Resurrection: The Way of CGI
The worst kind of storytelling is that in which characters come back to life non-ironically, refuse to die, or can’t be killed. In 2022’s Avatar: The Way of Water (i.e. Avatar II) the villain is the evil American/’Earth’ colonel who was killed in the first film. As a human, this character, ‘Miles Quaritch,’ looked exactly the same as ‘Major Chip Hazard,’ a toy from the 1998 film Small Soldiers (starring (as a non-toy) Phil Hartman, voice of Troy Mclure and Lionel Hutz, who later that year was shot by his wife “…once between the eyes, once in the throat and once in the upper chest” while she was on Zoloft). After Miles Quaritch is killed in Avatar I, his brain is downloaded and then uploaded into a blue basketball playing alien. Along with everyone else who died in Avatar I, he returns to fight the real Blues whose Spinozist religion allows them to recharge Iphones by plugging them into plants. These tribes are so at-one with their environment they don’t even mind that it’s PlayStation. This is the eco-utopian vision of a man who regularly gets into a toilet so that he can then look through a hole to see some seaweed and rocks. In Avatar II, the Earths are trying to invade the Blues so that Gwenyth Paltrow can extract gold juice from dead whale brains [when Gwenyth Paltrow hit Stalin’s car]. The main Earth General is played by Carmela Soprano. Building construction has been fully-automated by robot spiders but fishing still requires 19th Century Melvillian stereotype fishermen who dress like Robert De Niro in Cape Fear. Miles Quaritch(‘s brain uploaded into an alien) drowns in the ocean but is then brought back to life a second time by his son—the son of his downloaded brain, whose mother was a CGI rock—who is a white teenager with blonde dreadlocks dressed like George of the Jungle. Avatar III is out later this year, followed by Avatar IV in 2029, and Avatar V in 2031. The only good back-to-life story is the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Similarly to other plot twists (multiple personality disorder, identical twins etc.), sincere resurrection-in-flesh (not in spirit) could only be done once. The culture industry would be best off aspiring to a kind of Jacobean tragedy in the register of Sarah Kane, where not only do all characters die, but the writer also has to kill themselves at the end.