The many dimensions of 3-D

Can a director who hasn’t made a feature film in more than a decade encash a conservatively-edited, US$ 300 million sci-fi fantasy film based on a new take on an old story, with zero superstars and a DVD market sinking under BitTorrent? James Cameron’s Avatar faced daunting stats: of the 50 highest grossers of the past decade, only The Day After Tomorrow (2004) and Hancock (2008) were original stories, neither sequels nor based on earlier films.

And just look at Avatar’s story: the unkind – and there are many; a director of the stature of James Cameron (Titanic, The Abyss, Terminator) attracts barbs by the bushel just by being – have likened Avatar to Pocahontas and Dances With Wolves. Imperialist henchman/mercenary/soldier sets out to hunt indigenes, falls in love, goes native, turns against his paymasters. It’s such a trope already. To these critics, the retort is: it’s a trope, but in unprecedented 3-D, and that gives it all the cachet it needs, story or no story.

Jake Scully (Sam Worthington) is a paraplegic who lands on a planetary satellite named Pandora to work for a megacorporation out to disenfranchise the native blue-skinned humanoid race, the Na’vi, in order to get at a priceless mineral known as Unobtanium. He starts by inhabiting a human-Na’vi vat-grown hybrid in order to get closer to the close-to-nature indigenes and ends up leading them in the fight of their lives against the humans. Bracketed between is the simplistic filler that is brought to life – and what life! – by Cameron’s tried-and-tested magic.

Even before the film was released worldwide on December 18, cyberspace was crawling with critiques – seen and unseen, mostly the latter – by Cameron experts who either thought that he deserved the self-appointed “King of the World” moniker or that, this time round, he had gestated a bummer.

What Cameron had gestated was the kind of anticipation that only precedes the Olympics, and not even then. He had conceptualised Avatar a decade and a half ago, and wanted to go on the floor two years after finishing with Titanic (1997). But the special effects he had dreamed up would have entailed a then unrealisable budget of US$400 million, which no studio would pony up. So he shelved it for a decade.

Which was prudent, because stewing for 10 years brought down the cost by US$ 100 million; it afforded him time to perfect and patent his 3-D stereoscopic camera; and he also got to learn from the teething problems of motion capture digitisation that attended the character of Gollum in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002). It was a good time spent in study, since Avatar ended up being 40 per cent live action and 60 per cent photo-realistic CGI.

Motion capture, or mocap, hardly does justice to what Cameron has done. Not for a moment in the film do the actors come across as synthetic or digitally inert. Their ‘alien’ expressions are intricately shown – and that plague of CGI, the inexpressive dead-eye, has been forever done away with. Even the Na’vi blue skin, pores and bioluminescent freckles and all, is evocative. The digital artifice isn’t once waved in-your-face. (Well, yes, it is, since it is always on show, but spotting where normal camerawork ends and virtuality begins isn’t easy.)

The 3-D works best in the Pandora jungle shots – the Na’vi going about their work in and below the 150-metre tall Hometree, focusing on the Tree of Souls that sprouts strands like optical fibres, panning with loping predators and flying Banshees – and just about makes decent work of the marine camp. The cultural/technological juxtaposition of human and Na’vi is effective, even if sometimes affected. When his mind inhabits his human-Na’vi hybrid body, Jake Sully sleeps in a pod that resembles a sensory deprivation chamber; when his native self sleeps in Hometree, it is in an organic pod shaped like a living hammock slung high between trees. The marine camp is lit with actinic artificial light; the Na’vi are surrounded by flamboyant bioluminescence in colours that Pantone hasn’t even conceived of – in trees, fronds, animals, the water, underfoot, overhead. It is as if Cameron deliberately set out to enhance Pandora’s image at the cost of the steroidal marines, highlighting the ineffable beauty around the all-sheltering Hometree.

(So when, finally, the marines bring Hometree down in a thunder of napalm, killing scores of Na’vi, the anguished wrench that runs through you is greatly intensified by the catastrophe seeming to happen in your world, the cinema hall. The 3-D in Avatar triggers your fight-or-flight response like no movie has before: why do I have a feeling that the future of Cameron’s 3-D is in the US military’s battle simulations?)

(On the other hand, Cameron’s sociocultural juxtaposition of species might actually spark off a good thing – a global interest in extraterrestrial life-forms beyond the bogeymen greys of Area 51 who have so far excited the popular imagination. But Cameron also played it safe: the alien Na’vi are so close to human that we can’t but feel sympathy for them which we reflexively extend to the brutally colonised.)

