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來源：http://movies.nytimes.com/2009/12/18/movies/18avatar.html
A New Eden, Both Cosmic and Cinematic
By MANOHLA DARGIS／New York Times
December 18, 2009
With “Avatar” James Cameron has turned one man’s dream of the movies into
a trippy joy ride about the end of life — our moviegoing life included — as
we know it. Several decades in the dreaming and more than four years in the
actual making, the movie is a song to the natural world that was largely
produced with software, an Emersonian exploration of the invisible world of
the spirit filled with Cameronian rock ’em, sock ’em pulpy action. Created
to conquer hearts, minds, history books and box-office records, the movie —
one of the most expensive in history, the jungle drums thump — is glorious
and goofy and blissfully deranged.
The story behind the story, including a production budget estimated to top
$230 million, and Mr. Cameron’s future-shock ambitions for the medium have
already begun to settle into myth (a process partly driven by the publicity,
certainly). Every filmmaker is something of a visionary, just by virtue of
the medium. But Mr. Cameron, who directed the megamelodrama “Titanic” and,
more notably, several of the most influential science-fiction films of the
past few decades (“The Terminator,” “Aliens” and “The Abyss”), is a
filmmaker whose ambitions transcend a single movie or mere stories
to embrace cinema as an art, as a social experience and a
shamanistic ritual, one still capable of producing the big WOW.
The scale of his new movie, which brings you into a meticulous and
brilliantly colored alien world for a fast 2 hours 46 minutes, factors into
that wow. Its scope is evident in an early scene on a spaceship (the year is
2154), where the passengers, including a paraplegic ex-Marine, Jake (Sam
Worthington, a gruffly sensitive heartthrob), are being roused from a
yearslong sleep before landing on a distant inhabited moon, Pandora. Jake is
woken by an attendant floating in zero gravity, one of many such aides. As
Jake himself glides through the bright cavernous space, you know you’re not
in Kansas anymore, as someone soon quips (a nod to “The Wizard of Oz,”
Mr. Cameron’s favorite film). You also know you’re not in the gloom of
“The Matrix.”
Though it’s easy to pigeonhole Mr. Cameron as a gear head who’s more
interested in cool tools (which here include 3-D), he is, with “Avatar,”
also making a credible attempt to create a paradigm shift in science-fiction
cinema. Since it was first released in 1999, “The Matrix,” which owes a
large debt to Mr. Cameron’s own science-fiction films as well as the
literary subgenre of cyberpunk, has hung heavily over both SF and action
filmmaking. Most films that crib from “The Matrix” tend to borrow only its
slo-mo death waltzes and leather fetishism, keeping its nihilism while
ditching the intellectual inquiries. Although “Avatar” delivers a late kick
to the gut that might be seen as nihilistic (and how!), it is strangely
utopian.
It doesn’t take Jake long to feel the good vibes. Like Neo, the savior-hero
of the “Matrix” series played by Keanu Reeves, Jake is himself an avatar
because he’s both a special being and an embodiment of an idea, namely that
of the hero’s journey. What initially makes Jake unusual is that he has been
tapped to inhabit a part-alien, part-human body that he controls, like a
puppeteer, from its head to its prehensile tail. Like the rest of the human
visitors who’ve made camp on Pandora, he has signed on with a corporation
that’s intent on extracting a valuable if mysterious substance from the moon
called unobtainium, a great whatsit that is an emblem of humanity’s greed
and folly. With his avatar, Jake will look just like one of the natives, the
Na’vi, a new identity that gives the movie its plot turns and politics.
The first part of Jake’s voyage — for this is, above all, a boy’s rocking
adventure, if one populated by the usual tough Cameron chicks — takes him
from a wheelchair into a 10-foot, blue-skinned Na’vi body. At once familiar
and pleasingly exotic, the humanoid Na’vi come with supermodel dimensions
(slender hips, a miniature-apple rear); long articulated digits, the better
to grip with; and the slanted eyes and twitchy ears of a cat. (The gently
curved stripes that line their blue skin, the color of twilight, bring to
mind the markings on mackerel tabby cats.) For Jake his avatar, which he
hooks into through sensors while lying in a remote pod in a semiconscious
state, is at first a giddy novelty and then a means to liberation.
Plugging into the avatar gives Jake an instant high, allowing him to run,
leap and sift dirt through his toes, and freeing him from the constraints of
his body. Although physically emancipated, he remains bound, contractually
and existentially, to the base camp, where he works for the corporation’s
top scientist, Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver, amused and amusing),
even while taking orders from its head of security, Col. Miles Quaritch
(Stephen Lang), a military man turned warrior for hire. A cartoon of
masculinity, Quaritch strides around barking orders like some intransigent
representation of American military might (or a bossy movie director).
