easy to dismiss a lot of elements of Avatar, simply because at face value, they lack depth. Yes, much of the plot, and many of the elements, are recycled tropes; common things we’ve seen in basically every fantasy story since Tolkien. I’ve read a lot of fantasy in the past few years, and almost every single one of them is a monomyth story, or largely composed of monomyth elements, but one thing I learned from my original scorn of those tropes is that, if the elements are well done, originality hardly matters at all.
Consider Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn series; ostensibly, it was a fresh retelling of the Campbellion cycle, but in practice is was just a run-of-the-mill Campbell story based in a world where the first Campbellian hero failed. It had its fair share of twists and surprises, but its basic structure is absolutely nothing we haven’t seen before. But that doesn’t mean that the story was bad; quite the opposite. The main characters were detailed and complex, the world was interesting and unique, and teh magic system was fantastic and energetic. So, though the story itself was kind of dry, the way it was executed was as close to perfect as any I’ve ever read. I’d say about 90% of the off-the-shelf fantasy novels out there today are largely based on the same cycle, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t unique in their storytelling approaches.
Avatar was predictable, almost frustratingly so. But the acting was incredible (especially with the Marine Commander - yes his character was nothing special, but he WAS a marine commander, without a doubt, and unlike some other similar villains, he had a bit of depth as expressed through the actor - the writing didn’t really give us that much), the effects, as Douglas Mentioned, were mind-blowing, and that is certainly going to be what it’s largely remembered for.
January 16th, 2010 on 7:57 pm
Yet another great article this time on Avatar. I checked out the Avatar Movie Review and had to check it out. I do have to admit it was a bit long but WOW the 3D was amazing!
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