Avatar, a strange dream that became the biggest movie of all time
Image: Graphic: Karl Gustafson Film Features Avatar
James Cameron (FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP); Avatar (Disney+)
It’s been more than a decade since a wholly original film was the biggest hit of its year. All our reigning blockbusters since 2009's Avatar have been sequels or adaptations or sequels to adaptations. The military biopic American Sniper, the biggest hit of 2014, could be considered an exception, but it was based on a widely read memoir, and it was about a real-life famous person. Avatar was something else: a wholly original story, with wholly original characters, written just for the screen. Movies like that simply don’t become huge hits anymore.
With that in mind, it’s possible to look at Avatar as the last relic of an era when original movies could dominate—but that’s not right, either. To find another original film that was the biggest hit of its year, you’d have to go all the way back to 1998's Saving Private Ryan, 11 years earlier. In the past 22 years, Avatar has been the only one. That means studios have been keeping the lights on by giving us familiar sights for more than two decades. And it means James Cameron’s Avatar is an aberration, a world-historic fluke.
Cameron has said that he got the idea for his 1984 breakout The Terminator from a fever dream that he had while working on Piranha II: The Spawning. While sleeping, he’d conjured the image of a gleaming robotic skeleton rising from flames. The central image of Avatar also came from a dream, one Cameron’s mother recounted to him of a 12-foot-tall blue woman. He kept that image with him for decades, and he eventually turned it into the highest-grossing movie in history.
Cameron has made sequels, and he’s liberally peppered his movies with visual echoes of other ones. But if those two stories are true, then the director’s best source for intellectual property isn’t comic books or young adult literature or even the sci-fi paperbacks that he so obviously loves. It’s the unconscious mind.
Avatar could only exist because Cameron had already made the highest-grossing movie in the history of the world. He’d started writing Avatar before he finished 1997's Titanic, and his initial plan was to make Avatar in time for a 1999 release. When he started working on it, though, he found that the special effects of the day weren’t good enough. Rather than filing the idea away and getting to work on something else, Cameron made a couple of passion-project undersea documentaries, and started helping to make the tech that he’d need to make Avatar possible. He invested millions of his own money, for instance, on developing a new 3D camera. Avatar, then, is a product of one man’s obsessive laser-focus and artistic megalomania. He wouldn’t let his idea go.
Even after Titanic did what Titanic did, 20th Century Fox was nervous about investing hundreds of millions of dollars into a movie as bugshit as Avatar. You can see why they might’ve been nervous, even with Cameron’s track record. Avatar, after all, is a Dances With Wolves riff about giant blue shamanistic aliens on a magical psychedelic forest moon and the humans who go to war against them to mine something called unobtanium. There is no easy elevator pitch for this movie. Cameron has said Fox outright passed on the film mid-development and that it wasn’t until he showed his concept art to Disney that Fox blinked and exercised its right of first refusal. Ultimately, the Fox executives found outside financing to cover half of the budget. A James Cameron vision was still a risk.
If any filmmaker other than Cameron had made Avatar, the movie would’ve been unwatchable. He was working with the same CGI as every other director in 2009, and if you hold Avatar up next to something like Michael Bay’s Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen, the year’s No. 2 hit, the difference is stark. Cameron, once a special-effects artist himself, did everything in his power to make his movie an immersive experience. He brought in a linguist to invent a whole new language for the Na’vi, his blue aliens. His set designers came up with whole new flora and fauna for the world of Pandora, as well as whole new technology for the human invaders to use. You don’t have to know about all the extra stuff to enjoy the movie. You can just sense that people worked to make this look right—to ensure that the film would not just barrage you with two hours of herky-jerk CGI chaos.
Cameron is also a populist cornball entertainer, and that side of him is on full display throughout Avatar. The film’s hero is a blandly handsome lantern-jaw military type and its saintly and idealized natives are stock characters, echoes of the supporting cast of every white-savior myth in the trope’s history. The villains are a smarmy, sneering corporate exec and a mean, scarred-up military bastard who looks like a video-game character. Sigourney Weaver plays a Sigourney Weaver type. Michelle Rodriguez plays a Michelle Rodriguez type. Every plot development is predictable. Every character is an archetype. This is not a complaint.
Cameron speaks the language of blockbuster cinema better than any filmmaker this side of Spielberg. He knows how to manipulate you. He knows how to make you feel the thrill of adapting yourself to this alien planet, the frustration of watching your bosses destroy the world, and the righteous anger that might make you want to lead a revolution. In Avatar, Cameron casts a group of actors—Weaver, Rodriguez, Giovanni Ribisi, Stephen Lang—who know exactly what movie they’re in. The film’s broad silliness is not an accident.
Sam Worthington, the film’s lead, was a total unknown when Cameron cast him, and he’s the movie’s greatest flaw, the void at the center of everything. For one thing, he never quite manages to shed his Australian accent. Worthington also can’t hold the screen like Cameron’s other heroes, like Weaver or Schwarzenegger or DiCaprio. But I think that’s intentional on the director’s part. Worthington’s Jake Sully is a blank—an empty glass waiting to be filled. He’s the audience surrogate, so he doesn’t really need to have too much personality. He just has to feel things.
There’s something fundamentally silly about the Na’vi, the blue-skinned and cat-eyed aliens with whom Sully gradually ingratiates himself. After all, these are azure giants who use intertwined braids to fuck and to ride dragons. They’re funny. But Cameron depicts the Na’vi with total sincerity. To him, they’re not a joke. It’s a little gross that many of the people of color in the cast—Zoe Saldana, Wes Studi, CCH Pounder—are forced to put on motion-capture suits and appear on screen only as blue giants. But the director is trying to make a point here. He casts people of color as the Na’vi because you’re supposed to think of them as people of color. Avatar is a movie about, among other things, colonialism and rapacious capitalism.
