H.G. Wells Reviews Cameron’s AVATAR

John C. Wright has unearthed a 1927 NY Times review of Metropolis by H. G. Wells (apparently originally produced by Don Brockway in 2002) which you can see here. My original link comes via SFSignal’s tidbits of the day.

I read that review from top to bottom and couldn’t help but laugh at how similar it sounded to some of my rantings about Cameron’s Avatar – not the least of which was Well’s claims of theft from contemporary or near contemporary works (himself and Shelly among them).

Then I thought – man, I wish Wells had been around to say a thing or two about Avatar.

Then I realized – he could!

Here then is my (slightly edited) presentation of Herbert George Wells’ review of James Cameron’s Avatar. I hope the members of the Motion Picture Academy of America get a chance to read if before casting their votes!

(If you can, place the original side by side with this one as you work through it.)

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I have recently seen the silliest film.

I do not believe it would be possible to make one sillier.

And as this film sets out to display the way the world is going,
I think [my book] The Way the World is Going may very well concern itself with this film.

It is called Avatar, it comes from the great 20th Century Fox Film studios in California, and the public is given to understand that it has been produced at enormous cost.

It gives in one eddying concentration almost every possible foolishness, cliche, platitude, and muddlement about scientific progress and progress in general served up with a sauce of sentimentality that is all its own.

It is a Cameron film and there have been some amazingly good Cameron films, before they began to cultivate bad work under cover of a protective quota. And this film has been adapted to the Anglo-Saxon taste, and quite possibly it has suffered in the process, but even when every allowance has been made for that, there remains enough to convince the intelligent observer that most of its silliness must be fundamental.

Possibly I dislike this soupy whirlpool none the less because I find decaying fragments of my own and others  work of many years ago, Call Me Joe, Deathworld, Noon Universe, floating about in it.

Harrison’s planet-wide collective has been lifted without apology, and that biological monster of Anderson’s, breeds once more in this confusion.

Originality there is none. Independent thought, none.

Where nobody has imagined for them the author has simply fallen back on contemporary things.

The aeroplanes that wander about above the great jungle show no advance on contemporary types, though all that stuff could have been livened up immensely with a few helicopters and vertical or unexpected movements.

The walkers are 1926 models or earlier. I do not think there is a single new idea, a single instance of artistic creation or even intelligent anticipation, from first to last in the whole pretentious stew; I may have missed some point of novelty, but I doubt it; and this, though it must bore the intelligent man in the audience, makes the film all the more convenient as a gauge of the circle of ideas, the mentality, from which it has proceeded.

The word Avatar, says the advertisement in English, ‘is in itself symbolic of greatness’- which only shows us how wise it is to consult a dictionary before making assertions about the meaning of words.

Probably it was the adapter who made that shot. The German ‘Neubabelsburg’ was better, and could have been rendered ‘New Babel’. It is a planet, we are told, of ‘about one hundred years hence.’ It is represented as being enormously dense; and all the air and happiness are above and the natives live, as the servile toilers in the blue uniform in The Sleeper Awakes lived, down, down, down below.

Now far away in the dear old 1897 it may have been excusable to symbolize social relations in this way, but that was more than thirty years ago, and a lot of thinking and some experience intervene.

Those floating mountains we know now are, to put it mildly, highly improbable. Even in the Pandoran system, where unobtanium is available in exceptionally great quantity, it is only a small region that soars and excavates. The pressures that lead to the utmost exploitation of the planet also to the driving out of nature and indigenous lifeforms.

But its form is the least part of its staleness. This great conflict is supposed to be evoked by a single dominating personality. The English version calls him Jake Sully, so that there may be no mistake about his quality.  He works with a scientist, one Grace Augustine, and they make biological machines. There are a certain number of other people, and the ’sons of the military-industrial complex’ are seen disporting themselves, with underclad ladies in a sort of joy conservatory, rather like the ‘winter garden’ of an enterprising 1890 hotel during an orgy. The native population is in a state of abject slavery.

A young woman appears from nowhere in particular to ‘help’ Sully; she impinges upon him, and they go to the ‘jungle,’ which, in spite of the six-legged wolves, giant rhinoceri, snakes, and luminescent vegetation, have somehow contrived to get over from the human base, skeletons and all, and burrow under the home tree. She conducts a sort of Christian worship in these unaccountable caverns, and the natives love and trust her. With a nice sense of fitness she lights herself about the jungle with a torch instead of the electric lamps that are now so common.

