By Daniel Greenwood

This review contains tree surgery.

I saw Avatar a few days after Christmas, at a time when I found it difficult to be in confined spaces such as cinemas. But what better way to overcome fears of claustrophobia by sitting through an ‘eagerly-anticipated’ Hollywood epic. This is the time of year of course when The Lord of the Rings-esque behemoths  pummel audiences into a phantasmagorical stupor. Never has a film been so ‘talked about’ or never so many people talking about how much this film is ‘talked about’. It’s gone so far now for the need to ask, what do you want from me? Personally, I’ve paid my £9 and donned the special glasses. I’ve sat through the film. I’ve left the cinema amidst an orderly stream of bodies. I’ve recycled the specs and gestured to friends and fans, ‘It was fine.’

For James Cameron and his band of marketeers that would not seem to be enough. You get the sense that Cameron and co want you to see this film more than once. I know a few people who’ve seen it in 2D and 3D, and have stayed up to enjoy the 2am IMAX screenings. But is Avatar so thrilling that you would want to see it so many times in so many different ways. Everyone is different. And in my own way I cannot help but react to this movie, post-screening, with disdain. Graham Greene, novelist-cum-film critic, reasoned that one should not detest popularity in cinema, but he lived in a different time. The films Greene contended with would be predominantly better than the plethora of awfulness now available to us in this consumerist, apolitical mainstream

There is an argument that Cameron’s film carries a political message. I would argue that it carries an economic message. It bludgeons you with its images, well away from the cinema, these images are purely of the technological ‘successes’ of the filmmakers. To be political in Hollywood is to spit in the priest’s hand at Holy Communion. The status quo remains firmly unaffected by Cameron, if not lovingly embraced. The setting of Avatar in a grand, primitive land named Pandora is the crux of any environmental message. This planet is inhabited by tall, cat-like smurfs called Na’vi. The destruction of the planet by visiting humans is reminiscent of perhaps Americans invading Iraq on the bloody oil trail or the colonialists slaughtering Native Americans in the 17th and 18th centuries. But it’s all a bit Disney. Though the sight of beautifully rendered woodland bulldozed is a harrowing image. The holy symbol of the Na’vi, a humongous tree, is destroyed by the humans in a scene that recalls Cameron’s sinking Titanic. The humans are on the trail of ‘unobtainium’, a resource to fuel their dying planet – Earth. Perhaps any offhand critique of the reason for going to war in Iraq are a little late for any pertinence here. Heavy casualties aside The Na’vi win out, and the lines are well drawn between good and evil. That just cannot translate to anything beyond the screen.

I feel that this film inhibits any ecological revolution in the wider scheme of things. It is set in the distant future and is enacted violently rather than thoughtfully. Whatever your stance on the global pollution debate, you would surely agree that the only way to reverse human destruction of the natural world is to act differently in the moment. The wool gathering inherent in Avatar will not change anything. By this I mean that this film asks us, wills us, to marvel at the beauty of its reimagining of nature. But the world on show is a fantasy. I just hope that this is not the closest that a child or teen can come to the resplendence of the green earth in the distant future recreated here.

Films such as Old Joy (Kelly Reichardt, 2006) and Wendy and Lucy (Reichardt, 2008) do more to concern us about the damage man does to his environment. The trash in the woods in Old Joy, for example, in its simple and frank metaphor – the woodland is in the city (trees) and the city’s is in the woodland (garbage) – highlights a problem I can understand. Avatar spells a greater confusion for the ‘green’ revolution adopted by supermarkets and automobile adverts. I cannot rely on these grandiose, hyper-capitalists establishments to do either the thinking or the hard work for me. I must see that Avatar is a well-made visual spectacle, but its politics is purely bandwagon stuff. James Cameron could have made a film about a twenty-something who rejects the automobile lifestyle and walks an hour a day to work or one about a mother having to turn the washing machine down to 30. Then he would have made a ‘green’ film. Avatar is a movie about machines by machines that posits us firmly within the economic machine. If its financial success tells us anything it’s that the common cinemagoer is ever more disillusioned with the real world around them.