Looking back through Cameron’s filmography, virtually all of his heroes are working-class people: a waitress, a power-loader operator, a drifter. He even depicts the scientists of The Abyss like they’re oil-rig workers. The villains, meanwhile, are slimy corporate types who value profit over life, or they’re the robots that these slimy corporate types accidentally empower. Avatar has its obvious and hamfisted environmentalist themes, and it’s also a dire warning of what happens when militaristic nation states and vampiric corporations work together.
The movie’s soldiers are canonically ex-military, but they’re all Americans, and Cameron layers on the imagery of occupying forces and profit-motivated wars. The destruction of the HomeTree looks an awful lot like 9/11, but the people committing the acts of terrorism are American troops. Those military forces speak of a “shock and awe campaign.” Stephen Lang’s Colonel Miles Quaritch indulges in Bush-era hawk jargon: “Our only line of security lies in preemptive attack. We will fight terror with terror.” The big companies and the soldiers backing them up are the unambiguous villains, and only a few of those soldiers have enough empathy to figure out that what they’re doing is wrong. By the end, nature itself declares war on these invaders, as Pandora’s hammerhead rhinos and tiger-bug monsters join the fight.
Avatar is an unapologetic work of pastiche, from the prog-album-cover vistas of the Pandoran forest to the Miyazaki-style worship of nature. Certain influences are all too obvious. The moment where the Na’vi tribes gather is pure Lord Of The Rings, while the forest battles echo the Endor scenes from Return Of The Jedi. Sigourney Weaver’s presence only underlines how similar the military characters are to the ones that the director had already used in Aliens. The movie’s hacky parts—the clumsy narration, the stilted dialogue, the tree-worship bits where the hordes of Na’vi look like audience members in a Guitar Hero game—play into that sense of pastiche. For that matter, so does the white-savior stuff; the film exists in a long line of movies about white guys who immediately become the most awesome people in the societies that adopt them. Those are the reasons why Avatar is embarrassing, why the movie is such an easy snark target.
And yet Avatar fucking stomps. The movie is nearly three hours long, but it moves. Within 15 minutes, Sully is in the Na’vi body. Before the first hour is over, he’s riding banshees. Things slow down for the scenes about spiritual interconnection with trees, but even those don’t derail the narrative momentum. The film’s final battle is a long, elaborate masterpiece of action cinema. It’s fast and mean and exciting, and it’s about a million times more coherent than the substantively similar CGI giant-robot explosion-fests that Michael Bay was making at the same time.
Avatar also looks amazing. 3D movies started coming back before it arrived, but the film supercharged the trend. To watch Avatar at home is to behold a distant echo of the stoner phantasmagoria that Cameron put together for the theatrical release. Going to see the movie felt like an event. My daughter was born in 2009, so that’s the year I suddenly became one of those people who only makes it out to the theater three or four times a year. Clearing out the time necessary to see the movie with my wife felt like a big deal, but it also felt totally necessary. I walked out of that theater numb with adrenal fatigue. After months of no movies, Cameron had grabbed me by the back of the neck and heaved me into one.
Avatar certainly owed a certain amount of its huge box-office haul to the novelty of the immersive 3D experience. It’s tempting, I think, to look at the movie as something like a 21st-century version of Cinerama Holiday, the new-filmmaking-technology demonstration that became 1955's highest-grossing movie. But Avatar succeeds on a level beyond the sensational. It’s an elemental story, told well. The whole visual experience mattered to its success, but so did that story. Shortly afterward, other studios rushed their own 3D experiments into production. A few months into 2010, Disney had a monster blockbuster with Tim Burton’s near-unwatchable Alice In Wonderland adaptation, and that success came down almost entirely to the way the Mouse House pushed the whole immersive-3D-world story. Alice In Wonderland became the second-biggest hit of 2010, and that only happened because of Avatar.
It’s wild to consider just how much money Avatar made in its day. After a big opening weekend, the movie barely dropped in the weeks that followed. It made a billion dollars within three weeks, and it reached two billion, a number that no movie had ever touched, in a little more than a month. Avatar did ridiculous numbers around the globe, and it reigned for more than a decade as the highest-grossing film in history, dethroning Cameron’s own Titanic. Inflated prices for 3D and IMAX screenings helped juice Avatar’s box office, but a whole lot of other movies have had those 3D prices, too, and they haven’t beat it.
In 2019, something finally bested Avatar. Avengers: Endgame—another movie where Zoe Saldana plays an alien with a florescent skin color—skated past the all-time box office record. But it didn’t hold that record for long. Last month, with Chinese theatrical business once again booming, Disney re-released Avatar in 3D in China. That reissue brought in another $21 million, and now Avatar once again reigns as the highest-grossing film in the history of the global box office. Since Disney now owns both Endgame and Avatar, this amounts to one corporation big-dogging itself, sort of like that Kanye West/50 Cent release date battle when both of them were signed to Universal. Still, it’s a sign that Avatar has never quite disappeared. People are still willing to pay for that experience.
Avatar was a wild success on a lot of levels, but it was a failure on another: It didn’t change the world. A couple of weeks ago, former presidential candidate Marianne Williamson interviewed Cameron on her podcast, and they spent a lot of time discussing the movie’s spiritual underpinnings and environmental messaging. Toward the end of the podcast, Cameron laughs sadly and says, “It didn’t work.” Hundreds of millions of people had seen his film, and it had done nothing to slow down the cancer of corporate greed. Cameron knows that this was not a realistic goal: “Not that any film can do anything on its own. It has to be a kind of slow evolution of the zeitgeist.” But Cameron tried. Avatar is the product of someone who sincerely wanted to speed up that evolution.