It’s a favorite Cameron type, and Mr. Lang, who until this year had long
been grievously underemployed, tears into the role like a starved man
gorging on steak.
Mr. Cameron lays out the fundamentals of the narrative efficiently, grabbing
you at once with one eye-popping detail after another and on occasion almost
losing you with some of the comically broad dialogue. He’s a masterly
storyteller if a rather less nimble prose writer. (He has sole script credit:
this is personal filmmaking on an industrial scale.) Some of the clunkier
lines (“Yeah, who’s bad,” Jake taunts a rhinolike creature he encounters)
seem to have been written to placate those members of the Michael Bay
demographic who might find themselves squirming at the story’s touchier,
feelier elements, its ardent environmentalism and sincere love story, all of
which kick in once Jake meets Neytiri, a female Na’vi (Zoë Saldana, seen
only in slinky Na’vi form).
Mr. Cameron has said that he started thinking about the alien universe that
became Pandora and its galactic environs in “Avatar” back in the 1970s. He
wrote a treatment in 1996, but the technologies he needed to turn his ideas
into images didn’t exist until recently. New digital technologies gave him
the necessary tools, including performance capture, which translates an
actor’s physical movements into a computer-generated image (CGI). Until now,
by far the most plausible character created in this manner has been slithery
Gollum from Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” cycle. The exotic
creatures in “Avatar,” which include an astonishment of undulating, flying,
twitching and galloping organisms, don’t just crawl through the underbrush;
they thunder and shriek, yip and hiss, pointy teeth gleaming.
The most important of these are the Na’vi, and while their movements can
bring to mind old-fashioned stop-motion animation, their faces are a triumph
of tech innovation, with tremors and twitches that make them immediately
appealing and empathetic. By the time Neytiri ushers Jake into her world of
wonders — a lush dreamscape filled with kaleidoscopic and bioluminescent
flora and fauna, with pink jellyfishlike creatures that hang in the air and
pleated orange flowers that snap shut like parasols — you are deep in the
Na’vi-land. It’s a world that looks as if it had been created by someone
who’s watched a lot of Jacques Cousteau television or, like Mr. Cameron,
done a lot of diving. It’s also familiar because, like John Smith in “The
New World,” Terrence Malick’s retelling of the Pocahontas story, Jake has
discovered Eden.
An Eden in three dimensions, that is. In keeping with his maximalist
tendencies, Mr. Cameron has shot “Avatar” in 3-D (because many theaters
are not equipped to show 3-D, the movie will also be shown in the usual 2),
an experiment that serves his material beautifully. This isn’t the 3-D of
the 1950s or even contemporary films, those flicks that try to give you a
virtual poke in the eye with flying spears. Rather Mr. Cameron uses 3-D to
amplify the immersive experience of spectacle cinema. Instead of bringing
you into the movie with the customary tricks, with a widescreen or even Imax
image filled with sweeping landscapes and big action, he uses 3-D seemingly
to close the space between the audience and the screen. He brings the movie
to you.
After a few minutes the novelty of people and objects hovering above the
row in front of you wears off, and you tend not to notice the 3-D, which
speaks to the subtlety of its use and potential future applications. Mr.
Cameron might like to play with high-tech gadgets, but he’s an old-fashioned
filmmaker at heart, and he wants us to get as lost in his fictional paradise
as Jake eventually does. On the face of it there might seem something absurd
about a movie that asks you to thrill to a natural world made almost entirely
out of zeroes and ones (and that feeds you an anticorporate line in a
corporately financed entertainment). But one of the pleasures of the movies
is that they transport us, as Neytiri does with Jake, into imaginary realms,
into Eden and over the rainbow to Oz.
If the story of a paradise found and potentially lost feels resonant, it’s
because “Avatar” is as much about our Earth as the universe that Mr.
Cameron has invented. But the movie’s truer meaning is in the audacity of
its filmmaking.
Few films return us to the lost world of our first cinematic experiences,
to that magical moment when movies really were bigger than life (instead of
iPhone size), if only because we were children. Movies rarely carry us away,
few even try. They entertain and instruct and sometimes enlighten. Some
attempt to overwhelm us, but their efforts are usually a matter of volume.
What’s often missing is awe, something Mr. Cameron has, after an absence
from Hollywood, returned to the screen with a vengeance. He hasn’t changed
cinema, but with blue people and pink blooms he has confirmed its wonder.
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