The Hollywood Foreign Press declared Avatar the best film drama of 2009 Sunday night at the Golden Globes. Apparently, great drama has a new definition this decade: immersing 3-D computer-generated graphics weakly supported by a formulaic, predictable story.
The “drama” found in Avatar focuses on a handicapped soldier who winds up on an alien planet inhabited by giant blue forest people and, through vaguely explained technology, goes to sleep in a special chamber only to awake in control of a vessel clone of a blue person.
After getting to know the customs and planet-friendly ways of the alien species, as well as falling in love with a feisty female bluebird who catches his eye, the soldier must choose between helping the evil foreign invaders from Earth destroy the blue people and their planet to harvest an invaluable mineral or to join ranks and fight for freedom, the trees and popular sovereignty ... or something like that.
Is this what modern storytelling has become? Hollywood has never been known for its originality when it came to telling compelling stories, but Avatar's selection is a bit much to stomach. After settling down from the nausea-inducing special effects of the film, all that director James Cameron's latest box office behemoth has left is a bunch of flat one-dimensional characters (Thundercats and GI Joe both included), a posh save-the-trees message belabored over and over again, and some muddled parallels to the War on Terror and our removal policies toward Native Americans, both of which Cameron seemingly lacks historical understanding.
Oh, and the script. The essence of any movie, Avatar's script could have been penned by a 12-year-old suffering from A.D.D. who just finished watching Disney's Pocahontas and decided the classic story needed more explosives and giant blue Indians.
Avatar has been hailed by numerous critics as that kind of once-in-a-lifetime movie-going experience, a groundbreaking display of the art that technology can create if placed in the right hands. And rightly so. Avatar is visually breathtaking, a movie unlike anything to come out of Hollywood before.
But when did awe-inspiring graphics become a replacement for good storytelling? At the end of the day, eye-popping visuals are only a gimmick.
You can have great, compelling drama without brilliant technical achievements. You can't have it without a passable script or characters that insist on being dull and predictable.
Avatar is already well on its way to becoming the highest-grossing film of all time in the next few weeks, due to Cameron's previous melodramatic blockbuster effort, Titanic. Now with a Golden Globe under its belt, it'll look to seize a coveted Oscar for Best Picture next month.
Is this really the beginning of a new era for motion pictures? If so, I hope it'll find better stories to tell. Otherwise, it might be the beginning of the end.
Dustin is remembering a time when movies didn't require 3-D glasses. Share the memories at dustin.volz@asu.edu
