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Cast: Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana
Direction: James Cameron
Rating: ***
The American forces (even into the future)
command tremendous over-confidence. The earth-like colony of Pandora has impenetrable trees and trenches. The battle between the planets would be mismatched on weaponry alone. The Earth, or the Americans, being far superior in warfare. They wish to “pursue and destroy,” “fight terror with terror” in a supposed Garden of Evil.
But, as a strategist for Pandora puts it, “(If) they bring the fight to us; we have the home field advantage.” The object of this battle isn’t any sort of ideology. It’s a rare mineral ‘unobtonium’ that the Earth’s mercenaries have their eyes on.
The supremely tall, slender Pandorans are called the Na’vis. They breathe the air humans can’t; have a tail on their back; are blue in colour, not very different from popular images of Lord Shiva.
Like all native tribes, they are in sync with nature. They worship its fruits, and treat other inhabitants of their planet as equals.
Between a green worldview and the globe’s war over a natural resource, James Cameron’s twin analogies of present-day politics are fairly complete. They lend his science fiction ‘event picture’ a certain soul, even if not much of a story line.
This is Cameron’s first feature film in 12 years. His Titanic (1997) was the most ‘Bollywood’ of sweeping romances in Hollywood’s history. This one is similar in its own way, no less simplistic in its screenwriting approach. Few aspects allow for any gray complexities.
There’s a hero, who has little to lose. He (Sam Worthington) is a paraplegic marine, recruited to be teleported as a Na’vi into Pandora, because his genes match his dead twin’s. He is sent to spy on the other planet as one of them. In exchange, he would get his legs back in shape. His human form remains under a freezing coffin, while his mind with a new body wanders across the new world.
There’s a heroine, a beauteous, brave Nyetiri (Zoe Saldana), a Na’vi, with a limitless capacity for unconditional love. The leading couple shares a fatal bond written for Shakespearean tragedies.
There’s a villain, Col. Miles Quaritch (Steven Lang), a ‘Dr Dang’ kind of bald marauder, who can’t see beyond destruction.
The hero is stuck in his choice between love, and the loaded gun that he is. There is of course the grand climax. Poetic justice is sumptuously served in about three hours (168 minnutes, to be precise).
The screen is dark and psychedelic blue. The 3-D glasses, slightly weighty over the bridge of your nose after a while, connect you to an outer space, to admire its computer-generated vastness, or eerily feel a golf ball glide into a coffee mug.
Clearly, the 70 mm screen has lost its power of “shock and awe” as visual retreat. Cameron, a director born with the ‘curse of the masterpiece’, understands this.
He commandeers a team of technicians to hit you by a journey alone. I’m not sure if audiences in 1969 would’ve felt the same watching Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. I suspect the impact then would’ve been far more, which is to take away the years, and nothing else from this film.
Each Na’vi is delicately designed for attention. They speak a language entirely of their own. Their world and manners are crafted keeping an eye at posterity.
What strikes you is, unlike a Lord Of The Rings series, or even Star Trek 3, Cameron had no literary, pop-cultural or
mythical basis to this movie monument. He began his self-indulgence from square one. He does leave you with few answered questions playing on your mind.
But that’s a conversation you’d like to make. This is more a $300 million experience than a film. You’d shell out a couple of hundred rupees anyway. You should. The review is worthless.