I’ve been meaning to write up my thoughts on Avatar after seeing it last week, on Christmas Day, or the first day of Johnus as it is known to those select non-pagans.

It’s been a difficult process.

To begin with, Avatar is not a movie, or a film. I can’t tell you exactly what Avatar is, but I can tell you what it isn’t: this is not a motion picture in the traditional sense.

I saw Avatar in Imax 3D; it is also being shown in Direct 3D, and in a 2D version. I can’t speak for the superiority of Direct 3D over Imax 3D; I’ve been to both with various films though not Avatar, and the technology works fine in either. The Imax screen is of course very large, but I’ve been to D3D screens that were also pretty cavernous. Whatever you choose, though, you absolutely must see Avatar in 3D, and that gets to the heart of why this is something new. Avatar is not a 2 dimensional experience. This is, truly, the first immersive film experience.

When seeing Avatar with the proper 3D equipment, you don’t just watch the film; you are, thanks to the surround sound and the 3D glasses, presented with the experience of being partway inside the film. Previous attempts at three-dimensionality in movies (that I have experienced) have been a decidedly mixed bag. Monster House had lovely little 3D elements, like a garnish or a thin layer of icing on a cake. They were there, and complimentary, but completely non-essential. Nightmare Before Christmas in 3D felt tired and forced, a somewhat pathetic attempt to update an already enjoyable movie with the 3D gimmick. Coraline was meant for 3D, but it was also meant to insult its audience and test their patience, and the limited extra dimensionality was mostly there to disorient or confuse you, like the rest of the movie.

Avatar is different. Avatar uses the extra dimension with every shot, with every frame and in every scene. You forget that it’s there, that you’re wearing glasses and they’re bombarding you with their technological genius, because after a couple of minutes you realize that it simply works. Before that sinks in, though, if you’re anything like me, you come to the inescapable conclusion that this is an entirely new way of presenting visual entertainment, that it is both The Future and a new and separate art form entirely from the 20th century motion picture.

It’s hard to overstate the implications of this shift. With Avatar, the natural distance one puts between oneself and the spectacle onscreen disappears. Your brain lacks the automatic ability to simply dismiss the events in front of you as fakes, as an obvious fantasy, because the complicated visual cues for the real world, depth and focus and movement on all 3 axes are present. Depth makes things harder to dismiss, as your lizardy hind-brain is working fully in concert with your powers of imagination in a way that traditional film can never hope to achieve. The best way I’ve found to describe it to people is that watching Avatar is like sitting at the edge of an open window or door onto the outside world. You’re in one space, but connected, closely, to another, very different place, and you can be conscious of, and experience, the one without leaving the other.

So everything feels real, or real-er, and for a movie so deeply tied to the surreal, with 12 foot tall aliens on a deeply strange and hostile world, this helps to create an otherwise impossible realism. Being tied to this world, being unable to unconsciously dismiss it, makes it visceral, gives it an impact into your psyche, makes it more moving and emotional and threatening, than it quite frankly deserves.

Because, ahh, here’s the rub. Avatar isn’t that great of a *movie*. Stripped to the elements that fit into 2D, you have a very workmanlike script carried only by some very competent acting. There are layers upon layers of cliche in Avatar, some political commentary that goes over like a lead balloon. On The Daily Show, Sigourney Weaver said that this is the movie Cameron’s been wanting to make since he was 14. It shows, much like The Fifth Element was supposedly dreamed up by its creator while still in high school, and THAT showed. There’s a simplicity here, cardboard cutouts in place of important characters, a simplistic good vs. evil script that fails to live up to adult sensibilities, all of which speaks to a slightly underdeveloped view of the world.

