Avatar and the Gluttony of Technology

Anyone who buys a ticket to see Avatar is going to see technology on display. That’s what all the press has been about, that’s why the film has won awards, that’s why it sold out my local IMAX ™ theater on Friday night (some two months after its original release). Despite its pseudo new-age lust for the natural, the film is a gluttonous celebration of technology.

Couched as a struggle between a money-hungry and heartless corporation and a peaceful tribe wholly in tune with nature, the film sells viewers the latter but delivers the former with more technological firepower than the mercenary (ex-)marines it features as bad guys. The thin script and the cast’s paltry performances are literally no match for the fantastical animations and imaginary worlds brought to life by director James Cameron and his animation army. Any shred of humanity or trace of emotion, connection or affect is churned under the unrelenting barrage of computer-generated images (in 3D!) that seem to pile up, one after another, each trying to out-do the last without any sense of fun or excitement (indeed, rather than exploratory or curious, the film takes a rather triumphant, and, dare I say militaristic approach to showing just what technology can do).

That might be the film’s act of hubris, but here’s what I find even more troubling about my two-and-a-half hour journey on Pandora: Once you can do anything with computers and computer animation, I find it harder to be impressed. Once the door to imagination is thrown completely wide open, and computers are capable of rendering anything imaginable on screen, then what’s the big deal of having 8-foot-tall blue characters or fiddle ferns the side of SUV’s? Once you can make computers do anything, what’s the big deal when they do anything, at all? Once anything is possible, who cares what happens? It’s the cinematic equivalent of eternal life (lord knows, the film felt about that long) — it may last a long time, but why does it matter?

Avatar at once captures the gluttonous revelry of technology and its absolute failures. Cameron’s attempt to critique technology in the film ultimately collapses beneath the film’s bloated, burdensome reliance on technology to tell this story. Yet, at the same time, the film’s meta-emphasis on its own story-telling technology so radically opened up the possibilities of animation that it diminished its own ability to highlight those very possibilities. In this way, the film fails twice and twice as hard.

But ultimately, for all its technophilia and bloated self-promotion, and notwithstanding the awards it has won and will win, the film’s greatest failure seems to be not technological, but human. For all its armament and animation, the film’s greatest failure was its absence of any real, human imagination at all. There is still no technology powerful enough to hide hackneyed plot points, recycled dialogue, and flat acting. By letting technology tell the story, Avatar obliterates its desire to tell a human story, leaving only a trail of computer-generated fantasy worlds in its wake.