Worth every penny.By John DeSando, WCBE's "It's Movie Time," "Cinema Classics," and "On the Marquee"
"I am as free as Nature first made man,
Ere the base laws of servitude began,
When wild in woods the noble savage ran." John Dryden
Fifteen years and half a billion dollars later, writer/director James Cameron once again has invested wisely (if you thought Titanic was just good luck--not). A couple of weeks out and it already has sold a billion dollars world-wide. It is worth every penny and every moment the writer/director has given to the project.
Sometime in the future, paraplegic Marine veteran Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) goes to the planet Pandora to be involved in an integration initiative with the indigenous crowd and get his legs repaired as reward. Such imperialism means these invaders never heard the Star Trek prime non-integration directive or saw the recent Battle for Terra.
The native Na'Vi are not happy to be invaded, and the earthlings are pressing hard to move them elsewhere to get at the valuable resources under their home. If this all sounds like our Wild West crossed with Vietnam, on an allegorical level it is. The US's wars of the 19th and 20th centuries are well represented, and the allusions to Apocalypse Now, including the Robert Duval Major Kilgore village strafing sequence, are obvious but welcome as I remembered how effectively Frances Ford Coppola captured the absurdity of war.
The natives are noble savages, less Rousseau ("Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains") and more Maori while physically lean and lithe. Native histories, legends, and myths are present, from the Garden of Eden to Wounded Knee and any monomyth in between where the young are the warriors who must travel and learn about other cultures to preserve their own.
The forest is a venue for religion, a pantheism that links the natives socially and spiritually. The contrast between the benign forces of Mother Nature and the technological indifference of the invaders is not subtle.
Although I can't give you the technical explanation of Cameron's graphics innovations, I can say they eclipse any blockbuster CGI I have seen so far. Soaring reptiles and magical horses carrying heroes to their fate and forest behemoths in the service of the natives are but a few of the delights in Cameron's first reel of his unreality. While his story is a compendium of folklore from the Western canon, his rendition is nonetheless entertaining and his 3-D/Imax spectacular(See it as Cameron would want you to--in both).
As the clich?d story of bitter invasion takes over, more predictable action takes over, but the characters are so attractive and the story so metaphorically accurate, the film adjusts between geeks and those who just like a rousing good story.
"You are not in Kansas anymore. You are on Pandora, ladies and gentlemen." Col. Quaritch (Stephen Lang)
John DeSando teaches film at Franklin University and co-hosts WCBE 90.5's It's Movie Time, Cinema Classics, and On the Marquee, which can be heard streaming at http://publicbroadcasting.net/wcbe/ppr/index.shtml and on demand at http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/wcbe/arts.artsmain Contact him at JDeSando@Columbus.RR.com