Retro-Blog 2009:12:31 - Something Completely Different (and disposable)

Avatar: a cause for action by Roger Dean against James Cameron and his associates
Michael Kepler
December 31, 2009   · 7 min read  · Shared with Public

I'm taking a break from what has become my usual chronicle of family drama to offer some observations about a motion picture I viewed this evening.

First the obvious: the design of the geography, flora and fauna of the fictional planet in this film is based very closely on the artwork of Roger Dean.  It is not credible that the designers of this film could have come up with these images and structures without having a familiarity with very specific works by Roger Dean, particularly his paintings for the Yes albums Yessongs and Fragile, among others.

There was no mention of any kind of Roger Dean in the credits of the film, and an initial online search uncovers no evidence of any agreement between Roger Dean, or his assignees, and James Cameron or his associates in the production of this film, licensing the adaptation of Dean's work for use in this motion picture.  As such, absent any such agreement already executed in secret, I strongly believe that Roger Dean, or his copyright assignees if applicable, have a strong cause for action against James Cameron and his associates for copyright infringement and unpaid royalties.

Then the less obvious: to a lesser extent, the music and thematic concepts of the film could be considered as "inspired" at least in part by the works of Jon Anderson and Yes.  In fact, the film could have been better if Anderson and Yes had been directly involved in both the score and the conceptualization of the story.  As it is, James Horner, as much a musical thief as any soundtrack "composer", managed to hack out a score so beautiful it made me wish he would provide a bibliography of the works from which he had lifted it.  I don't need any help to identify Jon Anderson's Toltec, and some of his other solo works, as a source.   For the most part, however, both musically and conceptually, Cameron, Horner, Anderson and Yes have all drawn from the same deep well of over-used cliche's, and who could have cause to sue whom would be impossible to sort out.  As has been pointed out by others, the copyright holders for "Ferngully" probably have the strongest cause for action regarding plagiarism of the story. Still, I wish it had been Jon Anderson's voice singing over the end credits, instead of some generic female soul singer.  The Yes song "Homeworld" would have fit, both musically and lyrically.

Blatant and arrogant piracy aside, it was a better film than I had expected.  It was a more immersive cinematic experience that I had expected, and the character and story development edged out over my admittedly very very low expectations.

My biggest complaint of this film is the same complaint I have about most recent films which rely heavily on the attempt to merge live action and computer-generated graphics: jarringly incompatible visualizations of a subjective reality are juxtaposed awkwardly.  Much of the enjoyment of a good film is the escapism that comes from being drawn into it's seamless alternate reality.  Films which intercut or superimpose incompatible realities are like having someone in the theater poking and slapping you repeatedly and shouting "Hey, by the way, you're watching a MOVIE right now!".

Right at the beginning, the cuts between spacecraft interiors and exteriors were visually non-credible to a laughable degree.  While the interiors had very moody, shadowy lighting, the exteriors were bathed in such an excess of gamma (self-illumination), the spacecraft looked like initial drafts of designs for toys.

On the positive side, I was surprised at how quickly and completely I felt immersed in the hyper-real imagery of the planet, which was actually quite beautiful (thanks, again, to the uncredited, uncompensated, Roger Dean). The longer such sequences extended, the more I was drawn in.  The film even worked well enough when inter-cutting between the hyper-real planet and the mundane reality of the live-action interiors.  In a way, that contrast almost seemed to be quite intentionally the visual point of the film.   But then there were sequences where components of these two fundamentally incompatible realities were used in the same scene, in the same frame, at the same time.  That felt pretty much like getting kicked out of my seat onto the sticky theater floor.

Cameron's effort would have been much more successful if he had opted for a purely photo-realistic computer-generated film with no live action elements whatsoever.   Either that, or a consistently cleaner delineation of the two visual realities, as had been accomplished with such success in Disney's Tron (which actually managed to seamlessly combine elements of live action, early CG, and hand-drawn animation, as well as a unique use of backlit masks, to form the "inside the computer" reality).

In the end, it was an enjoyable enough spectacle, especially in 3D, but ultimately the kind of over-priced, over-worked yet sloppy excessiveness we have sadly come to expect from James Cameron.