In recent years, it’s become popular to talk about Avatar as the disappearing blockbuster—the film that made a ton of money and then vanished completely from culture. That’s not entirely accurate. The Chinese reissue showed that it’s still a draw. There’s a whole Disney World mini-park dedicated to replicating that Avatar ambience, with the giant floating mountains and the people walking around in mech suits and everything. But in sacrificing characters for spectacle and messaging and world-building—and in not having the advantage of whole comic-book cosmologies to draw on—Avatar hasn’t kept its hold on people’s imaginations in the ways that some other blockbusters have done. That might change, though. In a year and a half, we will supposedly see the first of four planned sequels, all directed by Cameron. I’ve heard people asking why this is happening—who asked for more Avatar? But the last two sequels that James Cameron made were Aliens and Terminator 2: Judgment Day. The man knows what he’s doing. Let him cook.
The runner-up: Pete Docter’s Up, 2009's No. 5 movie, might represent the moment that Pixar stopped making movies for kids and started making movies for emotional adults that kids could also watch. The early montage of a married couple’s relationship over the years reduced grown people to blubbering snot-piles, and Up deserves respect for that alone. But everything that follows is great, too—a fun, absurdist adventure with a never-ending supply of jokes. Up has talking dogs, and it also has total respect for its characters. It’s got range.
Next time: Toy Story 3—one of the all-time great animated films, and maybe the best thing that Pixar has ever done—uses generationally beloved characters as vehicles for a whole lot of people to feel a whole lot of things.
361 Comments
Just about every insult, joke and critique of Avatar has been said enough times to climb mount Everest. So I’ll just say, man Up is a fantastic movie but the 80ish minutes after the beginning doesn’t get enough respect. Its both breezy and heavy at the same time. I know everyone loves the beginning, lord I do a lot, but its easy to forget how solid eveything else is. The Academy Awards almost added a best voice acting category because of Ed Asners preformance. I wish they had. Would have been a for more deserving category then best popular film they tried to crowbar in last time.
Although the timeline of the movie is a little wonky. I mean, presumably the main movie is happening in the modern day of 2009. But the villain Charles Muntz is supposed to be basically a fictionalized Charles Lindbergh who went full on supervillain. So how old is Fredericksen and Muntz? Over 100?
In 2009, Charles Lindbergh would have been 89 years old. Carl would have to be quite a bit younger to have idolized Muntz when he was a kid, but there’s still room there for both of them to be crotchety old men at the same time.
Nevermind, I completely fucked up a google search. He’d have been 107. By all rights he should have dropped dead from the exertion of saying hello to Carl.
Yeah I figured Carl was in his 70’s, Muntz a robust 90’s, and since he had talking dogs he also probably had good medicine to slow his aging.
If you can invent a dog translator that even gives each dog his own funny cartoon voice, then a potion that slows aging isn’t that out of the question.
Nothing about Up would indicate that it wasn’t set in the early 2000s or late 90s. Other than Russell’s GPS there isn’t even a sniff of modern technology (the dog translators were clearly custom work by Muntz)
Up also spawned what I think is Pixar’s masterpiece in short animation, Doug’s Special Mission. I still laugh almost everytime I see it… heck, I’m almost laughing just thinking of Alpha shouting “I will be getting you, DOUG!”.
Somehow the film’s best joke went over my head for years: I didn’t realise until the other week that the dog in Up is literally an Up-dog.
What’s Up-dog?
GOTCHA!!!!!
It really is a shame they haven’t added any categories for voice acting. There’s some great performances that merit the recognition but there’s no way the academy would nominate them as best actor/actress.
There was talk of adding that as a category in the early 2000s after Andy Serkis in the Lord of the Rings movies & Ellen DeGeneres in Finding Nemo were getting buzz for the regular acting nominations.
After two decades, two decades packed with sublime voice performances, we still don’t seem any closer to having those categories.*Cues the Shame Nun*
I could name dozens of performances worthy of an award. Hell I know a couple people who probably deserved it, most voice actors are really nice. Shame.
The Academy Awards almost added a best voice acting category because of Ed Asners preformance. Ed’s not going to forget that they didn’t.
Nor should he.
The beginning sequence is great with Carl and Ellie, but I’m just as fond of the “thanks for the adventure” photo album from later in the movie.
So, why didn’t they adopt, again?
How could they know that the adopted child would share their enthusiasm for Paradise Falls? That shit’s in the blood.
Personally I’ve always been lukewarm on Up. The opening sequence deserves all the praise it receives, but it’s always felt like an awkward fit alongside the rest of the movie. Not many movies can stand toe to toe with Wall-E, the Incredibles, or Toy Story 2. But I’d put Up a rung below Inside Out, Finding Nemo, and Toy Story 3.
Your rankings are intriguing and I’d like to subscribe to your newsletter. Not because I agree with you, because everything you said up there is bonkers, but because I’d like to understand your reasoning.
I agree. I think it’s half of a great movie. Once they get to the
Falls and particularly once the villain shoes up, it veers too much into
crazy, violent territory for me. I’ve seen it plenty (because of my kids) and I
still can’t get on its wavelength for the latter part of the movie.
I looove that movie. To me, the introduction of the dogs pursuing Doug is the funniest scene in any Pixar film to date.
I enjoyed the hell out of Avatar. I did. It was exactly the 3D stoner spectacle that every stoner willing to shell out 10 bucks plus in 2009 was looking for. But if you actually think it’s a better movie than Pete Docter’s Up, I don’t wanna know y— oh, wait. Nobody on god’s green earth thinks Avatar is a better movie than Up.
My girlfriend, at the time, died a few months before Up was released (and, in fact, died in front of me). I went to the theater to get out of the house because I was depressed. Now imagine that first 20 minutes and someone in my state of mind at that time. It was soul crushing.
Oh my god I’m so sorry. That’s like when my dad’s father died and he went to see Big Fish to help cope with the loss. My condolences.
