"Avatar' vs. "The Imaginarium'

As the closing credits began to roll on James Cameron's Avatar, I removed the 3-D glasses, turned to my friend, and said, "Wow. What a stupid movie that was!"

"But fun," he replied.

"Loads of fun," I agreed.

James Cameron spent many years and an enormous amount of money making his science fiction epic, Avatar. Was the investment worth it?

There's no denying that the elaborate computer-generated special effects are eye-popping. Unfortunately, they're strung together along a story line engineered primarily to provide opportunities for the special effects. It's easy to imagine Cameron and his design team creating a wish list of set pieces for a 3-D movie— "You know what would be really cool? Traveling through jungle treetops at night!" "And falling off a cliff!" "Ooh! Ooh! And flying!"— and then building a story around that list.

Scientists vs. soldiers

The story they constructed is a standard conflict-of-cultures narrative. There are two Earth contingents on the planet Pandora: a large military-industrial group searching for the rare (and very, very valuable) element unobtanium, and a small group of scientists searching for knowledge, mostly of the planet's plants and animals. The former group tromps around in huge metal gizmos that shield them from the atmosphere, which is toxic to humans.

The scientists conduct their explorations while assuming the form of avatars— gollumlike creatures that combine the DNA of a particular investigator with that of a Na'vi, the tall, blue-skinned sentient beings of the planet. As avatars, they can roam the planet both biochemically and figuratively open to the environment, while the human is safe inside HQ, locked into a brainwave machine.

That's the premise, and not a single thing happens that any reasonably alert adult can't predict. Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a paraplegic Marine, is sent to Pandora to take the place of his scientist brother, whose DNA had been used to create an avatar that would be otherwise useless because the brother has died. Jake, in avatar form, meets a lovely Pandoran maiden, Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), who is brave and strong and wise (and, surprise surprise, the daughter of the Na'vi leader).

Predictable plot

Jake, who is brave and strong but blinkered by his preconceptions, is intrigued with Neytiri and grows to respect the Na'vi. He finds his loyalties divided, then tested. A battle between good and evil ensues. I won't spoil the ending by revealing which side wins.

Propelling the predictable plot is a collection of two-dimensional characters. (I never did manage to learn the name of the Na'vi princess; I recall her now as "the blue girlfriend.") You have "the hardnosed-verging-on-psychotic colonel" (Stephen Lang), "the experienced-but-not-yet-completely-cynical scientist" (Sigourney Weaver), and "the maverick pilot" (Michelle Rodriguez). The characters function as plot movers, not as individuals with personalities.

Despite all that, the movie truly is a lot of fun. The visuals are stunning. The special effects are very special: nighttime in the jungle is mysterious and beautiful and scary, the flight scenes are exhilarating. The alien world's plants, as much as its animals, are lovingly imagined. Though the story travels a predictable path, it travels it smoothly and briskly.

Horse-drawn theater

A few days later I saw another good-vs.-evil story set in another imaginary world, created for our visual delectation with the magic of computer graphics. Terry Gilliam's Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, however, is a strikingly different movie experience than Avatar.

Imaginarium opens with a shot of a cobblestone square in a city identified as London. We see an enormous horse-drawn wooden theater-on-wheels that strongly evokes the gaslight 19th Century, but the camera pans to a modern nightclub on the square, from which a modern bouncer ejects some modern drunks. They stumble over to the theater, the titular imaginarium, and one of the drunks ends up on stage, crashing through a Mylar mirror and entering the world of his own imagination— not a salubrious place, as it turns out.

Traveling with Dr. Parnassus (Christopher Plummer) on the imaginarium are his old friend Percy (Verne Troyer), daughter Valentina (Lily Cole) and assistant Anton (Andrew Garfield). The troupe encounters Tony (Heath Ledger), who has lost his memory but seems in need of rescue, so they drag him aboard and proceed with their travels.

During those travels, the troupe performs shows intended to persuade their audiences to traverse the mirror through which the drunk stumbled in the opening scene. On the other side of the mirror, people find themselves in worlds constructed out of the images of their own truest needs and desires, where they confront choices that illuminate those desires.

Friend of the devil?

The story's overall arc has two strands. The first concerns Valentina, whose 16th birthday is a few days hence. At that time she may have to be turned over to Dr. Parnassus's old adversary, Mr. Nick (Tom Waits), as payment of a wager. In the other strand we discover who Tony is and how he came to be in the situation in which they found him. Both of these stories are played out in "real life" as well as in the world of the imaginarium.

Gilliam lets us figure things out for ourselves as the story unfolds. The characters are individuals, not collections of clichés and stereotypes, and the subtleties and complexities of their relationships reveal themselves slowly. The plot isn't crystal clear at the end of the movie, let alone at the beginning. This is not, of course, entirely a virtue— Gilliam has a history of making movies that place a higher value on visual quirkiness than narrative coherence (Brazil, Twelve Monkeys)— but it makes for a more intriguing and involving experience for the viewer.

Good vs. evil

Both Avatar and The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus involve a story that's played out simultaneously in two worlds, one "real" and the other a visually sumptuous alternative. The nature of the connection between those two worlds differs; they are on the same physical plane in Avatar but on the same moral/psychological plane in Imaginarium. This difference reflects the filmmakers' divergent values, as do the differing means of entry to the other world: In both cases that entry is achieved through the power of the mind, but that power is harnessed through technology in Avatar and through the imagination in Imaginarium.

In both films, people who visit that other world participate in a battle between good and evil whose roots lie in the "real" world. That battle takes place at the level of the individual for Gilliam, but at the level of the group for Cameron, whose treatment of the conflicting ideologies involved is as lacking in nuance as his treatment of individual characters.

Several people have commented on the irony that Cameron's extremely expensive, special effects-laden film purports to be a critique of the pro-technology mindset and a celebration of direct interaction with nature. Others have shuddered at the unreflective Noble Savage racism of Cameron's portrayal of the Na'vi.

Big difference: the budgets

Both Cameron and Gilliam are strongly visual artists, and both men subordinate plot and characters to imagery. Both work extensively with computer graphics to achieve the visual effects they want. The difference here is one of scale— or, rather, of budget. Avatar is said to have cost more than $200 million to make; Imaginarium, less than $30 million.

What might Gilliam have done with Cameron's budget? I'm not convinced his movie would have been fundamentally different, since he allowed his actors to retain their human forms in the imaginary world, rather than converting them into special effects vehicles, as Cameron did. With Gilliam the bottom line was not his budget but his feeling for both the primacy and the specificity of the individual.♦


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