That reversion to torches is quite typical of the spirit of this show. Torches are Christian, we are asked to suppose; torches are human. Torches have hearts. But electric hand-lamps are wicked, mechanical, heartless things. The bad, bad inventor uses quite a big one. Neytiri’s services are unsectarian, rather like afternoon Sunday-school, and in her special jungle she has not so much an altar as a kind of umbrella-stand full of crosses. The leading idea of her religion seems to be a disapproval of machinery and efficiency. She enforces the great moral lesson that the bolder and stouter human effort becomes, the more spiteful Heaven grows, by reciting the story of Babel. The story of Babel, as we know, is a lesson against ‘Pride.’ It teaches the human soul to grovel. It inculcates the duty of incompetence. The Tower of Babel was built, it seems, by bald-headed men. I said there was no original touch in the film, but this last seems to be a real invention. You see the bald-headed men building Babel. Myriads of them. Why they are bald is inexplicable. It is not even meant to be funny, and it isn’t funny; it is just another touch of silliness. The natives of Pandora are not to rebel or do anything for themselves, she teaches, because they may rely on the vindictiveness of the TREE.

But Augustine, the scientist, is making an Avatar, apparently without any license from Anderson, the original patentee. It is to look and work like a Navi, but it is to have no ’soul.’ It is to be a substitute for drudge labour. Sully very properly suggests that it should never have a soul, and for the life of me I cannot see why it should. The whole aim of mechanical civilization is to eliminate the drudge and the drudge soul. But this is evidently regarded as very dreadful and impressive by the producers, who are all on the side of soul and love and suchlike. I am surprised they do not pine for souls in the alarm clocks and runabouts. Sully, still unwilling to leave bad alone, persuades Augustine to join him among the Navi, so that they may raise an insurrection among the natives to destroy the human invaders.  Rather intricate that, but Sully, you understand, is a rare devil of a man. Full of pride and efficiency and modernity – all those horrid things.

Never for a moment does one believe any of this foolish story; for a moment is there anything amusing or convincing in its dreary series of strained events. It is immensely and strangely dull. It is not even to be laughed at. There is not one good-looking nor sympathetic nor funny personality in the cast; there is, indeed, no scope at all for looking well or acting like a rational creature amid these mindless, imitative absurdities. The film’s air of having something grave and wonderful to say is transparent pretence. It has nothing to do with any social or moral issue before the world or with any that can ever conceivably arise. It is bunkum and poor and thin even as bunkum. I am astonished at the toleration shown it by quite a number of film critics on both sides of the Atlantic. And it costs, says the London Times, six million marks! How they spent all that upon it I cannot imagine. Most of the effects could have been got with models at no great expense.

The pity of it is that this unimaginative, incoherent, sentimentalizing, and make-believe film, wastes some very fine possibilities. My belief in Cameron has had a shock. I am dismayed by the intellectual laziness it betrays. It is profoundly interesting to speculate upon the present trend of special effects and of the reactions of invention upon the audience. Instead of plagiarizing from a book thirty years old and resuscitating the banal moralizing of the early Victorian period, it would have been almost as easy, no more costly, and far more interesting to have taken some pains to gather the opinions of a few bright young research students and ambitious, modernizing architects and engineers about the trend of modern invention, and develop these artistically. Any technical school would have been delighted to supply sketches and suggestions for the aviation and transport of A.D. 2027. There are now masses of literature upon the organization of labour for efficiency that could have been boiled down at a very small cost. The question of the development of industrial control, the relation of industrial to political direction, the way all that is going, is of the liveliest current interest. After the worst traditions of the cinema world, monstrously self-satisfied and self-sufficient, convinced of the power of loud advertisement to put things over with the public, and with no fear of searching criticism in their minds, no consciousness of thought and knowledge beyond their ken, they set to work in their huge studio to produce furlong after furlong of this ignorant, old-fashioned balderdash, and ruin the market for any better film along these lines.

Six million marks! The waste of it!

The theatre when I visited it was crowded. All but the highest-priced seats were full, and the gaps in these filled up reluctantly but completely before the great film began. I suppose every one had come to see what the world of a hundred years hence would be like. I suppose there are multitudes of people to be ‘drawn’ by promising to show them what the world of a hundred years hence will be like. It was, I thought, an unresponsive audience, and I heard no comments. I could not tell from their bearing whether they believed that Avatar was really a possible forecast or no. I do not know whether they thought that the film was hopelessly silly or the future of mankind hopelessly silly. But it must have been one thing or the other.