It has been a while and I am happily remarried now. But that was an experience I would not wish on anyone. She died of a heart attack and was in my apartment dancing and laughing just minutes before. So I was kind of numb for months and would just sit there staring at nothing until I fell asleep (or even at work). I went and saw “Up” because I knew I needed to get out of the house. Then that opening scene of a love lost and I am not sure how I made it through the rest of the movie.But that was over a decade ago. The good memories have resurfaced and they crowd out the bad ones.
Man that’s rough. Closest I have was my mother dying in front of me but it was cancer. In some respects a quick death is more painful. No time to say goodbye. Glad your okay now. The Pixar movie that came out for me the year of her death was Coco. Also not a fun watch in those circumstances.
Holy fuck.
I thought it was a downright mess tbh.
I wish that I felt the same, but the moment the blimp burped out those biplanes piloted by Muntz’s dogs I was done. For me, “Up” is a perfect example of story that should have remained as a short. Nothing that happened after that opening could hold a candle to the emotional impact I felt. It’s like the film started with its climax and the next 80 minutes were a very long refractory period.
There’s a whole Disney World mini-park dedicated to replicating that Avatar ambience, with the giant floating mountains and the people walking around in mech suits and everything.Fun Fact: The land Pandora: World of Avatar sits on was originally supposed to be a fantasy-themed Land called Beastly Kingdom. See, the premise of Disney’s Animal Kingdom with its conception was that it was supposed to be themes to the animals of today (i.e. the zoo), yesterday (dinosaurs), and fantasy (dragons, unicorns, etc.). Trouble was the animals were expensive so Disney only had enough money to fund two of the three themed lands. So Dinoland USA, the Dinosaur-themed area, was chosen because they were making the movie Dinosaur and wanted some synergy. So Beastly Kingdom was put on hold for a later expansion and the area that it was supposed to go was used for a petting zoo and character meet and greet.Than a bunch of former Imagineers who were working on Beastly Kingdom got layed off and went to work for Universal where they re-used the concepts for Beastly Kingdom to make Islands of Adventure. After that Beastly Kingdom was basically scrapped.This video goes into detail on Beastly Kingdom.
Yesterworld and the well-produced Defunctland are goldmines for tales of the failed/abandoned in theme park history.
I was watching Defunctland last night. This is my favorite video, both for the AD parody and just the “what the hell wa was Eisner thinking” aspect of this “ride”.
Superstar Limo, as a concept, just screamed “Hey, we know you imagineers do alot of great work…buuuut the big guy has an idea for a ride and he thinks it’s really what common people want.”If the ride had caught on, maybe it could have lead to an interactive experience where you get to feel the celebrity power of firing an intern for getting your coffee order wrong.
The gift shop would be packed to the gills with Goop products!
“We want this to be hella bougie, but also hella relatable.”
What the hell was Eisner thinking is a fun game to play because its almost endless!
My family and I had a Disney trip just before Covid (and I mean just before). We’d been to Animal Kingdom four years prior, so the Avatar area wasn’t up and running, but it was this time. The outdoor area is reasonably interesting to look at, and the floating mountains are genuinely cool. The River Ride is fairly boring, although my goodness have animatronics come a long way, but the Flight of the Na’vi ride (I forget the exact name offhand) is fantastic.
The point of this is to say that of the areas at Animal Kingdom, the Dinosaur area is by leaps and bounds the least interesting now, although it’s also more geared toward the youngest kids, so it has its place.
I’d always heard that the Dino area was supposed to be temporary. If only that had been true. It’s such a come-down from the rest of the park. I have young kids and even we barely spend time there.
Yeah, the first time we were there, with 4 and 6 year olds, they had some fun, but this time with them being 8 and 10 even they admitted there wasn’t much. Didn’t help that the semi-interesting little coaster in there happened to be down for maintenance that day. Luckily, the rest of the park was great, so we didn’t need to waste more time in Dinosaurland.
Yeah Dinoland USA, from what I’ve heard from Theme Park YouTube, was a symptom of the Late-Eisner Era’s aversion to risk. EuroDisney had been a flop and Frank Wells was dead. Eisner basically just stopped caring about really big risky ideas and just did what was safe and cheap. Hence why, on opening, Animal Kingdom only had like four major attractions, two of which were technically just transportation.
I don’t recall this being in the movie, at the very least it wasn’t in the theatrical cut as far as I remember, but I remember everyone joking about Jake and Natyri (Forgot how to pronounce Zoe Saldana’s character’s name.) supposedly have sex by connecting their Na’vi tails. Which, because the Na’vi use their tails to commune with their god and the wildlife of Pandora, implied that the Na’vi really enjoy Pandora…It’s just weird that this joke came to existence and I cannot for the life of me recall it being in the movie. As far as I remember, they just fade to black when they have sex in the theatrical cut.
No, they really do connect their Na’vi tales in the movie. But I don’t think that is really how they have sex. I think connecting the tails is kind of like a Vulcan mind meld and is a a sign of love (as what better way to show your love than to share your thoughts), but given the shape of Na’vi bodies the unseen sex is basically like the human kind.
They are literally and near-visibly having sex in the expected manner as well during that scene, so it’s absolutely not just the braids as so many like to snark.
I believe it’s in the “Special Edition” version of the film (which is apparently different from the “Extended Edition”).
Isn’t that a Simpsons gag?
Everyone was using that joke. Robot Chicken did it and TBBT was doing it too. It was pretty much the most obvious joke that could have come from the movie.
Michelle Rodriguez plays a Michelle Rodriguez type.Does she? I thought she was kind of channeling Jennette Goldstein’s Vasquez in her role here.
Yeah, it’s more like Michelle Rodriguez has been playing Jennette Goldstein/Vasquez characters all along.
Thankfully minus the awkward brownface.
Ugh, good point. In Goldstein’s defense, though, she does have Brazilian and Moroccan heritage in her family.
