Happy New Year, criticism-appreciators! You’ll be glad to know, as a direct result of my boundless extravagance and disregard for my financial affairs, I have not one but two reviews for you this edition. Last week I went on an expedition to see the hugely underrated comedian Mark Watson perform a ‘work in progress’ gig in Soho, and when I drifted out of the theatre it was compellingly pointed out to me that an hour or so’s hanging around would put me in pole position for a look at James Cameron’s sci-fi epic Avatar. I stumbled to bed around four AM, having repeatedly dozed off on the bus home, and comforted my aching eyes and buzzing prefrontal cortex with the thought that I’d have lots and lots to tell you. I think I need a decent run-up to babble convincingly about Avatar, so I’ll start with the comedy gig.
Twitter has reliably informed me that Mark Watson’s first stand-up DVD is due out later this year, and I heartily recommend that you keep an eye out for it whether or not you’ve seen any of his previous work. Currently hosting BBC4’s deliciously odd quiz show We Need Answers, you might recognise his beardy Bristolian features from the occasional episode of Mock the Week or HIGNFY, although his most famous endeavours to date have been his deliriously successful and headache-inducingly ambitious 24- and 36-hour stand-up shows at the Edinburgh Fringe. When I tracked him down at the Soho Theatre on Sunday, I had barely stopped chortling from the last time I saw him perform (November), and after a few seconds of late-arrival bullying I settled into the most enjoyable hour of live comedy I’ve ever experienced. Watson just keeps getting better and better – his endearingly shy style, punctuated with ‘um’s and self-deprecating cracks, eases the audience into a pleasant and uneventful journey through his evidently pleasant and uneventful life (the most exciting anecdotes we heard were about those Magners adverts and a chap he met on a train who subsequently didn’t kill himself). Nevertheless, he has the room transfixed. Watson combines the very sharpest observational humour with effortlessly witty wordplay, something that fewer and fewer comedians seem able to do – whilst Michael McIntyre can highlight the absurdities of everyday life (whilst being a twat) and Jimmy Carr can deliver a perfectly crafted line (whilst being a twat), Watson’s fluid and apparently unrehearsed delivery is a delight to listen to, making light work of subject matter with which the audience can readily empathise. I doubt any person or production will garner such wholehearted, fanboyish adoration this year, so unless you want me to keep yapping on and on about Mark Watson then please do check him out.
Moving on to the second half of my evening (I’m skipping for your benefit the hour I spent in a filthy Soho pub waiting for these parentheses to end), I toddled off to see Avatar in three glorious dimensions at the sickeningly overpriced Leicester Square Odeon. I know I promised to stick to our dear Coronet, but it was ever so convenient and I felt I should probably see one overpriced film there and one at the IMAX whilst in London. (The IMAX one was Watchmen, which was jolly good). Once I’d finished vomiting in shock over the price of the tickets and checking myself out in my snazzy polarised glasses – am I the only person who didn’t know they’ve stopped using red and green lenses? – I settled into a surprisingly adequate chair and braced myself.
Mistake #1 by whoever’s responsible for these things was to include adverts in 3D before the film itself – I doubt the number of people who were swayed towards seeing any of the films promoted changed significantly, and the novelty was conveniently ripped out of the 3D format before the film had even started. And believe me, Avatar needs to cling to all the novelty value it can possibly beg, borrow or steal. It’s a perfectly adequate sci-fi film, albeit with a plot thinner than almost anything I’ve ever seen (my viewing companion observed that she’d never been able to follow a regular-length sci-fi/fantasy film all the way through, so the fact that this lumbering three-hour beast managed not to lose her at any point is perhaps distressing), and it is undoubtedly a feast for the eyes – in fact, the imagined world of Pandora is so idyllic that online support groups have appeared for those ‘Avatards’ who can do nothing but pine for the simple lifestyle of their alien heroes. No word of a lie. People are extraordinary.
An effects-heavy, plot-light extravaganza, then? Absolutely. It’s very visually appealing, so long as the specs don’t give you a headache. But can James Cameron really justify having poured 15 years of his odd little life and an estimated $450 million into something pretty? Once you’ve seen one shot of the “big blue cat-monkey smurfs” (Ross Noble, in case you were wondering) riding dragon things over shiny forests, communing with nature by way of their telepathic ponytails (absolutely no kidding) or shooting at the evil humans in their evil human gyrocopters whilst they try to do evil things to lovely lovely Nature, you’ve essentially seen all you need to. The film has a very standard, tiresomely patronising eco message about safeguarding the natural world, so expect to feel demonised for clutching a non-recycled cup of Coke and/or vat of popcorn – although not for craving a cigarette, since even 150 years in the future Sigourney Weaver’s character is almost never without one.
Perhaps the most distressing aspect of Avatar, however, is its insidious and racist adherence to what has become known as the ‘White Messiah’ fable. This is an archetype present within all forms of fiction but especially prevalent in cinema, where an embittered and/or thrill-seeking protagonist (male, white) is plunged into the midst of a culture he initially and ignorantly despises. However, once he realises that its simple virtues (gentle treehugging as opposed to technology and so on) outweigh those of his own civilisation he rallies his new-found family to combat the rest of the white men, who are naughty and impure. This happens time and again – Dances With Wolves and The Last Samurai are particularly obvious examples, whilst Pocohontas and FernGully water the message down for kids (in fact, FernGully is basically a more visually crude version of Avatar, with Robin Williams as a lobotomised bat) – and it is extraordinarily unpleasant. The suggestion is that the ‘natives’, or indigenous persons or Na’avi or whatever the particular film calls them, are little more than children for all their athleticism and connection to nature – what they really need is a big, strong, rational white man to point them in the right direction, because bless them, they can’t do it themselves.
Avatar aspires to be an epic which will change our attitudes towards film and environmentalism forever. That it represents the future of the cinema-going experience I have no doubt – but could Cameron not have made more of an impact on the green campaign by donating those hundreds of millions to charity? That way he could have maybe saved some creatures which actually exist, and he would also have avoided looking like a big fat racist.
