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Away from the Hype: AVATAR

Away from the Hype: AVATAR

Away from the Hype: AVATAR

Sometimes, a movie is released and the hype/controversy surrounding it is too much for the movie to get out from underneath. Sometimes this means we sit down in the cinema with expectations and preconceived notions that we can’t escape.

Away from the Hype is an ongoing series looking at some of these movies years away from their initial release to see if, without all of the window dressing of hype, expectation, and controversy, the movies are actually any good or not.

The Invisible Movie

I saw Avatar at the cinema in South Korea, where I was teaching at the time. And it was a fun, cool movie. It was a bit long, and a bit muddled. It was derivative of other movies and was pretty predictable. However, the technical prowess on display was incredible, and it was good to see James Cameron back making movies after 12 years of focusing on producing and making documentaries.

In summary, it didn’t blow me away.

Away from the Hype: AVATAR
source: 20th Century Fox

It is an incredibly odd situation, in the sense that it became the biggest movie of all time and yet it has left no cultural footprint. Contrast it with the second most successful movie of all time, Titanic, and consider the fact that Titanic is still a legitimate reference today. “Draw me like one of your French girls”, “I’m the king of the world”, and the stirring strains of Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On” evoke very specific memories and feelings, and are still routinely parodied, meme’d, and referenced in TV and movies.

Avatar, however, has none of that. If anything the way Avatar is talked about now is either in relation to the fact it has no cultural capital or the endless speculation about its sequels and how many there will be, and if we actually want them.

Next year will mark 10 years since Avatar came out and tore up the box office, so it’s the perfect time to sit down with the movie again and see how it holds up away from the hype.

Avatar (2009)

Avatar, the most successful movie of all time (not adjusting for inflation), is a pretty good movie. It is not great. It is not terrible. It is perfectly fine. If it didn’t run close to three hours long (I watched the special edition which is 178 minutes), it would be a great piece of cinematic junk food. Instead, it is a long exercise in okay-ness.

Now, that is definitely damning with faint praise, and I do want to make it clear that this is not going to be a hatchet job for Avatar. I’m not going to come out here telling you its awful, or that it is a shameful indictment on our society that this movie was so popular upon its release because it isn’t. However, I also can’t tell you it’s worthy of its place in cinematic history as the movie that topped the worldwide box office charts from 2009 until it is eventually replaced (possibly by Avatar 2).

Away from the Hype: AVATAR
source: 20th Century Fox

I can say this though: the technology on display in this movie has not aged a day. CGI has reached insane levels in the past few decades and Avatar was heralded as a bold new step in filmmaking and motion capture, and it delivers. Prior to Avatar the two biggest motion capture characters had been Gollum and Jar Jar Binks, and while both were impressive they were also balanced out by being surrounded by human characters who carried the lion’s share of the dramatic work (though the scene of Gollum arguing with himself in The Two Towers should have won Andy Serkis an Oscar).

With Avatar, James Cameron made the bold step to have 60% of the entire movie spent with completely mo-capped characters who go through the full range of a love and war plotline. Crucially though, it never feels as though we’re watching an animated movie, and it is very easy to get lost in the story of these characters without realising you’re watching CGI creations. The problem lies in the fact that the story is not very good.

A lot has been said about the derivative nature of Avatar’s story as it follows a well-trodden path of previous white saviour and ‘gone native’ storylines. Pocahontas, Dances with Wolves, The Last Samurai, Fern Gully, etc. all covered similar ground so Avatar’s plot is predictable from the get-go. There is no doubt that Jake (Sam Worthington) is going to betray his military masters for the sake of his newfound tribe.

There is also no doubt that he will be their chosen one as soon as such a thing is even remotely alluded to. It almost feels as though Cameron was so eager to show off the technology and the special effects that he worried about his audience getting distracted by an engaging story.

Away from the Hype: AVATAR
source: 20th Century Fox

What is frustrating though is that there is an engaging story here, we’re just not following it. Zoe Saldana’s character, Neytiri, goes through an incredible journey in this movie but we spend all our time watching the human, so we miss it. Her character is destined to marry the tribal leader and become the tribe’s spiritual leader herself, something we never get to see if she’s happy about or not.

Then, a stranger wearing the body of one of her species shows up and she is tasked with teaching him how to better integrate himself with them. She falls in love with him only for him to betray them, which leads to enemy invaders destroying her home before the alien she loves reveals himself to be a sort of messiah figure who leads them to war against the invaders. This is much more engaging than the white man goes undercover with ‘savages’ and then becomes one of them/their messiah and leader plotline we’re given.

The other problem on display is that Cameron’s script doesn’t allow for subtle world-building. Sully’s outsider status to both Pandora and the other scientists means that a vast majority of the movie’s run-time and Worthington’s dialogue is dedicated to questions about the culture, the surroundings, the past, the future, the fauna, the meaning of their mission, etc. etc. etc. It becomes tiresome as the movie passes the hour and a half mark and we’re still being told things about the planet.

Away from the Hype: AVATAR
source: 20th Century Fox

Consider John Wick, Star Wars, and Mad Max: Fury Road, movies with huge differences to our world but they found a way to give us this information organically or by inference without the need for everything to grind to a halt every two minutes for a massive exposition dump. Cameron is so pleased with this world he’s created his script ends up sounding more like a Wikipedia article than a movie.

Final Thoughts

Even though Avatar is derivative and has been clearly and heavily influenced by other stories, it is an original movie. If you look at the table of all-time worldwide box office that Avatar sits at the top of, you have to go down to the 67th entry, Inception, before you find another live-action movie that isn’t a sequel, based on a true story, or a remake/reboot. This, the success of an original movie, shouldn’t be that much of an achievement but in 2018 where a majority of the movies that tear up the box office are sequels, spin-offs, reboots, remakes, re-imaginings, prequels, etc. it is quite incredible that the top of the pile is something that came directly out of James Cameron’s head and onto a script with nothing in between.

What is less of an achievement is that this original movie isn’t that original. As mentioned above, these ideas that we’re presented with aren’t brand new, and the white saviour vibes of Avatar are reductive and discomforting.

Overall, Avatar is an exasperating movie. It is a technical masterpiece that really pushed forward what mo-cap could do and gave us amazing creations like K-2SO, Caesar the ape, and Thanos, but the story is so lacking and predictable it doesn’t deserve re-watching or its lengthy run-time. Hopefully, Avatar 2 (and 3,4, and 5) put equal weight towards the story and the effects, to give us something truly magnificent.

Are you excited for the future of Avatar? Let us know in the comments below!

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