To the contrary – a little – I think this is one of the cheeriest roles I’ve seen Rodriguez play, barely even using that Ice-T scowl.
She’s playing Jeanette Goldstein’s Vasquez, if Vasquez were a helicopter pilot played by Michelle Rodriguez.
In fact she channeled it so well that I spent the first half of the movie thinking “wait, did they digitally de-age Jeanette Goldstein?”
“Does she? I thought she was kind of channeling Jennette Goldstein’s Vasquez in her role here.”
You don’t think Vasquez is similar to what Rodriguez pretty much always plays?
I fucking hated Avatar at the time, so it’s a testament to the excellent writing in this column that I actually kinda want to rewatch it now.
It was dumb but it’s a gloriously beautiful and tightly woven kinda dumb.Avatar sold me my first Samsung flatscreen LED which I still use today.
As a best-man gift, handed me the newly-released Avatar Blu-ray. in the box, he put the receipts for a PS3, a big-ass (for the time) Sony flatscreen, 5.1 speakers, and a fancy amp. The PS3 is gone, but I still have the rest (though I do need to get a replacement TV remote, because many of the buttons are worn to unreactive nubs).
It’s a shame the PS3 wasn’t more robust, given nothing else plays PS3 games. Even the controllers don’t last (at least PS2 ones work).
When the PS3 was going out I bought an extra controller just in case because I was already on my second. That extra controller also has a PSTV in the box, so I got a free, mostly pointless console out of the bargain.Also on my second PS3, the first having died half-way through playing Symphony of the Night. It’s one of the last models, formerly owned by a grandpa who wanted to play Tiger Woods and nothing else, so I have high hopes for its long life.
I’m on my second too, first one YLOD’d. This one likes to make loud cracking noises as it expands/contracts from its own heat, so I’m not too confident in its longevity.
IIRC, Avatar was supposed to sort of be the killer app for 3DTV. It was going to usher in a new era of entertainment where everything was in 3D, even CBS procedurals, and you would just have to have one.
I was fully expecting to be watching NFL football in 3D back when I bought my plasma around that time
Same, maybe? No, actually no, the script was awful. In my memory the rousing speech that Worthington gives at some point is literally just “yeaaaahhh!” The whole thing is nonsense from start to end, and it’s too expensive to be good nonsense. You spend that much money on something and it has to actually be good.
Something I will never get over with this damn film, the dude doesn’t even do his damn job. He was sent in to be a sort of bridge (and spy) between the Na’vi and the Corp. He was supposed to talk to them, and tell them what the hell was going on. Instead he was reaaally focused on hooking up with the big blue cat lady. I just hate the main character so much lol, everyone else is cool.
I want to watch it again but I am glad you won’t be there to sourpuss the experience down.
Literally why do you care how much a movie cost? Did you personally invest money in the production?
It’s a great piece, but nothing can make me want to lose another 3 hours of my life on this flick.
The snark overload in their news reporting makes it easy to forget that AVC’s columns are still very good. See also: the rom-com column that I make sure to read, even though I don’t like rom-coms.
honestly the AVClub has always been snark heavy, and I’m talking about going back to the 90’s here. I mean, they had a recurring column named “the hater” dating back to 2006, so they weren’t exactly trying to hide it. Friday buzzkill was another that was pretty damn heavy on the post-modern internet snark. the difference is that for a while there in the aughts the writing talent was just so off the charts insanely good that the snark was entertaining and sometimes insightful, instead of tedious. And I don’t mean that as an insult to the current staff, becuase there are still good writers here, they’re just not as consistently good as when the years with Rabine, Amelie Gillette, Sean O’neal, Vanderwerff, and all the others who I’ve omitted
…if you can actually find the rom-com column when it gets bumped from the front page before noon.
Check “Latest” for a chronological feed.
I generally google for the column name. The point is that this fine writing is getting short shrift by not being on the front page longer.
I honestly don’t mind the snark but I do wish there was more long-form analysis nowadays, because the few regular columns are excellent. Petition for Ignatiy to get a regular column on literally any topic of his choosing?
That’s exactly where I am. I had no interested in it at the time, and never felt that I was missing something. Until this morning.
Yeah I had a moment of “was I wrong about Avatar?” But I don’t think I was wrong about Avatar.It was a total sensation at the time, like it was one of those all-consuming cultural juggernauts. And I watched it and hated every goddamn badly written patent bullshit second of it.
Why ‘Avatar’ Never Really Managed To Take Root In Pop Culturehttps://www.forbes.com/sites/danidiplacido/2020/07/24/why-avatar-never-really-managed-to-take-root-in-pop-culture/?sh=185cc1bc51fe
Is is a better movie than people make it out to be. It has it’s flaws but I think it’s judged at too high of a standard. It is a great movie judged bad for not being perfect. And the action; Jesus Christ can Cameron bring on the action when he puts his mind to it.
Be sure to listen to the dialogue. Actually, turn the picture off … Whatya’ think?
Nope, terrible movie wrapped in shiny packing
You say that now, but after 15 minutes of your rewatch, you will say “nope, what was I thinking, god this is stupid as hell.” And you would be right. I see these articles pop up every once in a while trying to salvage “Avatar” as some secret great film like “Star Wars” was in 1977, but nope, it is terrible and it was all based on a fad. (3D)
District 9 was better and it looked better. I’d never confuse Avatar aliens for real life creatures. There are to this day shots in District 9 where even though I know it’s not real, my brain is telling me “where did they get those alien actors?”
I’ve only ever seen this once (at the cinema) and I fucking loved it. Fully aware of it being a big-budget remake effectively of Dances With Wolves, I didn’t really care and still don’t largely. It was a spectacle and an incredible one at that.It was a genuine event movie and while I haven’t every felt any strong need to watch it again, it’s a movie that I’ll always remember for how incredible the viewing experiences was on the big screen in 3D that night in December 2009.
