On Laziness, or How James Cameron Just Doesn’t Give A Shit

So I saw Avatar over the weekend. I can’t say I was disappointed, because I had a fair idea of what I was buying tickets to see. It was very pretty. The effects were awesome. Visually, the movie is beautiful and well-executed. WETA Digital certainly deserves congratulations for their efforts. James Cameron, on the other hand, has clearly stopped trying.
I’m not going to get into the whole ‘noble savage’ idea, because just about every columnist I’ve read has already mentioned it. It’s there, it’s obvious, it’s not even trying to be something else. What bothered me about this movie was the sheer laziness in the writing.
First of all, the entire plot was cribbed from any White-Man-Goes-Native narrative you care to name. There’s not thing inherently wrong with this; stories are told and retold throughout history. But it’s lazy to add not a single new thing to the narrative. You could have the same effect by smoking a joint and then watching Dances With Wolves.
And the characters…Holy crap, between the Noble Blue Savages and Colonel Cliche, it’s amazing anyone got through this script with a straight face. Not a single one of them was interesting or unique or even well-crafted. They were cliches hacked together from popular fiction. I have nothing against a good stock character, but it’s the first time I’ve ever seen an entire movie populated by them.
Secondly, and this bugged the crap out of me, the name of the precious, expensive material found on the alien world is…Unobtainium? Really? That’s the best you could come up with? That sounds like the place-holder name you put into a first draft until you think of something better. Admittedly we live in a world with elements named einsteinium and berklium, but at least those were named after noted scientists and labs. They weren’t just named by casting about for a big word you like the sound of. He might as well have said, “the audience is so stupid that they don’t know what ‘unobtainable’ means, so I’ll just throw it in there for the hell of it.” Also, what the hell is the bloody stuff for? Nothing, apparently. It’s enough to know that it’s really, really expensive.
Third, where does the water on the floating mountain waterfalls come from? That totally threw me out of the fantasy. I was sitting back, watching floating mountains and the beautiful jungle scenery, and then these waterfalls appear and the verisimilitude is blown. I’m all for the willing suspension of disbelief, but the writer has to meet you halfway.
There’s more, but those are the biggest ones that I remember. And maybe this wouldn’t bug me so much if I wasn’t a writer myself. But it annoys me to be treated like I’m stupid, whether it’s by a person or a piece of fiction. Every writer I know and many I know of through their web presence works damn hard at making things believable. You can take your audience for a ride through things fantastic and strange, but without putting the legwork to figure out how it all fits together, you end up with these holes. It’s insulting to your audience to expect them to swallow whatever you put up on the screen or on the page without so much as a question. You don’t have to answer every question, but you should invest in a good box of Plot Spackle and fill in some of the gaping holes. Really, they spent half a billion dollars on the goddamned thing. They could have taken the extra hour to sort out some of this stuff.
If I ever watch it again, I think I’ll just turn the sound off and watch the pretty jungle light up.