Finally and again, if I could grab his ear, I would strongly encourage Cameron to do the right thing and enter into good-faith negotiations with Roger Dean for appropriate compensation, and at least proper credit, and maybe a tribute featurette, in the Blu-Ray and DVD releases.

ADDENDUM: 4:30PM December 31, 2009

I just wanted to make clear that Cameron's use of visuals originally executed by Roger Dean are not limited to the "floating islands" of the Yessongs album inner artwork.  It would be an interesting and difficult task to map every derivative scene and setting in the film to the specific works from Dean from which they were adapted.  One that springs immediately to mind, however, are the specific appearance of the stone circles and arches in one area of the Pandora planet, and their origins in the artwork for the Yes Union album cover.

I would also like to note that over-emphasis on visual spectacle, while treating story and dialog as a secondary afterthought, can have disastrous results on the finished product.  A single word choice can make a world of difference, and this movie is perhaps the penultimate case in point.  It doesn't matter how many hundreds of of millions you spend on the visuals, if you name the precious mineral at the center of the conflict "inobtanium".  This resulted in giggles from a significant portion of the audience.  A silly word like that would be expected in some kind of fairly-tale-like fantasy film, but it seems Cameron worked very hard to take concepts and visuals usually associated exclusively with fantasy and bring them credibly into the context of realistic science fiction, only to have that single word make it all seem silly and childish.

Given the inherent limitations of the cinematic form, we can perhaps forgive many of the outrageous liberties taken with so-called "science" in this film.   Never mind no attempt made to rationalize islands floating in the air on which normal physics appear to apply to people, animals, water and loose objects, although there was a missed opportunity to tie this into the properties of the mineral "inobtanium", the great value of which was never really explained.  Least credible of all was the ease and speed with which the main character adjusted to the experience of living inside a humanoid, yet in many ways vastly different, body, and being surrounded by people, culture and animals that are significantly outside of his experience and knowledge.  It almost seems like the script wanted us to honor his often-mentioned "stupidity" as a form of strength that made it easier for him to adjust and accept with a minimum of "freak-out".  Ultimately, it is the strong suggestion of  some supernatural "destiny" upon which we must rely to believe in his rapid transformation from Marine to, in his words, "tree-hugger".

My final objection is to how much groundwork was laid for what could have been a mold-breaking big Hollywood movie, only to have the movie fall back on bankable, focus-group-tested cliches.  The people of Pandora were depicted as a kind of idealized version of the native peoples of the Americas, using violence rarely and sparely, without even any mention of wars between tribes (although why else would they have a word for "warrior", or an apparent warrior class).  Again, this is an idealized version of the native peoples of the  Americas, as in reality some tribes and nations were viciously violent against others and their own. The people of Earth were, of course, depicted as the "bad guys", with the exception of the modern-day cleric class of "scientists".   There was an opportunity here to present a different model for conflict resolution than is depicted in most big Hollywood films. Yet, ultimately, it was a war film, with the Pandoran peoples essentially "lowering" themselves to the level of the "evil" humans.

Ultimately, this seemed like a film at war with itself, and in such case, there can be no winner.
8 Comments

Kevin Romero
Have you read "MIDWORLD" by Alan Dean Foster? Talk about piracy

    12y

Kevin Romero
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midworld - also reading the comments in Amazon it is apparent there are a little of people noting the similarity

    12y

Kevin Romero
http://img.denihilation.com/delgovatar.html - another source

    12y

Michael Kepler
Kevin, given my age, it is probably easy to guess which was the first Alan Dean Foster book I read: the novelization of the first Star Wars movie. Now there is a movie in which all absurdity is forgiven because it's false reality is so seamlessly consistent in it's visual style.

    12y

Michael Kepler
Jeff, I may have mis-quoted the movie. I'm not sure if they said "inobtanium" or "unobtanium". Either way, it's just plain silly.

    12y

Kevin Romero
I think it was mispronounced in the movie...

    12y

Stuart Pitman
I just keep thinking of Ricky Gervais "joke" about buying a Golden Globe...