I saw it January 1st 2010 at the Imax in Darling Harbour, then the biggest Imax screen in the world before it was demolished to make way for an even larger screen so I hear. Still under construction even though it’s been 5 years, I believe. Had seats right in the centre because I bought the tickets a month in advance.
Oh fuck yeah that cinema was awesome. I saw Swordfish there back in 2001.That’s a terrible film but fuck it’s entertaining and hilariously pre-9/11.But thanks for the nostalgia hit. I can’t wait to get back to Sydney sometime too. Was meant to go down for a trip last year which the pandemic cancelled.
Like the reviewer here, I had my first kid in ‘09 and Avatar was the first movie we went to see on our own afterwards. We had fun, even sitting in the first row as we unfortunately did. But I can’t say I ever had even a passing impulse to watch it again.
I haven’t seen this movie, partly because I somehow never got around to it when it was out at the cinema and it really does seem like a big-screen experience, and that watching it on a TV will just expose its flaws more harshly.I also haven’t seen Up apart from the first ten minutes, which broke my heart but in hindsight does fuel my general suspicion that it’s when Pixar started toeing the line of being a wee bit too into outright emotional manipulation, as witnessed by the fact that pretty much every Pixar trailer since might as well have a caption at the bottom reading “C’mon, we all know you’re gonna cry at some point during this.”In conclusion, in what I freely admit is a desperate grab for imaginary internet points, here’s a random Simpsons gif.
Yeah alright. I’ll star that. Why not.
Pixar: Gonna Cry? Gonna Cry, Crybaby, huh?
SPACE COYOTES RULE!
Space Coyote, I think you and your species are headed for a big fall…But for right now, I gotta go study.
I also missed Avatar in theaters and figured it wasn’t worth watching on the small screen. Even though Cameron was the first director I knew by name and Aliens and Terminator 2 are STILL in my top 10 favorite movies, Avatar looked gimmick-y and at that time I barely went to theaters. I am hoping the Avatar sequels will lead to a re-release of the original in American theaters, because I would like to experience the movie at least once on the big screen in 3D because Cameron can do spectacle like no other.I also appreciated the Pixar line in this article, because I have been saying for years that Pixar movies aren’t “kids movies with emotional parts adults can appreciate,” they are “movies trying to hit adults in the feels with parts that kids can appreciate (i.e. obligatory chase scenes and wacky jokes/characters).”
As a lot of people have already mentioned, dumping on Avatar has become a sport of kinds. Which is why I actually liked reading this column — and I have come to trust Tom’s evaluations enough to think that maybe I should give it another go some time, when the movie is not carrying the burden of being “the most expensive awe-inspiring cinematic experience ever”, or something.To be honest, I do remember getting out of the cinema feeling that it was totally blah. I was especially disappointed in seeing how… well, completely lacking in imagination the design of about every part of the movie was. It’s interesting that Tom is singing the praise of the prog-rock bad-shitness, the flora and the fauna. I was more like: “Ok, you had all that money, and all you could come up with is gluing two additional pairs of legs to a tiger, chaining a few rocks to the sky in Huangshan, and calling it a day?” And, honestly, I still think the visual design is profoundly unimaginative and boring.
That said, I wonder what I was expecting. It’s possible that my hopes were unconsciously raised high by “Zeno Clash”, another 2009 entertainment project set in a different world, that went all out in doing prog-rock and surrealism right. But in retrospect, the most expensive movie of all time could, of course, not go were a Chilenian indie game went. It couldn’t help being a bit boring — it was, as Tom writes, considered already enough of a risk. Maybe glowing tigers was all we could ever have realistically expected.
I’ve never understood the hatred for Avatar. Like I get no caring for the film and all that but the relentless shitting on it and glee taken in the whole “hey everyone forgets this movie even existed/it has no cultural footprint” thing mystifies me.Or being pissed off it’s the biggest movie of all time or dismissing it’s big box office.What is it about Avatar’s existence/success that pisses people off?
Sam Worthington
He’s 2009 personified. All he needs is a baby with aviators
Who?
I agree with you. I don’t really enjoy dumping on actors but I find Sam Worthington to be a distractingly bad actor and that did impact my enjoyment of Avatar.
That’s fair.
Does anybody really hate Avatar? Honestly, I found the movie pleasant enough when I saw it, but I’ve never been terribly interested in revisiting it, or returning to Pandora (or to the larger universe of the movie). The movie didn’t leave me with any questions, or so in love with the Navi’s lifestyle, or the dystopian corporate society the human colonizers belong to, or Jake Sully, or any of the individual Navi that I need more of them.I think the stuff about the the cultural footprint is just that it’s weirdly baffling. In the past, the biggest movies of all time have been cultural phenomena. The top 25 movies of all time, inflation-adjusted, are all films you can get people to guess by describing a single scene, sometimes by saying a single line, with no proper nouns being used. Looking at the memorable quotes on IMDB, I can’t think of a line that’s distinctive enough to recognize in Avatar. Usually, a big movie like this (the live action ones, at least) makes at least a few big stars. Zoe Saldana’s as close as Avatar gets, and she’s not really headlining her movies.Part of all of this is that the appeal of Avatar was largely visual, the thrill of 3D, strong CGI. But it’s a bit surprising, because Cameron makes really memorable movies. Even The Abyss—the one film of his that underperformed at the box office—has at least one scene that’s etched on my memory permanently (Mary Elizabeth Mastroantonio intentionally drowning herself to save her and Ed Harris). It just feels weird to have a movie that so many people saw, and that hasn’t really captured the public imagination relative to films that didn’t earn so much money. That’s not begrudging Avatar the money it made, it’s more a puzzlement.
Well they dislike it enough to make fun of it and insist it wasn’t that big a deal/isn’t worth remembering every time it comes up so yeah they do.
