Retellings and Avatar

The idea that every story is a retelling of another story is something that this class has made me appreciate. Generally I graciously accept that most of my favorite stories are shameless ripoffs of another story. I'm OK with that idea, I've come to accept that thats how the world works.

For some reason however, James Cameron's Avatar drives me up the wall. The fact that the plot is so blatantly derivative of so many stories that came before it infuriates me. I'm not exactly sure why the movie makes me so angry. It might be that it has been so successful despite obviously taking a formulaic approach to story telling.

The move hits all of it's emotional cues, dazzles the viewer with a rich visual presentation, ham fistedly drives home its environmental message and delivers a happy ending. It's just like hundreds of other movies I've sat through in my movie viewing life. Yet I can't help feeling used when I walk out of the theater at the end of Avatar.

Maybe it's that I feel like a small cog in the giant machine that is Hollywood, where crappy scripts are fed in and money shoots out the other end, back into the hands of the bad script writers. The idea that a film maker feels that they can get around a bad story by just making it pretty to sit through goes against the spirit of storytelling. The world created by a film maker is an intergral part of the story they are telling, but when the visual elements become a crutch for a tired story the film becomes a failure in my book.

Storytelling through film has the advantage of creating a rich world for your story to take place in but I believe that a film maker is responsible for making sure that story is worth telling. James Cameron created a fantastic world for his story to take place in, he just told a crappy story.