Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Avatar
2009 · James Cameron · Avatar on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch Jake's feet the first time he uses the avatar. (performance)
He ignores the scientists, swings off the gurney and runs on bare blue feet, toes digging into dirt. He has been paralyzed. The film hands him perception and motion back in one shot.
Payoff: The whole picture is organized around restoring the link between seeing something and being able to move on it. In the reading: the movement-image. The reading calls that link the movement-image: perception flowing into action, the circuit most modern films had given up on.
Compare the human base's color with the forest's. (light)
The installations are cool, hard and industrial. Pandora runs saturated green and teal by day and bioluminescent purple and blue at night. The two palettes never mix anywhere.
Payoff: The argument of the film is made in color well before any character states it out loud.
Look at how many layers of depth each shot holds. (camera)
Cameron built the stereo system for recession rather than for things thrown at you. Foliage, creatures and distance stack back into the frame, and the compositions stay readable as space.
Payoff: The spectacle is spatial. You are given room to stand in rather than images meant to startle you.
Listen to how crowded the forest sounds at night. (sound)
Insects, animals and vegetation are layered into one enveloping field. The human machinery clangs and whines against it. The two soundscapes are as opposed as the two palettes.
Payoff: You can hear which world the film wants you inside, and the mix keeps making the case for Pandora.
Count how long it takes before the fighting starts. (structure)
The first half is acclimatization: the clans, the home-tree, the banshee you have to bond with, the rules of the forest. Almost nothing urgent happens and the film is not in a hurry.
Payoff: The world has to be installed in you and felt as pressure before any act can be big enough to answer it. In the reading: the encompasser. The reading calls this the encompasser: a situation so total it has to be built up before one deed can change it.
Once you have seen it
Watch Neytiri's face during the quiet scenes. (performance)
Saldana wore a head-mounted camera and the facial data drove the character directly. The film's claim is that this is a performance rather than an animation, and her scenes are where you check it.
Payoff: The small expressions are the evidence. Nothing in the character reads as drawn rather than played.
Watch Quaritch move through the human compound. (staging)
Lang plays him as a near-archetype: no ambiguity, no hidden self, a combat knife and a jaw. He gets the exo-suit, and the film keeps giving him the widest frames on the human side.
Payoff: The whole mining operation gets condensed into one man so that it can be fought as a man. In the reading: binomial. The reading calls this a binomial: the encompassing situation given a body so that force can meet force directly.
Track how often the film shows things physically connected. (setting)
The queues, the roots, the bonds between rider and animal. Carter and Stromberg built Pandora as one networked organism, and the film keeps returning to the act of plugging in.
Payoff: The connectivity is set up as the world's architecture and then spent as a weapon in the last act.
Notice the small handheld drift inside fully digital shots. (camera)
Cameron framed Pandora through a virtual camera, a tracked monitor he could pan and push with by hand. The digital scenes carry the small imperfections of somebody operating a rig.
Payoff: The world feels observed rather than rendered, which is most of why it reads as a place at all.
Carry this in: Watch the first half build a world, so the second half has something big enough to answer.