The Kinja universe has built a pretty successful buisness on cultivating hate in the comments. Each blog has their punching bags. So yes, there is plenty of hate for Avatar among AV Club for sure.
That’s a pretty tepid definition of hate. I mean, if all it takes is feeling that something isn’t a big deal, then I guess I actually hate a lot of things I believed I was indifferent to. Then again, hate is memorable and often has greater cultural impact than a movie that’s pretty fun, gorgeously shot, but ultimately kind of inert. For example, I really dislike Batman v. Superman, and know lots of people who hold it in similar low regard, but if someone walks up to us and yells “Why did you say that name?” people will tend to know what’s being discussed, even without invoking Martha.
A corollary to this, and one that tends to get left out of the discourse of the film these days -It was one part that it was forgettable. It was another part that it was a forgettable movie that Cameron had been hyping up for the better part of a decade as his magnum opus that he couldn’t make sooner because Hollywood just wasn’t ready yet (which, from a technical standpoint is certainly true.)
That we knew so little for so long before that did kind of shoot the film in the foot when it came out because people saw all the very rote story beats and went “THIS was the big passion project?”
Well, it didn’t shoot the film in the foot that hard. I mean, it did still break box office records, and we were used to this kind of talk from Cameron. The talk in the lead up to Titanic was a mystified, “The passion project he’s obsessed with is pretty much a remake of A Night to Remember?”
That’s… not quite accurate. When it came out it was HOT SHIT. You really underestimate just how hot shit it was. There were lines weeks after. There were stories on the radio of people who were depressed because the real world didn’t look like Avatar. It was such a smash theatres upgraded all of their equipment just to play it, movies had last-minute 3D added in post because people wanted more of it. Nobody, when the movie came out, said “THIS was the big passion project?” People GOT IT. It was a pop culture FORCE. It did fade out because it was most notable for the visuals but tech kept advancing, so a lot more movies can do the tricks Avatar did. But it was a sustained hit, if audiences were disappointed they were in the vast minority.I mean I absolutely hated it but I knew nobody cared what I thought.
That’s similar to how I feel – the film was a phenomenon when it was released but now it’s mostly just a synonym for ‘huge blockbuster’. Every other biggest film of all time has left an impact in pop culture big and small – Titanic, Jurassic Park, E.T., Star Wars, Jaws, The Godfather, etc. They get referenced to death with quotes, homages, references to scenes. And not just by nerds. They’re just part of the cultural lingo for a huge amount of people. Avatar didn’t really have any of that and I don’t knock the film for it (I enjoy it and I’d pay to see it in IMAX 3D again today if I could) but I do find it fascinating. For all of Scorsese’s talk of MCU films being like amusement Park attractions I think this is the closest a film comes to that analogy – it really did seem to be about the experience of watching it more than taking in the story, characters or dialogue. Again, that’s not a dig – it worked to the tune of $2.7b, which was nearly a whole billion more than any other film up until then (the 3D surcharge-can’t account for that – but it’s interesting to explore and discuss the unique success of the film.
The lack of cultural references is what stands out to me – Titanic wasn’t exactly the most quotable film, but “I’m king of the world” and “I’m flying, Jack!” definitely got play in every medium you could think of for years afterwards – and if you had anything that looked like the prow of a boat, by God, somebody’s going to get up there and do the poses.
Avatar had none of that, despite being just as major a success. There’s probably a mix of reasons as to why that happened – death of the monoculture is way up there, followed closely by the fact that everything about Avatar is just so weird and idiosyncratic that it somehow simply defies reference culture. It costs basically nothing get two people up on apple boxes to do a Jack and Rose bit for a cheap basic cable comedy show; getting everybody in blue paint and makeup or having a giant CGI bat-thing, slightly more complicated and expensive.
On that same line of thought, because the film is so singular, it’s kind of hard to pull any one thing from it to reference (Or, if I can being less charitable, the movie simply isn’t particularly memorable.) I saw it in the theater, I remember the basic structure and story beats of the film, but there’s no real standout scene or setpiece that leaps to mind. Maybe the RDA ships demolishing Home Tree, which again isn’t an easy reference to make (Or one you’d be eager to call back to – hey, remember how the humans killed their God?)
I agree that “everything about Avatar is just so weird and idiosyncratic that it somehow simply defies reference culture.”The vision for the world/movie is so well-conceived and earnest that there really is no place for meme-worthy snarky bits that are typically peppered throughout something like the latest Marvel films. I’m not sure how you can have a Titanic “king of the world” moment on the bow of a ship for someone to mimic when the world and machines were specifically designed to be completely unfamiliar. Or “paint me like your French women” when “romantic interludes” for the Navi include body parts that don’t exists on a human.
Considering how utterly toxic some movie franchise fandoms have become, I’m kind of enjoying the quiet.
yes, I agree! I think it’s mystifying because the movie isn’t overly fantastic, yet it took hold culturally, and then faded again. Idk, it feels like a weird blip in time so I understand peoples humour towards it.
Yeah, I think the whole thing is that the main draw of the film was its immersive world, with the story being secondary to that, I think to the point that it’s obviously not a coincidence that the story and message archetype chosen was someone going into the environment and created culture and learning to value it. I think it did have a huge influence in that way, though, as it seems like immersive world-building and storytelling through background details became much larger parts of media creation afterward, even in video games (see: Bethesda series).
I’d push back on the video game thing – Elder Scrolls 1-4 and Fallout 3 all precede the release of Avatar. If anything you could argue the reverse, that a fixation on world building and task-oriented plot progression is something movies picked up from video games over the past decade (I like Rogue One, but the part where Rey has operate a series of switches to advance the plot is basically Half Life 2).