Still, if this is the work of a high school mind, it’s a very broadly read high school mind (backed by a few hundred million dollars of art). Avatar reminded me of almost innumerable works of science fiction, fantasy, movies, games, actual science, a bewildering variety of concepts. Avatar has pieces reminiscent of Cory Doctorow (think Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom), Greg Bear (particularly Blood Music), George R.R. Martin (A Song for Lya), the later novels in the Foundation series, videogames like Final Fantasy VII (particularly the concept of the Na’vi god, Eywa, which resembles the Lifestream), movies like Aliens (perhaps deliberately, perhaps not, as both Cameron and Weaver worked on both that movie and Avatar), and anime series like Eureka 7…. I could go on like that forever, and I keep thinking of more as time goes by. I’ve seen it compared in reviews to Star Wars and Dances with Wolves; I can’t ever remember seeing Dances with Wolves, but with regard to Star Wars, I think it has a very different feel. Star Wars is an Epic storyline, with a handful of larger than life, classic fantasy archetypes battling for the fate of countless billions off-screen; it’s a bit extroverted, focused on fate, acting through memorable characters. With Avatar it’s the inverse, a handful of tiny, fragile (even if 12 foot tall) people defying fate, being crushed by it, cast aside; it focuses on their internal processes, and hence I’d describe it as introverted.

Avatar, and the religion, if one can call it that, of its Na’vi aliens, also draws upon recent scientific work that has discovered an empirical reality behind the old notion of the environment as one living organism; in at least some cases, this can be said to be literally true, such as enormous fungal organisms, both symbiotic and parasitic, found in North American forests.

For example:

(March 25, 2003 ? Ottawa, Ont.) — The world’s biggest fungus, discovered in Oregon’s Blue Mountains in 2001, is challenging traditional notions of what constitutes an individual. The underground fungus–estimated to be between 2000 and 8500 years old–is also deepening our understanding of the ecosystem, with possible implications for the management of Canadian forests, according to a paper by the discoverers (B.A. Ferguson, T.A. Dreisbach, C.G. Parks, G.M. Filip, and C.L. Schmitt) published March 17 on the Web site of the Canadian Journal of Forest Research (http://cjfr.nrc.ca).

The clone of Armillaria ostoyae–the tree-killing fungus that causes Armillaria root disease–covers an area of 9.65 square kilometres, about the size of 6000 hockey rinks or 1600 football fields.

“It’s one organism that began as a microscopic spore and then grew vegetatively, like a plant,” says Dr. Catherine Parks, a research plant pathologist with the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Forest Service and co-ordinator of the research team. “From a broad scientific view, it challenges what we think of as an individual organism.”

This fungus is perhaps 2400 years old, as large as a small town, unfathomably huge and hidden. The trees it feeds upon could just as easily be viewed as parts of its body, and the entire ecosystem as symbiotes in the process of feeding… it. Is the fungus, which has lived longer than anything else in that forest, really a parasite upon it, or is the forest the food generating organ of the fungus? Now, what if that fungus was aware of the trees that it feeds upon, if only in the same way as an animal is aware of the parts of its own body?

Likewise, there are forests that, to the outward observer, appear to be a diverse range of life, but in fact consist of one biologically identical individual. Certain varieties of Aspen form clones, connected by vast networks of roots, that would appear to be a forest of similar trees to a person walking through them; in fact, depending on how you define ‘tree’, they could be seen as one, giant, living plant. The world’s largest of these is apparently a tree-forest called ‘Pando‘ in Utah:

The clonal colony encompasses 43 hectares (107 acres) and has around 47,000 stems, which continually die and are renewed by its roots. Many of the stems are connected by its root system. The average age of Pando’s trunks (or technically, stems) is 130 years, as deciphered by tree rings. Michael Grant in BioScience said:
…quaking aspen regularly reproduces via a process called suckering. An individual stem can send out lateral roots that, under the right conditions, send up other erect stems; from all above-ground appearances the new stems look just like individual trees. The process is repeated until a whole stand, of what appear to be individual trees, forms. This collection of multiple stems, called ramets, all form one, single, genetic individual, usually termed a clone.

Some species of Redwood/Sequoia also practice varieties of clone growth, of far larger though less numerous individuals.

At any rate, given the existence of these immense superorganisms on Earth, the concept of a truly integrated, single living creature feels eerily plausible; indeed, such a thing may yet exist undiscovered on the planet. Which brings to mind yet another piece of fiction, a short story by James Schmitz called Balanced Ecology (collected here), that posited the existence of a place somewhat like Pandora (the planet of the Na’vi in Avatar) and also asks a difficult question, seen in Avatar, about what role, precisely, humans could play in such a place. Can we exist, coexist, with such entities, or are we by nature destined for conquest over any alternative systems of life?

