February 1, 2010: Avatar
At this point, Avatar has topped the world box office and effectively re-crowned James Cameron as the king of Hollywood. Lots has been written about it, and opinions differ. I had been wondering whether I would come up with an exhaustive analysis or more or less gloss over the film as the technical exercise that I heard it was.
James Cameron has been an A-list Hollywood director for a quarter of a century now, with early hits The Terminator (1984) and Aliens (1986) having cemented his bankability. From that point on, his career arc has leaned decidedly towards expansion of cinematic technology, and this is where even people who aren’t fans of him personally have to concede how much he has done for the industry. He pioneered realistic computer graphics effects in movies, with the aliens in The Abyss (1989) being a trial run leading up to the liquid metal robot in Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991). This crowning achievement was topped by Titanic in 1997, when he manufactured a 3/4 scale model of the Titanic and used groundbreaking computer graphics effects as well as innovative undersea exploration vessels (another of his passions) to bookend that epic film and bring it greater “depth”, if you will. Despite the passionate claims that Titanic is utter garbage, which in a storyline sense may be true, the technological advances are unmistakable and the combination of the accessible story and impressive effects catapulted it into the top (unadjusted) box office position of all time.
It’s been 12 years since then. What has Cameron been doing? Well, he’s pursued more of his underwater exploration, but he has also been working on this little movie called Avatar. He’s the kind of guy who when he realizes current film technology can’t bring his vision to light, takes that to mean he has no choice but to go out and invent it, while waiting for the computer hardware to catch up. In the process, he wrote a movie with a widely appealing story (typically described as boring or unchallenging), ran up a budget rumoured to approach $500 million (bringing the predictions that this would be the most expensive flop in history), and pushed movie technology in new directions by creating tools and techniques which can be used by others in the future to make their visions more compelling on the screen. If this sounds a LOT like Titanic, that’s because it is. And as before, the film has defied predictions and gone on to dominate the world box office.
So what is Avatar all about? What’s so great? Well, I’ve thought about this a bit, and I really do have to conclude that the presentation is the most compelling part of the film. I made sure to see this in an IMAX 3D presentation, the most immersive (and most expensive – helps those box office numbers!) way to see the film, and in my evaluation, I’ve found it useful to think about whether the exact same thing in a regular 2D 35mm print would have been as compelling or impressive. The story is fairly simple – mankind has used up the resources of the earth, and is attempting to pillage a foreign planet for what is buried beneath their soil. They attempt to negotiate with the native species by growing soulless bodies in the physical form of the native species, and using machines to allow humans to inhabit these bodies – their avatars in this new world. The native species has a humanoid form, and social customs which strongly resemble those of North American native tribes, hence the descriptions of this film as “Dances with Aliens”, with the story resembling that of Dances with Wolves (1990), in which Kevin Costner starred as a Civil war-era American military man who tried to ingratiate himself with the local tribes and ended up coming to understand their side of the fight and turning his back on his people to fight with the natives. That’s more or less what happens in Avatar, just with bigger trees and a lot more flying. The thinly-veiled hard-left political stance could easily be taken to suggest that the earthlings are Americans, and the foreign planet is any country the USA invades in a disingenuous attempt to control natural resources (Iraq and oil, anyone?).
The most significant technological advance here is in the motion capture equipment. The equipment worn by the actors allows computers to collect positioning data as actors move around, including special cameras capturing facial movements at the same time, and the motion can be mapped to the oddly-proportioned tall thin blue “people” in whose bodies they reside. This leads to unquestionably the most realistic movement of animated characters that I have ever seen in movies, which has always been a real sore spot for me. Running and jumping are very difficult to animate, for some reason, but here it’s spot on. The rich 3D landscape is impressive as well, but it’s nothing that couldn’t have been done before – this just happens to be one of the first movies to push digital 3D cinema beyond cartoons and horror.
It’s well known that James Cameron is a megalomaniac, and not paticularly pleasant to work with. Sigourney Weaver has returned to work with him again here, and he knows there are plenty of actors in Hollywood who are chomping at the bit for the experience, so he’s got nothing to worry about. His movies are undeniably and almost universally well-regarded. He’s in an Oscar battle this year with one of his ex-wives, director Kathryn Bigelow who brought us the much more introspective and awards-oriented The Hurt Locker, but Bigelow is going to be fighting an uphill battle for love from the Academy, despite the fact that story-wise, her film is clearly better. As I often claim with my technique of watching all Oscar nominees, the point is to see a bunch of movies which are considered good, and which ones actually win has plenty to do with politics and the sentiment of the day. Would I be happy to see Avatar in a scratchy 35mm distribution print? I’m not sure that I would.
James Cameron dominates again, with ease.
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