The BBC presents Planet Pandora

When I first saw Avatar it was during a mythology class my senior year in high school at the ravings of a pothead teacher who had seen the film a good twenty or thirty times within its first few months of being released. I was in a classroom grappling with onset of senioritis so I’ll admit I most certainly did not get the full Avatar experience people kept talking about after having seen it in IMAX or in a theater. However, to get it out of the way quickly I’ll say it as this, you didn’t watch Avatar for the story, you watched it for the world of Pandora and the organisms that lived there and the visual appeal the film had. Had they decided to make Avatar in Claymation I am more than positive no one would ever see a Cameron film again. Or look at Gumby the same way. It has long been understood that the storyline is essentially Pocahontas meets Fern Gully with a dye job- something to which Cameron admits. While he worked on the film for fifteen years, that time was not spent about character or plot- but on the world of Avatar itself so my biggest criticism of the film is, why didn’t he show us the world more?

 

Cameron had an entire team of artists, designers, linguists working on his film and he created an entire world and an entire ecosystem and then just uses the film to portray a political agenda about the war. But that’s enough griping, about the story- sort of. Like I said, you did not watch Avatar for the plot line, but the visuals, the special effects, the entire planet of Pandora and its ecosystem. As it stands, maybe it is something more fitting of a different medium than a clash of culture war-love story? Maybe a faux-documentary of sorts.

As it stands, when I think of Avatar, I kind of think of something that you could see on Animal Planet ( not the Animal Planet of today, when Animal Planet had Irwin, Corwin, Mutual of Omaha), the visuals, the creatures, an entire ecosystem that was created could have been explained in a different medium.  All of the animals, sans the Na’vi were hexopedal. The culture of the Na’vi, their connection to nature.  Maybe national geographic, tell the story in which it shows the amount of work, the time and effort spent by those designers, linguists, and artists put into the film because the actors did not have much in regards to the characters. For that matter, why did you need humans at all? Why not a film focused about the Na’vi people. Okay, okay, so there was issues with money, and budget and time, but when the film was already about 60% CGI, why not go the whole nine yards? Poo, pah, bills and stuff. Besides they more than made up for it. Alright, I’m nitpicking, all move on.

In any case, I think that what Cameron achieved with the visuals in Avatar were phenomenal, but fifteen years down the line there will be technology that will be even greater- like I said, no one would have liked Avatar if it was made in Claymation. No one- and if you would, I’m sorry, you are a hipster and I’ll have to ask you to leave. Cameron created an entire ecosystem, why didn’t he tell us about that. The obvious reason would be because of entertainment. No one is really going to spend fifteen dollars at the movie theater to simply watch beautiful scenery…oh wait.

I guess what I am saying is that it felt a little cheap to have all of these intricacies, all of these details of an entire world created (the Na’vi language does have over one thousand words), the beauty that was Pandora was told through a story that I watched when I was five and that raccoons and hummingbirds hung around and if I just sang my heart out I too could sing with all the voices of the mountain. Then again, maybe I’m also the only one would watch as BBC presents Planet Pandora with Sigourney Weaver narrating.

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