Avatar

Páginas: 5 (1018 palabras) Publicado: 31 de mayo de 2012
On the basis that most people like to be kissed before they’re screwed, let me start by saying a few nice things about Avatar, this winter’s blockbuster movie and already the highest-grossing film in cinema history. (I thought Pink Flamingos was pretty gross but apparently this one takes the biscuit). Is it worth seeing? Absolutely. Did I enjoy it? Yes. Would I recommend it? Yes. Decent acting?Good enough. Amazing special effects? You betcha. Gripping story? Er... No. Time to assume the position, Mr Cameron. You see, Avatar is to storytelling what Jive Bunny was to rock-and-roll. It is the death-knell of an era, the triumph of plagiarism, the total abdication of original thought.
Before I go any further, I need to make a brief distinction between plot and narrative. Plot is the whole,narrative the vehicle that carries it. It’s the same distinction that exists between ‘story’ and ‘storytelling’. At least, that’s the definition I’m using today. James Cameron, you see, has had the decency to acknowledge his plot’s debt to Dances With Wolves. And I can live with that. If you can’t come up with an original story of your own then you might as well borrow someone else’s. So onceAvatar’s baffling, clunky, and unnecessarily-complicated first twenty minutes are out of the way, you can sit back and confidently predict exactly what is going to happen next. On a scene-by-scene, shot-by-shot basis. Which is, I suppose, entertainment of sorts.
Harsh? Maybe. After all, it’s getting incrementally hard to be original these days. And, if you believe Christopher Booker, there are onlyseven stories in the world anyway. As a thriller writer, I’m constantly having to abandon seemingly good ideas when my research reveals that someone else has had them before me. Last year, I wrote a synopsis for a story about a criminal who receives an unexpected pardon from a prison governor, only to find that he is the quarry in an organised manhunt, run by the governor and his rich buddies.Great idea? I thought so too. Right up to the point when my research led me to a film by Ernest Dickerson called Surviving The Game, itself based on a short story by Richard Connell. (The target in the film is a vagrant rather than an ex-con but, otherwise, the conceit is the same). Having never of heard of either, I suppose I could have protested my innocence and continued – but that was hardly goingto wash with the rest of the industry. So into the bin it went, and I moved on. It happens all the time. But not, apparently, in Hollywood, where remakes – like cover versions in music – are an acceptable part of the diet. Some, of course, can be highly successful. I enjoyed the second Thomas Crown Affair enough never to have bothered with the original. Similarly, I imagine that there is anentire generation of cinema-goers, who have never heard of Dances With Wolves, let alone seen it. So, no, the fact that Cameron has remade a perfectly good Oscar-winning movie doesn’t bother me. No, what irks me, what makes me want to grind my teeth to dust is the laziness, the apathy, the sheer bloody...lassitude of the narrative.
Rather like Jive Bunny remixing Great Balls of Fire with The Twist,Cameron has pilfered the defining images from a number of blockbuster movies and badged them as his own, telling his story through a collage of other people’s work. The stampeding dinosaurs are straight out of Jurassic Park. The toruk pouring down the mountains are cringingly reminiscent of Gandalf liberating Helms Deep in The Two Towers. (And if the sight of Jake Sully on Toruk Makto doesn’tremind you of a Nazgul riding its fell beast then you clearly haven’t seen the Rings trilogy). Colonel Quaritch’s robot has stepped off the set of Transformers, while the semi-naked Neytiri is a not-too-distant cousin of Mystique from X-Men. Plugging in and out of a parallel world? I give you The Matrix. Hero under pressure in the jungle? Easy: jump over a waterfall. It worked in Apocalypto, The...
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