I see you

Yes, that was quite a hype.  I just saw Avatar for the second time in the cinema.  Of course this time, I had the liberty to go to the bathroom anytime I wished, hah.  And could do it when there’s little or no action to be anticipated in a scene.  But the fact that one thinks it is worth paying good money to watch again is symptomatic of a curious film piece.  I suppose that the reason is because there are so many elements in the creation of this film that requires repeated review in order to elucidate its whole.  I also think that it helps to watch it several times, the first for me was a complete state of arrest while the second was critical and distant.  Overall, it is a multi-million–I mean–multi-layered piece.

I come home from the movie having a mix of elation and disappointment.  Elated because I was so receptive to the visual and sensational penetration of the technical effects, that all my senses were relaxed to the point of being absorbed in to the world that was constructed before me.  Disappointed that just as how the film manages to convince perceptual “reality” so craftily translated through synthetic visuals, it just as well thwarts the excitement of this profound imitation the moment you walk out of the cinema, forced to sober up.

And so what I like to reflect on is how this new frontier in blockbuster, apart from it being the next cash cow, will dismantle our predisposition of cinema’s command of spatial-perceptual image relation.  Furthermore, it would be interesting to discuss the implications of a more “realistic” CGI and 3 or 4 dimensional digital constructions.  How privileged is an audience’s concept of “reality” in face of effects that nearly blur the lines of what constitutes realistic visuals?  What are the factors which propel our differentiation of synthetic or natural reality?  Or are we simply caught in the trap of an optical illusion, a mind trick if you will, rather than our imaginations being unleashed and coalescing with new visual perspectives that upon engagement is strikingly familiar?  The questions will not be answered for now, but what compels us to ask them is of greater curiosity.

I admit that I turned off the cynic in me when I watched the film, but retrospectively, I feel that the film has underutilized the sophistication of its medium by failing to articulate the complexity and intrinsic nature of “dreamwalking”, (which theoretically would have been an unnerving parallelism to the moviegoer, yet I forget this is not European cinema). I also forget that this is not a George Lucas film where world creation also entailed political, philosophical, scientifically theoretical, and massive ideological construction.  There’s a line to cross to be able to create a colossal world in our imagination.  Avatar was just not that eloquent, literature-wise or how the characters were defined based on their world view.  For the sake of argument let’s disregard for a moment that the film was such a bleeding-heart narrative.  Given that the narrative took on this character-centered approach, the character of Jake Sully struck me as someone who was so unnervingly apathetic to his own developments.  He merely reacts, predictably at that, to the situation he finds himself in.  The trouble with casting an unremarkable actor for a supposedly internally conflicted character, is that so much of the story was narrated by the larger-than-life design of the digital representations and the set rather than the subject, or that which occupies the foreground of the spatial limits of the frame.  I kept asking myself, how did Jake Sully manage to disconnect himself, whether willfully or consciously, from “human” life to migrate in to a new one with the Omatikaya? This is just one of the many character intricacies of Jake Sully which was oversimplified and thrown out to obscurity.  The film was a lush landscape, I’ll give it that.  But in effect, the different stories of the diverse characters that lived in this landscape was so poorly articulated. Take for instance the Na’vi people presented in the film was hardly a sustained theme, when it would have helped a lot to illustrate the dichotomy between the sky people and the Na’vi.  Why did it prove difficult for the sky people to assimilate with the Omatikaya, and vice-versa?  What is the history of misunderstanding between them despite attempts from both ends to bridge the gap? There are so many unfilled blanks throughout the story.

The problem with a filmic narrative is that the story is only ripe when it comes full circle.  I admire Cameron’s effort to weave some mysticism to “dreamwalking” and “waking”.  For me, the last scene was the most powerful.  The attempts to strike a dialog about rebirth, ever-flowing energy and waking from dreams were such powerful references to life itself.  There was also an attempt to portray repetition of history, of life.  But all of these seemed like one foot in the door to a cinematic masterpiece, while the other foot stays in unabashed mediocrity.