Perhaps it is an indication of what he wants to achieve that Cameron refused to make Pandora a truly, frighteningly alien planet, the kind we are likely to encounter if we ever go interstellar. Pandora is little different from Earth (except that its air is a toxic brew of ammonia, methane, carbon dioxide, oxygen, nitrogen and a tiny dab of hydrogen cyanide); its plants look terrene but are purplish; its humanoids are blue-skinned; its land-dwelling sextupeds paw the ground like Pamplona’s bulls. And the Na’vi are so human that they keen in grief, demonstrate interconnectedness by holding hands and swooning like New Agers, anger by a lip curl, rage by a snarl. This is also why Cameron has Pandora’s flora and fauna based entirely on Earth plants and animals.

By making xenomorphs (aliens, to the uninformed) so identifiable and familiar, Cameron takes the viewer’s natural xenophobia out of the picture right from the start. Fed on a Hollywood diet of malignant interstellar outsiders, Planet Earth’s cinemagoers tend not to take kindly to aliens. But these Na’vi – like Neytiri, who is doing the rounds of the Internet as that “hot, blue alien chick” – we could get to admire, or, like Jake Scully, even love. Cameron once likened the Na’vi to “our higher selves… our aspirational selves” and the humans in the film as “the parts of ourselves that are trashing our world and maybe condemning ourselves to a grim future”.

There is a great deal of Orientalism running through the film, even if it is inoffensive and naïve. The Na’vi are dead ringers for Native Americans, although they are constructed like blue-skinned Maasai – ectomorphic, willowy, free-limbed, square-shouldered, long-backed, small-bummed. They worship their ancestors; they commune with nature through neural symbiosis. They think of Pandora and Eywa as we think of Earth and Gaia. These are the kind of people that governments spend millions of dollars protecting from the ugliness of modern life and ensuring that they continue to live the naïf life.

But for all that, Avatar is not about innocence pitted against malign maturity or naturalism versus technology – it is about stunning, even radical, visual treats. It is about what Cameron can do with his virtual camera with which he can monitor the actors reacting with their virtual environments even as they emote on a podium outfitted with scores of sensors that send kinetic data to supercomputers. It is what he can do with his patented 3-D stereoscopic Fusion Camera System, two high-definition cameras running side-by-side in one container. It is what he can do with a giant performance-capture stage called, imaginatively, The Volume, and with actors whose eye movements are captured by a skull cap with a tiny camera attached to it.

Among the memorable things about Avatar is the almost casual detailing: the Pandoran bugs and midges that seem to float from the deep background to hover like confetti about your ears; the stunning depth of field that mimics – actually, outdoes – the DoF of binocular human vision; the digitally inscribed dirt on the Perspex canopies of the tilt-rotored Aerospatiale SA-2 Samson helicopters; the poison-tipped spangs of the Na’vi arrows hitting the assault ships; the pores on the Na’vi epidermis; the moving reflections in the Na’vi cats-eyes; the scattering of hundreds of leaves in the wake of lumbering metal; vast Polyphemus, with its Jupiter-like Great Spot, rising like an omen in the night sky; the crumbling sides of the flying mountains; the wind in the hair of the Na’vi riding the Banshees; the wasted legs of the paraplegic Jake Scully.

The sheer magnetism of the visuals diminish the banality of the film’s dialogue and the mundane score by James Horner (who also collaborated with Cameron in Aliens and Titanic). And of course, Avatar, although set in 2154, is all about big contemporary issues, highlighted by phrases like “shock and awe” and “fighting terror with terror”. There is no subtlety of script in Avatar. Not that it would matter: we’re here for the vertiginous thrills.

And who would argue that James Cameron hasn’t got it right? The Web is full of the Avatar backstory and minute nuancing that didn’t find their way into the film but which will flesh out the context for those who wish to go deeper into its mythology. There already is a fledgling Na’vi lexicon of 1,000 words, created by a professional linguist, waiting to go viral, like Klingon in Star Trek. The growth in 3-D screens the world over show that movie studios are banking on the Pandora mythology: according to Screen Digest, there were only 84 digital 3-D screens in 2005; by 2009, they had increased to 6,882; by 2010, they are expected to number 9,732.

So, mark my words, there will be more 3-D films – 22 over the next two years, including Alice in Wonderland and Piranha 3-D. And there will be Avatar sequels. In Cameron’s universe, Unobtanium is necessary to fuel interstellar travel – so the Na’vi will be attacked again. Pandora’s grief will be our salvation.


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