So Avatar plays with a lot of themes that have crept up, over the years, in a lot of different places. It has a sense of wonder about itself, about the utterly fake world Cameron has created, the beauty and the dankness of it. Pandora isn’t just a pretty place; it’s hot, dangerous, wet, full of bugs (brilliantly buzzing about in 3D to help set the tone). The characters are almost always sweaty and bedraggled, save the researchers in their air conditioned base, or the bureaucrats who oversee them. But it’s beautiful, and seen as beautiful by the people inhabiting it, and by the audience with one foot in the doorway as well.

Avatar also has a refreshing emotional honesty. Let’s get it right up front: yes, this movie is about the European conquest of North America. Yes, it is also, in a hamfisted, shallow, and ultimately inaccurate way, about the recent (and ongoing) Iraq War. It is as brilliant and honest in dealing with the former as it is glib and unobservant in dealing with the latter. (The two events, contra Cameron, are not terribly similar. The conquest of Native America was largely a conscious, well-considered, coldly murderous genocide, while the Iraq War was an effort by idiots to impose their ideology on the world through trickery, or by distorting reality via force of will. The fact that, from a White Christian European perspective, the North American campaign went so well, and the Iraq war so poorly, reflects this relationship with empircal reality nicely.)

Still, the movie does show, and doesn’t flinch from, the human consequences of the organized sociopathy we call Western Civilization at its worst. Crass, materialistic, dismissive of outside perspectives, violent, homicidal, genocidal, perhaps even ecocidal. Short-sighted, lacking in empathy or compassion, driven to scapegoating and demonizing The Other. The brown, the red, the yellow, the Arab, the Jew, the Indian whoever has whatever it is we want at that moment, money, land, gold, spices, converts. (A point which is made explicit, again somewhat unnecessarily, in the movie).

So you see the cogs in the machine, the bureaucrats, the soldiers, and yes, you see the results of their civilization, the bodies and screaming and blood and terror, fire from the sky, death from above. Beautiful, awful, technological marvels of killing. Death is our gift (to paraphrase Joss Whedon).

That, ultimately, is the thing I took away from Avatar, and its value as a work of art, beyond being an excellent tech demo. The immersion into this world is achieved with technology, and once complete, once it gets past your defenses, with beauty and marvels and tricks of polarized plastic, you’re defenseless to the simple message at the core of the movie, the emotional truths and pain behind the last thousand years of Western history. We are a conquering people, and in between conquests, we try, very hard, to forget the people we put into their graves so that we could take their stuff, plant our flags, and spread our religions. We try, very, very hard to forget.

Avatar tries to make us remember, and in that it finds true value. That Cameron created a whole new way to tell stories in the mass market, something part theme park ride, part theatre, part movie, is wonderful, but it’s the delivery system for a painful historical lesson, the spoonful of sugar or the gelatin capsule. I don’t think Americans are ready to digest this, and I think they’ll dismiss it, or forget it. But it was good of Cameron to say it anyway.

I found myself somewhat depressed, over the weekend, in a foul mood, working through all this. I was turned off of my computer games, feeling too much entirely empathy for the virtual people huddled in the face of my virtual armies. They don’t feel pain, they don’t cry out for mercy, but somehow putting them to the sword wasn’t fun anymore, at least for a while. I was cranky, distracted, had trouble focusing on tasks, easily frustrated… the kind of emotional fallout that’s rare for me, from entertainment.

With some distance, time, perhaps, I’m forgetting a little too. I’m back to my games of conquest, to finding the quickest and most expeditious way to put enemy cities under my boot, plotting vengeance and death against people who never existed. It surely doesn’t matter, in a sense; they’re not real, if I load the last save they exist again, ready to fight back, again. There’s no actual pain, no permanent death. It’s utterly misplaced empathy.

But maybe even that’s worth something. Thanks, James Cameron, for all of it.