Avatar and How We Consume or Fail to Consume a Movie

By Christopher Barr │POSTED ON JULY 09, 2015

Avatar was a visual spectacle that captured the hearts and minds of millions of people and then just went away.  Why?  Avatar was about a paraplegic former marine who was brought into negotiate the relocation of an alien species.  His twin brother died so he was asked to replace him as a Na’vi human hybrid called an “Avatar” in order to explore a forested habitable moon orbiting a massive planet composed mainly of gas.

It’s the year 2154 and Jake Sully is assigned to learn from the indigenous alien species, the Na’vi, learning their customs and beliefs about their world and their place in that world.  He is also covertly studying their infrastructure for a potential military attack on them.  Underneath their village exists a valuable mineral called Unobtanium that a militarized company called The Resources Development Administration, which Sully works for, wants badly. 

The Na’vi are these 10 feet tall, blue-skinned, sapient humanoids who live is this tranquil harmony, co-existing perfectly with their natural surroundings while worshipping a mother goddess they call Eywa.  The Avatar Program was set up to explore and adapt to Pandora’s biosphere.  Sully integrates himself as one of these Na’vi and falls for the female Na’vi, Neytiri that is assigned to initiate him to their society.  Sully falls in love with her and her people’s naturalistic way of life.

While Sully learns all these wonderful customs, the military plot an attack against them to get that mineral.  A war breaks out and Sully takes the side of nature and fights for the trees, the land and the people living there in harmony with it. 

Avatar is a cautionary tale about how we are killing our planet as we steam roll over ‘lesser people’ to get what resource we feel we want.  It’s about how the little man can fight back and win.  It’s an age-old story about good versus evil and for the most part has all but been forgotten.

Avatar is the most successful movie ever made but yet it never became a pop culture phenomena.  It grossed almost double than The Avengers, which is stapled firmly into the collective conscious of the pop culture population.  Iron Man, Captain America, Thor and the Hulk are everywhere.  They are on t-shirts, bumper stickers, tattoos, Coke bottles and are discussed in internet debates.  

Star Wars was the explosion that started most of what we identify as pop culture these days.  It might be from a galaxy far far away but here on earth, in the first world, we have anthropomorphized these aliens (yes Luke Skywalker and Han Solo would be classified as aliens) to exist with us in our 3 dimensional space.  We’ve made them tangible, we’ve reversed-engineered the virtual nature of their genesis, the movie screen.  We’ve invented Jedi religions and cosplayed them to death at comic-cons.  We so desperately wanted them to be real because what is real to us isn’t as exciting.

We 3-dimensionalized the Terminator, the Back to the Future series, Harry Potter and the Lord of the Rings but Avatar has been left with little to no cultural significance.  Unlike Avatar these other movies have become these everlasting cultural memes that have weaved themselves into the very fabric of modern first world society.

Avatar became a cultural sound bite of sorts.  It visually stunned people and captured their imagination like in a scene in the movie where a ship flies past floating mountains, but yet it was forgettable.  It can be blamed on all the 3D movies we are all subjected to today but what else has it done.  How can something be so enormously successful, more than anything else, and yet be all but forgotten?

Avatar wasn’t a horrible movie, it entertained and even had an environmental message, which was likely its gift but also its curse.  Environmental issues never happen in the Marvel universe, the Harry Potter universe, the Back to the Future universe, or the Lord of the Rings universe.  Our actual environmental plight on this planet is very real and is sadly being fought by very little.  Avatar attempted to juxtapose American environmentally unfriendly intervention on various nations around the world.  Most movie-goers lost that sentiment because they have been systematically trained to not process metaphor.  For them the crisis is fictional and sadly disposable after they leave the theater.

Philosophically the movie mildly explored the body and mind issue, Sully suffered from out of body fatigue.  He was loving being in the avatar and using his legs but was also losing parts of himself while in the avatar.  Falling in love and exploring this incredible world certainly didn’t help him reconcile with his virtual experience.  

In the end James Cameron, the movie’s director, achieved what he wanted.  His technology is now out in the world, his movie grossed just under 3 billion dollars worldwide, he’s the ‘king of the world’ again, but what of this legacy?  The question here is should we value something solely based on its pop culture significance and longevity?  Was Avatar a movie to be seen as a lesson to learn from or simply a bumper sticker throw-away meme?  Possibly more time will tell as all the sequels are released but for now the big question is 'do we really need anymore of these environmental lessons'?  I would think we absolutely do.

Terminator Genesys: Semiotics and the Reprogramming of Historical Meta-Narratives

By Christopher Barr │POSTED ON JULY 04, 2015

“Every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.”

– Walter Benjamin

There are some spoilers ahead.

