I saw Avatar in 3D over break, which was a really interesting experience. My favorite comment about the film came from my little brother, who said he loved everything but the movie.

While watching it I noticed a few major incongruities between the three acts. The first was in tone.

The beginning of Avatar sets up a different movie than the ending. While character development is fairly minimal throughout the film, tonally it sets up a conflict between the environmental and the technocratic/capitalistic societies on the planet. More than anything, the beginning of the film has a critical tone about the military and the corporation. This is a set up for a different film than the one we see.

SPOILER ALERT

For the beginning of the film to work, it would have to have a downer ending. The piece would have to become a meditation on displaced cultures and refugees. At the second act break, where the big tree falls, we are set up to expect a different ending than the one we are given. This would be fine, except that the ending we get reeks of Deus Ex Machina. This makes the film ultimately very unsatisfying.

The most obvious reason for making this dramatic decision is the budget. A 500 million dollar movie will not be a downer. It has to maintain certain standards of commercial filmmaking in order to recoup its massive initial investment, which it has done as of this writing.

Obviously a movie like this requires a long first act in order to introduce a very complex new world and it’s large cast of fairly one-dimensional characters. What I don’t understand is, if Cameron knew he was going for the blockbuster ending, why he felt the need to paste on so much political humdrum, which could only have been served by a more character driven piece.

The other difficulty between the acts is that it is an adventure film. The adventure film is typically a genre of wish fulfillment and happy endings, partly why Cameron and Spielberg are such heavy hitters at the box office. Avatar fulfills the magical wish of success for the alien people, but it cheats in doing so. When the Hammerhead dinosaurs march in, I couldn’t help but think of the ending of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy.

At the end of the Lord of the Rings, a similar Deus Ex Machina falls into place; the ghost army. It is as if Tolkien realized that the odds against his heroes, necessary for producing maximum drama, were far to high to make a happy ending remotely believable. So he adds in the ghost army to give us the happy day. The same with Cameron’s Hammerhead Dinosaurs. You need them for the happy ending, but it cheapens the whole experience, because you know you’re being lied to, that what we’re seeing could not exist in this, or any other fictional world.

The ending is in the beginning in all good movies, which is why, for all of its visual splendor, Avatar falls short as a story.