As Avatar’s worldwide gross sky-rockets towards $2 billion, having already passed Titanic as the highest grossing movie of all-time (worldwide, although the all-time domestic record seems imminent), it seems hard to believe that the film was initially met with such hostile skepticism, the first trailer being derided—as the gentleman next to me in the theater at the time so charmingly put it—as a “f—— cartoon.” But now as James Cameron and company march toward the bank, picking up award after award on the way, the criticism has mostly died down, the public now declaring the film a revolutionary epic for our time, better even than Star Wars. Hollywood likewise has embraced it, seeing it as the savior of the movie industry, with Avatar’s end-of-the-year grosses pushing the total box office over the $10 billion mark, making 2009 Hollywood’s most profitable year ever (unadjusted for inflation, of course).
But, regardless of my thoughts on Avatar as a film (visually stunning, but ultimately unengaging), I find these declarations being lauded on the film to be a little hyperbolic to say the least. I mean, I understand that the new technology involved took ten years to make and has produced visuals that are, and probably will be for quite some time, unsurpassed, but how exactly is this changing the movie industry?
The technology was used to tell a very common, very traditional story, not asking any more of the audience than any other film. Champions of the film speak to the new level of immersion that the technology allows, with the “Performance Capture” technology allowing the viewer to feel closer to and more connected to something that clearly is not human. Yet, the level of feeling that I felt toward the Na’vi was not any greater than what I felt towards Gollum, the computer generated antagonist in The Lord of the Rings, or the CGI prawns in the year’s earlier sci-fi film District 9. It seems as if the marketing campaign is trying to substitute technological innovation for simple suspension of disbelief. I no more felt that I was on Pandora than I felt like I was on Tatooine or in Middle-Earth. Sure, it looked better, but hey, you get what you pay for.
I’ve even heard people claim that a story like the one that Avatar tells, one that insists upon the preservation of and communion with nature, is unlike anything to have been in a Hollywood blockbuster. To these people, I say: go see every other James Cameron movie. They are all about man’s futile desire to conquer nature and the repercussions that follow. It’s simply a mash-up of several other Hollywood films, from Dances with Wolves to Fern Gully, pulling perhaps every stereotypical character from film history (macho marine to exotic tribal princess) and smashing them all together as a vehicle to show off the visuals.
The fact is that Avatar was produced for $400 million (a figure that has been widely disputed, some claiming it was actually closer to $500 million before marketing) and made by a world-renowned, Academy Award winning filmmaker whose last film was the highest grossing film of all time. (It doesn’t seem like a technology that took 10 years to create and $400 million to utilize is going to be outsourced to other studios and filmmakers anytime soon. The majority of directors just don’t have the pull to do what Cameron did.) To me, it doesn’t seem so much like a gamble as it does business as usual: another high-profile event film made by a high profile director.
But perhaps Avatar is not revolutionary because it actually is, but because this is what people want the revolution to look like. Karen Hughes in the January 17th episode of Meet the Press observed, “I saw this morning in the newspaper--and don't take it from a Republican--there was a Democratic senator who said that the American people, when they voted for change, did not think they were voting for higher taxes, higher deficits, and much more government intrusion in their lives.” This seems like a startling fact to me, considering that President Obama emphasized every one of these points in his campaign profusely (although he didn’t specifically phrase that last one as “more government intrusion.”)/ Hughes’s point seems to be that people voted for the idea of “Change,” liking the way it sounded rhetorically, but once they actually witnessed change happening, they began to long for the familiar, the traditional.
Avatar gives the people this: a traditional, tried and true story wrapped up in the packaging of the future. It gives people the change they love to say they want without any of the, you know, actual change.
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