Plasma Pool

The first trailers for James Cameron’s techno-orgiastic megablockbuster Avatar made it look like an ungodly mess of overdone CGI and a half-baked storyline about helicopters and blue aliens on dragons fighting each other. Mockery, including many comparisons to the notorious animated flop Delgo, came swiftly.

Then the film screen for critics in mid-December, got great reviews (currently at 94% among “Top Critics” on RottenTomatoes.com), and wowed audiences. But it was still a CGI-heavy film with an incredibly simple (or very stupid, depending on your point of view) plot. So what changed?

The obvious answer is that there’s a big difference between viewing a three-minute trailer on a computer screen and watching a 160-minute movie on a big screen in 3D with superior sound. As promised, Avatar’s visuals are uniformly impressive, the best use of computer graphics and performance-capture we’ve ever seen. (Honestly, if I were Robert Zemeckis I would seriously think about not making any more movies. Avatar makes Zemeckis’s motion-capture trilogy of The Polar Express, Beowulf, and A Christmas Carol look like a bunch of Steamboat Willie cartoons.) Every composition contains several things worth cheering, whether it’s the texture on the skin of a hammer-headed rhino (I’m sure this thing has a name, but I have no idea what it is and don’t care at all) or the way a tree spore floats onto a body or the sound of a mech-warrior slamming into the ground. Cameron and his army of technicians have created a world worth getting lost in.

It almost makes you forget there’s a story. Here it is:

In 2154, paraplegic Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) travels to Pandora, a distant moon rich in “unobtainium,” an extremely valuable mineral that can help save a dying Earth. Pandora is populated by the Na’vi, a group of ten-foot-tall blue humanoid cat-like beings who don’t want to give up their land. Jake’s brother, a scientist, was involved in a program that mixes human and Na’vi DNA to create Na’vi bodies — avatars — that humans can control with their minds. When Jake’s brother dies right before he’s to be sent to Pandora, the corporation bankrolling the project hires Jake and his matching DNA to “drive” the avatar in his brother’s place.

At its core, this is a story we’ve seen many times in everything from Dances with Wolves to The Fast and the Furious: an outsider (usually white) infiltrates a foreign group (often a minority) under less-than-friendly circumstances and ends up siding with them in the end. As many have said in the last few weeks, Avatar is about as racist, or at least fetishist, as a movie about blue aliens can be — replace them with Africans or Native-Americans and you’d likely have some activist groups speaking out against the film’s depiction of the Na’vi as the kind of embarrassingly simple and kindhearted people that lead people to name character types like the Magical Negro.

Let’s set aside the film’s politics for now. The point here is that, while the particulars distinguish Avatar from its kin (especially the fact that Jake returns to his human body when his avatar sleeps), the story is very easy to grasp. Cameron created a new language and had botanists and biologists name Pandora’s flora and fauna, but these tidbits function like the aliens and planets in Star Wars – they’re extra-credit work for the superfans and in no way necessary to enjoyment of the story. The first draft of the script took him three weeks to write. If you’re moderately familiar with basic Hollywood storytelling, you’re good to go. While not precluding sustained thought about the movie, Avatar doesn’t require anything of the sort to be liked. Or, to put it another way, the story gets out of the way so you can enjoy the visuals, which is likely the reason you’re in the theater to begin with.

The history of recent Hollywood popcorn fare suggests that Cameron made the right move in giving Avatar such a simple story. It’s become increasingly the case that Hollywood blockbusters succeed when they become self-aware — that is, when they embrace their status as light popcorn fare. That doesn’t mean that they stop taking themselves seriously — in a recent Charlie Rose interview, Cameron said that Avatar is a better argument for the importance of sustaining our environment than An Inconvenient Truth because it makes you feel the pain — but the plot itself is so classic that it goes down with all the weight of cotton candy. There may be serious arguments about war and the environment in Avatar, but they’re depicted in such a basic, one-sided fashion that they fall flat. Yes, the film takes the viewpoint of a revolutionary, but there’s a reason no one prints Marx on the side of a Cracker Jack box.

Again, I don’t mean this as an insult — Avatar gets things right by making things so simple. This is a film about the experience of its visuals, and any further plot machinations would become extraneous. For evidence of what can go wrong when story overtakes visuals in a blockbuster, just look at the difference between the second and third films in Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy. Both films are technical marvels, a combination of gorgeous sets and best pre-Avatar CGI in film. Davy Jones, portrayed by Bill Nighy and a truckload of effects as a photoreaistic squid-headed, lobster-clawed mutant pirate, remains the preeminent effects-driven character in any movie — the character looks completely believable. But while both films feature the same phenomenal production values, the first sequel is far superior to the second.

The plot of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, the second film in the franchise, is almost comically loose. A brief summary:

That’s about it. The plot is essentially a picaresque search for the titular MacGuffin and its key; the characters flit from setpiece to setpiece with little regard for each scene’s overall narrative or thematic importance.

