I know, I know... what's the point in blogging for the first time in six months and wailing on a point that is essentially a corollary of the previous post?
Well... I watched Avatar, that's why. Yes, patient reader, I shall explain. In a longish rant (I feel your chagrin).
To dismiss it as eye candy (or a play on "Dances with Wolves") would only prove the point I'm trying to make and add me to the count of the unwashed masses I decry. It is a phenomenon of computer imagery and sound design and whatnot. But at its core, it is yet another big-ass rip off of Joseph Campbell's mono-myth, with a dash of Gaia-ism, anti-Bush/ war/ Blackwater rhetoric and a big dose of "John Carter of Mars" and "Midnight Tides".
To the uninitiated, John Carter of Mars is a series of books by Edgar Rice Burroughs (he of Tarzan fame) about an American on deathbed who finds himself transported to Mars in the blink of an eye, discovers he has superpowers while there, joins a clan of Martian warriors (Martians come in green or red or yellow skin if memory serves, and call their planet Barsoom), marries a princess, defends against fanatics, tames a six-legged steed (no dragon here) and so on... until one day he is the "warlord of Mars"; sound familiar? Well, these books got written somewhere in the last century.
Midnight Tides is the fifth book in the Malazan Book of the Fallen saga by Steven Erikson. It tells the story of how a capitalist empire (Lether) which has already subsumed many indigenous civilizations by trade-craft and war finally meets it match at the hands of a very war-like if fallen (grey skinned) civilization known as the Tiste Edur. One of the primary characters of the book is a Letherii man responsible for studying/ helping destroy several civilizations in the past who this time around intends to betray Lether and make it eat crow...
Fanboy tangents apart, here's the thing: both Burroughs' Barsoom and Erikson's writing feature a beautiful world with imaginative flora and fauna, and the authors (more so for the latter) in broad strokes paint a narrative that is far more complex and real than Avatar. In other words, they do everything on a page that Avatar does on screen, and then they do a lot more.
Someone said to me, this movie is more of an experience than a story; and I agree completely... it is a superlative experience (as I tweeted the morning after I saw it). But did it also have to be so f**king dumb and derivative?
In the translation from page to screen these days (and hardly anyone would argue that the zeitgeist is now ruled by the screen more than the page) we lose all manner of nuance that would otherwise make things much more worthwhile. For that matter, if you read the scriptment that Cameron had written for Avatar years ago, in its 70 odd pages it had a lot more meat on the bone than what's in the final movie. Where did it go?
Cameron hardly had Hollywood suits breathing down his back asking him to make the movie merchandise or lowest common denominator friendly (one assumes)! He calls himself an auteur (and he is, technically) but seriously - this is an Eragon-esque story that a teenager could belt out in a year or so of effort. This took him a decade and a half?
Movies - science fiction movies - like the Matrix and Blade Runner and The Fountain (and many more) have come out over the last three decades that frankly don't allow people like Cameron the excuse of having to make their work "accessible". Can anyone honestly say Cameron shouldn't have spent another - oh, 5 million - and come up with a better story?
Now all this said, the truth is Avatar and movies like it will remain the gateways, nay the gatekeepers for a vast majority of people to the world of Science Fiction and Fantasy literature and imagination. That is not a bad thing. If I'd been twelve years old and had never seen a science fiction flick in my life, Avatar would be enough of an excuse to become a fanboy, buy every toy that comes out, devour all spin-off comics and books, and dive deep into SF&F. Hopefully I would still end up discovering the joys of Erikson and Dan Simmons (whose Hyperion Cantos featured the concept of uploading your consciousness to a cosmic network by the way) and others that are devastatingly good.
But guess what? I'm not twelve any more, and I prefer my Oz to be closer to Kansas!
