Alien assumptions

In depicting the emotions of natives of occupied territories, Avatar' did better than The Hurt Locker', but the latter won more Oscars and other awards.

RECENTLY I had the opportunity of seeing Avatar and The Hurt Locker one after the other, both contenders for a number of honours, including the Academy awards and the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) awards, given earlier this year.

Avatar's official budget was $237 million, but its actual cost, including the cost of promotion, is estimated to be between $430 million and $460 million. It was made in 2-D and in a new 3-D technique, which used the Real3D, Dolby 3D, XpanD 3D and IMAX 3D formats. These features gave viewers a totally new 3D experience that is different from the usual computer-generated images. The film became the highest grosser of all time, surpassing the record held for 11 years by Titanic, the first film to gross over $2 billion.

The Hurt Locker was made on a budget that was tiny compared with Avatar's, and it was not even released originally in the United States. It was released a year after it was made, which was why it was considered for the Academy awards this year. Interest was also whipped up by the fact that Avatar was made by James Cameron, who made Titanic, and The Hurt Locker was made by his former wife, Kathryn Bigelow, who was not known outside the U.S. except to a few film aficionados.

The Hurt Locker won six BAFTA awards, and then swept the Academy awards, winning six again, including those for Best Picture and Best Director. The mighty James Cameron won just three Academy awards for Cinematography, Visual Effects and Art Direction. A poor consolation prize indeed.

The excitement this generated had much to do with the feeling that a small budget film made by a relatively unknown director could take on a giant like Cameron and humble him. True quality was what counted, it was said triumphantly, not the glamour and glitz of futuristic effects and gimmickry.

When one saw the films, the assessment came as a bolt from the blue. All the assumptions one made had been upside down. The Hurt Locker, authentic though it is, is about an invading army in alien territory, where the natives, that is the aliens, are a shadowy and menacing presence seen from a distance. The brave, occupying soldiers fight and defuse bombs, shoot at these shadowy creatures and kill some of them, while they too get killed.

The film dwells on the tragedy of the deaths of the occupying soldiers, the grief of their comrades and their poignant last words. Not once, not even once, did it ever show any alien family, that is Iraqis in their own country, grieving over their dead. The only glimpse of something like that is when an American soldier bursts into a house screaming at the owner, asking him who stays there. The owner answers reasonably that he is a professor at the university, and asks the soldier to sit down. At that moment, the professor's wife bursts in and begins shouting at the soldier in Arabic and drives him out.

Apparently, one of their relatives had been killed by the Americans. But that was, the film assumes, collateral damage, and did not warrant the old woman's ranting. The point of the sequence is the American soldier being driven out of an Iraqi house, not the grief that was its cause.

Avatar, on the other hand, is its opposite. The occupiers are shown as an American corporation on a planet, which they have occupied by force, and from which they want a mineral. They are ready to eliminate the natives in order to get it.

Of course, Cameron has the inevitable white saviours who transfer their spirits into bodies that are like those of the natives and who eventually become a part of them and lead the fight to save the planet.

These saviours try to plead with the corporation bosses that the planet and its people are one organism, not in a fuzzy sentimental manner, but in advanced bio-engineering terms. Therefore, they advise caution, which is of course ignored. The local people, the aliens again, suffer dreadfully until the tables are turned and the occupying forces are forced to leave the place.

Where The Hurt Locker takes the barbaric occupation of Iraq as a given, and its people as figures who are a source of death to the occupying soldiers who would be unfashionably called freedom fighters in years gone by Avatar shows the American corporation, having brutally occupied the planet Pandora, preparing to eliminate, in cold blood, not only the inhabitants but also their most precious locations. It is Avatar that shows the terrible, helpless grief of the natives when their loved ones are killed by the occupying forces, not The Hurt Locker.

One can argue that the films were judged on merit. But clearly The Hurt Locker was directed in a clumsy manner, its script was jerky and included sequences that one felt were unnecessary. For instance, the British unit's encounter with the local resistance, in which it is wiped out. The local resistance is shown to be evil, and thus the deaths of the soldiers as pointlessly tragic.

In comparison, Avatar has been directed with far more skill, and the script put together with more care and thought.

What one is questioning really are the assumptions that are taken for granted in the West, where they profess to be more understanding of the horrifying injustice done to the people of Iraq by the liberating forces.

Sadly, there is just one word for these unstated assumptions colonialism. The native Iraqis are villains, the American bomb squad just ordinary human beings. And these assumptions blot out the actual truth, that Avatar is a much better film in terms of quality, content and assumptions than The Hurt Locker.

Never mind how much these films cost and all the rest of it. What won the films the awards were some shameful assumptions, not quality. One needs to apply only one test: Find out after a period of, say, five years, how many people still remember The Hurt Locker and how many remember Avatar. One needs to place The Hurt Locker beside Apocalypse Now and then decide if merit was indeed the criterion that decided the awards.