The story of Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, on the other hand, is a massive spastic fuckup. I don’t actually know what happens in the movie, so I’ll just quote various passages from its Wikipedia page:

Did anyone know that Jack was a pirate lord? Why do pirates have lords? There are rules of succession? Aren’t pirates supposed to be without law? Why is this Sao Feng guy so important all of a sudden? Let’s move on, maybe they won’t fixate on it:

My brain no longer works.

In a different kind of movie, these machinations wouldn’t be such a problem — after all, no intelligent viewer complains that Miller’s Crossing is too confusing. But At World’s End maintains Dead Man’s Chest’s fast pace and awe-inspiring visuals — it’s not leisurely enough to allow the audience to piece together the plot, assuming that they even care. At World’s End makes the mistake of thinking that people primarily watch the Pirates franchise for things other than the spectacle. I don’t want to suggest that this content is worthless — my friend Ryland Walker Knight has argued otherwise — but the consideration of the plot and themes has very little to do with the oh-shit-look-at-that experience of watching a ridiculously expensive Hollywood blockbuster. In fact, I’d make the counterintuitive argument that anyone who comes out of one of these movies talking about the themes isn’t paying enough attention.

A similar problem befalls Michael Bay’s Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, in which we’re asked to contemplate the complicated history of robot aliens, including their original forefathers and how some sort of code could find its way into a human brain. Bay’s films are often criticized for their immaturity — and this one certainly has plenty of it — but the main problem with Revenge of the Fallen is that it feigns intelligence by stopping to explain a bunch of ridiculous backstory. Better to throw it out there and move on.

It’s this unwillingness to explain that makes Avatar and Dead Man’s Chest so successful. Both realize that their plots rely on relatively common archetypes that any audience can understand. Instead of trying to make everything plausible, they pile on the spectacle. In Avatar, when Jake must tame a dragon-banshee thingy to become one of the Na’vi, they just go to their lair and get on with the taming. Likewise, Dead Man’s Chest throws its characters into the search for the chest and doesn’t look back. They’d rather waste time by showing Jake in a beautiful jungle or extending a scene of Sparrow and Bloom fighting over a key on a giant runaway wheel. And that’s a good thing.

Many would disagree. San Francisco Chronicle critic Mick LaSalle recently called Dead Man’s Chest the worst movie of the decade, claiming that its creators “stuffed this bag of nothing with endless banter, hot air and action sequences that did not advance the narrative.” I would write the same thing as a compliment. If you’re looking for someone with more authority, no less an intellectual stalwart than David Foster Wallace once decried the growing tendency of blockbusters to become glorified demonstrations of visual effects in his consideration of Cameron’s Terminator 2:

I can’t disagree with any of these observations: films like T2 and Avatar and Dead Man’s Chest exist to wow us. These are thrills that don’t typically prompt intelligent thought — DFW’s comparison to pornography is at least somewhat apt. But there are a few notable things absent from his analysis. First, there are interesting ideas and concepts at play in these movies, even if they’re occasionally unintentional. I don’t see this as a huge problem; if a movie stimulates thought, even after the fact, then I’m happy.

Second, and most importantly, visual effects have become so impressive that there are now far more than eight or ten memorable scenes in a big-budget action movie — in most cases, there enough impressive moments to sustain the entire two-hour runtime. Not every movie is a Pirates or Avatar, but those films somehow manage to throw something exhilarating into virtually every shot. When everything becomes amazing, there’s always the danger that we’ll become desensitized, but I’ve never found that to be the case. And if everything is memorable, then the entire experience becomes memorable, the sort of event that keeps us going back to the cinema. This isn’t so much pornography as a lesser version of what we feel when we visit the Taj Mahal. Sometimes it’s okay to feel nothing more than an overpowering sense of awe at an irresponsible use of a pile of money.

Look, I wish every film could be Jacques Tati’s Playtime, a visual wonder that also contains revolutionary storytelling and a totally important consideration of interpersonal interactions in an increasingly mechanized and impersonal society. But it’s a fool’s errand to hold everything to such a high standard. Likewise, many supposedly mature films about serious subjects are just as intellectually bereft as a Hollywood blockbuster; to pick one off the top of my head, Todd Field’s Little Children has absolutely nothing interesting or new to say about suburban life, but it was considered good enough to hit 80% on Rotten Tomatoes and receive an Oscar nomination for best adapted screenplay.

It may seem a little weird for a critic to say it’s not worth thinking critically about a movie, but 1) that’s not what I’m doing, as will hopefully become clear when you read my forthcoming piece on the role of virtual experiences in Avatar and 2) I am sick of pieces on Hollywood blockbusters that criticize them for being what they are. To be clear, I don’t think Avatar belongs in the canon; its politics are far too stupid to put it on that level. But seriousness and modesty are not a prerequisite for a worthwhile film, and in many cases they can actually keep a movie from reaching its potential. No one says Volvos are better than Lamborghinis because they’re safer. They’re both good for different reasons.