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Rating:
Understanding an alterity. Embracing it. This should be one of the goals or at least a key step in the journey of those who decide to delve into a narrative. I start reading to understand a point of view, I watch a movie to enter the director's perspective. The art of storytelling should go in this direction, which requires effort. The effort of reading a text, whether literary or filmic. Without this, the cognitive effort and therefore the content contribution of a work is reduced to zero.
Avatar represents in this sense a fairly definitive landing in this form of Hollywood degeneration. The maximum technical-technological effort of the production is accompanied by the minimum contribution of content that is not solely exterior, like veneers that cover everything with different and sparkling colors, thinking of renewing a quid that is old and stale. Everything in this film is old, banal, sedimented in decades of film craft. Narrative functions, pre-established schemes that are understood and thus exhausted after two moments, upon which a flood of colors and lights is poured, a computer graphics rainbow that can seduce the eye for half an hour, but ultimately allows the narrative skeleton—which is predictable and debasing, to use euphemisms—to reemerge.
Let's be clear. The film is solid, without glaring slips. An effective product. But this is what outrages me: passing off as good a work that lives solely and exclusively on pure stereotypes. The only, tiny uncertainty is discovering how the pieces will be juxtaposed, which clichés will come first and which later. But there is no doubt, not even the slightest moral thrill attempts in any way to leave something, a message, a value, a sentiment that is not pre-digested and therefore false, empty.
It is narrative fast food, but without even the advantage of being quick. It's a lavish, long, interminable meal with the depth of flavors that a McDonald's sandwich can have. The essential story is little, but we are imposed hours of scenery, a cinematic ride devoid of thought, a visual amusement park that can almost tire. What is the purpose of showing so much, what value does that visual apparatus have if it serves a non-story? If there is no moral tension in the storyteller, cinema becomes gymnastics for the eyes.
We need to take a step further, to better understand. Colossal films have always existed, but this tendency to fill them with nothing is recent. Nothing, a pneumatic void. They are like this because they reflect an industry and therefore a saturated, flattened society, which has lost its cultural dynamism when it comes to investing money. Gone with the Wind, Ben Hur, Titanic are science fiction compared to this. They at least had stories to tell. Here, however, we have reached a stage where those with money no longer have ideas, do not want to take risks or listen to those who do, only care about giving storyline hints that are as reassuring as possible, only to make the audience swallow all of its useless and fully paid-for pomposity, among sea monsters, alien whales, and blah blah blah. Even a sort of sinking of the Titanic on the planet Pandora.
Maybe I'm too harsh. The film is not obscene, I repeat. But it makes me very angry thinking that this stuff is essentially the flagship product of the entire Hollywood year. How have we come to such meagerness?
Capitalism by its nature should absorb the excellences that arrive from outside, to renew itself. Even those who contest it, even the most exotic deviations, should be fuel to relight the market engine. Everything becomes merchandise and is sold, Fisher explains. But now the system, in the film ambit, is so tired and involuted that it no longer works, at these levels of expenditure, except by repeating the most banal standard schemes. It is sclerotic and aims only at survival.
Or perhaps that’s what those three or four who essentially decide how to invest 4-500 million this time think. They want to be sure to recoup the cost and make at least a clear billion. Why should they take a risk? If you look closely, the true Avatar is the one the film wears in pretending to be new, when it instead tells always the same story and the same horrible Yankee characters. The teenage children, the stern fathers, the blackmails, the sword fights. All sadly seen before.
And so the colonizers "come from the stars" are the producers of 20th Century Fox, as well as those of Disney, Netflix, etc. They want to desertify the world of Pandora which is the dream called cinema. To burn art and lay a layer of cement, to drain resources and finally move on to the next planet.
We must resist.
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