Avatar and bad screenwriting

The Internet had a good chortle yesterday when the Writers Guild of America nominated Avatar for Best Original Screenplay, a move that probably says more about the movie's presence in our national consciousness than it does about the quality of James Cameron's writing. (Bear in mind that the group deemed ineligible several of the supposed front-runners, including Inglourious Basterds.)

But the nomination once again draws attention to the quality of Cameron's script, something that inevitably comes up in conversations about why I disliked the film. It's true that Cameron's writing has never been his greatest strength; isn't it hypocritical, the argument goes, to pick on Avatar and not Titanic? I don't think so—but then, I don't agree that Avatar's script is up to the level of Cameron's best work.

First, I should confess that I liked Avatar more seeing it at Navy Pier, where IMAX made the human scenes less jittery and heightened the immersive and visceral power of what Cameron had created on Pandora, especially in the nighttime sequences. (The New York Times' Neil Genzlinger, who watched the film in three fomats, also took issue with the multiplex version of 3-D, which is what was used at the press screening.) But I'm still amazed that Cameron would make a movie that seems so half-baked on a narrative level. It's not populated by characters as much as character types. Stephen Lang's colonel does little but growl, Giovanni Ribisi's corporate asshole seems even less caffeinated than Sam Worthington's hero, Zoe Saldana's Neytiri is basically just an expository guide to the Na'vi world—and not to beat a dead ikran, but is "unobtainium" really the best term he could come up with?

Perhaps some of the hasty feel is the result of paring the movie down to its essential, story-advancing material. An IMAX projection setup can hold only so much film, and Cameron's first cut was supposedly more than four hours long. (If the writing in the Na'vi sex scene is any indication, perhaps the material was ditched for a reason.) But the more people go on about Avatar's "wow factor," the more I'm convinced that this kind of technical wizardry—now a given for this director—has nothing to do with why we came to value Cameron as a filmmaker in the first place.

Look past the bluster, and Cameron is—or used to be—a master of narrative tension. The weekend Avatar opened, I rewatched Aliens, and I was amazed to find that 72 minutes go by before we see a full-blown alien attack. Up until that point, Cameron's primary concern has been establishing the setting, introducing the characters, having them peer around dark corners and so on—in short, building suspense. Cameron started his career in B movies, and it's likely that lower budgets showed him the value of making audiences wait for the special effects. The Terminator works the same way. For the better part of an hour, we're teased mostly with car chases and gunplay before we get a good look at Stan Winston's handiwork. More expensive by orders of magnitude, Terminator 2 proves that you can have groundbreaking effects and still use them to advance a compelling mythology.

Even Titanic, the Cameron film perhaps most widely regarded as an example of mediocre writing, takes its time laying out its story, so much so that it allows what would be a conventional movie's full length to elapse before it gets to the sinking. Not only is the film absorbing, but it moves with purpose. Set aside the spitting contest and "I jump, you jump—right?," and note how the love story functions in showing us various locations on the ship—the real source of Cameron's obsession. In order to rescue Leonardo DiCaprio when he's handcuffed in the master-at-arms' office, Kate Winslet goes on a virtual guided tour of the boat's hallways and elevator shafts. With fewer obvious marks to hit, Avatar rushes headlong into the rain forest and quickly becomes a textbook demonstration on how miracles can, in large quantities, seem ordinary.

In terms of Cameron's films, Avatar's closest analogue is probably The Abyss—another visually revolutionary movie whose story seems to consist only of the bare essentials necessary for its effects. Avatar, at least, gives you more to talk about. On Twitter, I got into a lengthy discussion about the film with Philadelphia-based critic Sam Adams, who—in one of the most provocative pieces on the movie—suggested that the hype over Cameron's technological achievement is overblown and that the film's ideology is what makes it trenchant. On that point, I'll agree. It's ballsy to make a $400 million (or whatever) blockbuster so obviously critical of American foreign policy—even more so given that Rupert Murdoch's company picked up the tab.

I'll cede that Avatar marks an interesting addition to the director's personal cosmology (Cameron's brother is a Marine), and I don't deny that his taste for allegory has always been broad (messiah John Connor's initials are no accident). But if the way Avatar opens itself to multiple readings makes it a fun movie to see and debate, it's still far from elegant by Cameron's admittedly high standards. The Iraq references—and it's hard to see how lines about "preemptive action" and "shock and awe" are intended to evoke anything else—are so on-the-nose that they come across as a Hail Mary, a last-ditch effort to add a new kind of resonance to a screenplay that has already run the gamut from eco-consciousness parable to Matrix knockoff to anti-imperialist Western. Throwing in the mawkish romance of Dances with Wolves felt calculated—Cameron's idea of how to rope in the teen-girl demographic that oohed and ahhed over Leonardo. (These aren't my stereotypes; they're Hollywood's.) As to the question of the movie's allegedly patronizing politics, I'll leave that to David Brooks.

The film is obviously a landmark, and I would never discourage anyone from grappling with a cultural phenomenon. (The inimitable Michael Atkinson has already gone there.) I'll even see it again. Still, it says something about Cameron's caliber as a director that the most ambitious film of all time could play as if it's below his reading level.