Terminator Genesys is not a good movie.  In places it wasn’t bad but for the most part it failed to live up to the previous films, certainly the first two.  Instead of living up to them, Genesys decided to terminate them.  Especially the first Terminator movie where that time line got completely severed.  Arnold Schwarzenegger is back as the T-800, a cyborg infiltration unit: part man, part machine with a hyper-alloy combat chassis and microprocessor-controlled, with living human tissue on the outside.  He was sent back to 1973 to protect Sarah Conner from a T-1000 liquid metal unit that was sent to kill her.

A T-800 terminator is sent back to the year 1984 to kill Sarah Connor, the mother of the leader of the Resistance, John Connor, who leads the war against the machines in the year 2029.  In Genesys, John Connor along with Kyle Reese, his first in command, in the year 2029 set out to destroy Skynet’s new primary weapon, which they learn is a time machine.  The T-800 is sent back before the Resistance can reach the machine, so Kyle Reese is then sent back to protect Sarah Connor from the Terminator.  While Reese is in the magnetic field of the time machine, he envisions an alternative timeline where he sees warnings of events that take place in the year 2017.  Just before he disappears into the time machine he sees a soldier from the Resistance walk up behind John Connor and attack him.

The T-800 arrived back in 1984 as he did in the original Terminator movie but this time he is met by an older version of the T-800 sent back to protect Sarah, who was ‘old but not obsolete’.  They fought and the bad T-800 is terminated by Sarah Connor and thus adding a very telling postmodern meta-narrative to the already convoluted retelling of this story.  Here is where Genesys cuts the timeline from the original film.  Kyle Reese arrives in the alley and is chased by a police officer into the department store, much like the original, except here the cop is a T-1000 liquid metal terminator like the one in Terminator 2.  Reese is saved by a soldier-ready, combat-trained Sarah Connor. “Come with me if you want to live!” she shouts out to him rather than him shouting that out to her in the original.

On many levels this is off-putting.  Here Genesys pays zero respect to the original film and its existential material.  It rewrites the narrative of the story within the story and also, and more disturbingly, it attempts to rewrite our own narrative of the story as an audience member.  Here the movie is pushing at the ceiling of postmodernism, threatening to create yet another complication on how we store knowledge versus how we store data in the external world.  

Genesys suggests that knowledge in the external world is the only knowledge there is.  It also suggests that knowledge can be manipulated and changed anyway it sees fit.  This commodification of knowledge is what philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard warned us about in his 1979 book, The Postmodern Condition: A Report into Knowledge, where he summed up what he thought of the postmodern age and the ‘decision makers’ that are altering the narrative for their own means of profit.

“What is new in all of this is that the old poles of attraction represented by nation-states, parties, professions, institutions, and historical traditions are losing their attraction.” 

- Jean-Francois Lyotard

The Terminator was a masterful film following a vulnerable young woman that was thrown into this insane world of cyborgs and machine wars.  The film showed Sarah grow from a helpless girl to the mother of the leader of the Resistance.  She was forced to embrace her strength and fight back not only for herself but her future son.  The existential part of the film lies in its ever-impending dread.  Like George Romero’s zombies, the Terminator cannot be bargained with, it can’t be reasoned with, and it doesn’t feel remorse, pity or fear.  It’s a force that will not stop until she is dead.  It’s impervious to negotiations but in the case of this film, it’s postmodern because it’s a machine from the future.  It’s not only death coming but death by man-made technology.  It changes everything Sarah thought about the world, it throws into question her own existence.   

The semiotics of Terminator Genesys lost all this meaning and vanished into this shallow-surface, level terminator-coolness that it failed to even capture.  It also failed at having any life-force that the first two films had throughout.  Genesys didn’t make us care about anyone even though it exploded characters that we do care about nostalgically.  The Kyle Reese and Sarah Connor of this movie had no chemistry at all where in the original they had it throughout, you believed their love story where with Genesys it was Facebook-forgettable.

Terminator Genesys had actors playing characters that had less life in them then “Pops”, the T-800 older terminator that was sent back to protect Sarah.  These characters have impassive eyes like dolls or oddly enough, like terminators.  These new generation actors are social-media-friendly-disconnected-consumers that have not been brought up on human emotion like an Al Pacino or a Dustin Hoffman.  Genesys mentions how technology and our obedience to it will result in our eventual demise but simultaneously embraces it by celebrating the ‘Guardian’ terminator that saves Sarah and the future of mankind.

In the end, the ‘Genesys’ program, which is an app in the movie that allows consumers to consolidate their technology and thus allows Cyberdyne to take over the planet, is destroyed.  Kyle, who remains alive unlike the original, and Sarah remain in 2017 after time travelling there from 1984, where they await the next chapter of this convoluted story.  The movie had some okay action sequences but was ultimately a disappointment to the franchise.  It was a symbolic mess and as a result could very well be studied for years to come for its very post-postmodern reassignment of knowledge and its assignment of meaning.

“Increasingly, the central question is becoming who will have access to the information these machines must have in storage to guarantee that the right decisions are made.” 

- Jean-Francois Lyotard