I don’t think people generally do hate Avatar. The lack of a cultural footprint wasn’t a thing I thought about until I saw the odd comment online when some (not all) folks talked about the film. The fact that Avatar is fairly forgettable seems a valid point to raise about the film.Titanic had a fairly straightforward love story to keep us interested in the story, before we got to the real time sinking of the ship. That was still more memorable than the anti-colonisation eco drama James Cameron came up with this time around.The USP of the film was (and still is) the 3D effects, beyond that you have a nondescript blockbuster that wouldn’t stand out from the crowd of typical Hollywood fare.
I just wish his dreams were a bit shorter. (Titanic took more time to watch than the actual Titanic took to sink, and she went down slow.) Maybe they could be made that way by cutting out the more didactic if not downright hectoring parts. I think this expression of lack of trust in his audience really hit me in T2—did we really need to be told that all-out thermonuclear war would be bad? The original Terminator was lean as an indestructible robot skeleton at 107 minutes, and just try looking away for a single one. I miss that James Cameron. Circling back to Avatar, I am intrigued by what the sequels might be about. He killed off the only character I found really watchable the first time around, Major Message or whatever his name was, and the main idea left unexplored (great science fiction is about ideas, and Cameron does seem to get that) was that the life forms on Pandora were all interconnected. I am sure to be surprised, hopefully in a good way, and further hope that there’s either a lot more on the cutting-room floor this time or an intermission to let the audience tend to the needs of the creature without missing anything.
Yes, I think this is why Avatar irks me. It’s as though Gods of Egypt or Battleship or some other random mediocrity had accidentally become the unadjusted box office champion of all time.
For my sins I don’t mind Battleship, but totally see your point about how Avatar falls into that category of blockbuster (even allowing for it being by Cameron).
Here’s my main thought about Avatar and its lack of cultural impact. Fundamentally, it’s a movie that is the inverse of a cult classic. Most of those “cult classics” are movies that bombed/underperformed in the theatres, but then had a robust life in the home market. But Avatar is a movie that its biggest strength is in the shear awe of the cinematic experience, and that strength outstrips the rest of it. It’s almost pointless to buy the DVD and watch it at home, because it doesn’t hold up to that viewing. It’s fine but, why watch it on your TV? And so you don’t get that obsessive rewatching that gives it that same cultural benchmarking that, say, a Napoleon Dynamite— which you can watch on your phone and not lose anything, really– has gotten.
I was thinking about why it didn’t stick around and I think you hit it. Once it left theatres it didn’t hold up. Like as a theatrical experience there was nothing like it at the time, but shove in the BluRay and you miss pretty much all of the appeal. The only way for it to stick in the cultural zeitgeist would be regular revivals, as that successful run in China proved people would watch it.
For me, the whole amnesia thing comes down to the fact that no one quotes avatar. No alludes to any particular sequence that enthralled audiences.People remember a list of facts about the movie, but it seems to have no emotional resonance. That’s genuinely pretty amazing given its success.
This is a good point. There are movies I’ve never seen but I can recognize bits of dialogue, or I am aware of one of its big scenes, because it shows up everywhere.I don’t think Avatar had even spawned any memes (not that I consider that a measure of quality, but it is a measure of something’s cultural footprint — hell, that’s what “meme” basically means).
as I think I said on the Dissolve, the only line from Avatar that I can remember is “you are not in Kansas anymore!” which is paraphrasing a line from The Wizard of Oz.
Because it’s so derivative. Throw Dances With Wolves and FernGully into a blender and that’s Avatar.
Yeah, it’s Dances with Wolves just worse, because 20 years down the line people were questioning the “white guy goes native and becomes the indigenous people’s greatest hero” narrative a lot more than they did in 1990, and that’s only gotten stronger since. Also, while both Cameron and Costner were coming from a place of aching sincerity and good intentions with their white savior narratives, Costner had the good sense to make his savior character incredibly humble, while Worthington’s Jake is not only the greatest Navi ever, he’s also the cockiest dude on the planet. Cameron seems to have forgotten that the main reason he got away with Jack yelling “I’m the king of the world!” in Titanic is because within 72 hours, that guy’s frozen to death in the North Atlantic, and it turned out to be Rose’s story all along.
You raise a lot of great points, especially about the staleness of the white savior narrative. And it’s like Cameron has to take a trope like that which was already tired, as you said, and inject it with elements of the ultimate Gary Stu / male wish fulfillment. Jake, who has lived a completely Western lifestyle of modern convenience, is somehow a better native than genuine natives, no training required! And his artificial alien dick is so big of course the chief’s daughter can’t help but be swooned by it, another giant cliche. God, the mediocrity of it all is just flooding back the more I think about it. The villains are each corporate or military cliches as well, to a truly ridiculous degree. And the villain who died will supposedly be back somehow! No one has to truly die, not on space-magic Pandora!
Is Costner’s character a white savior? Because Costner’s character did absolutely nothing to save the Dakota, whereas Worthington completely single-handedly whooped the invaders ass and sent them packing.
You’re right in the sense that he does not actually save the Sioux in the long run, but in the story, the guns he provides them do help with both the buffalo hunt and their fight with the rival tribe (IIRC) and he is in turn accepted into the tribe, so I think the label is correctly applied. It’s more a case of Cameron’s movie being a pure fantasy that isn’t bound by history. So in Cameron’s Dances with Wolves, the movie would have Costner’s character unifying the Native American nations, leading a military campaign against the European colonizers, and would end with Costner putting Andrew Johnson on a boat back to England after retaking the North American continent.
Plus a bit of his own Aliens (there was an evil corporate guy in Avatar, although nowhere as memorable as Paul Reiser’s Burke).
There’s this obnoxious dynamic in internet commentary wherein everything has to be either the best or worst thing ever. Nothing can just be decent or mediocre.I think part of that is because those without strong feelings tend not to comment; but there’s definitely a whole lot of hype, hyperbole and bandwagoning/contrarianism.
Yeah… I don’t have anything to say one way or another about Avatar, and I think that’s kind of how a lot of people are with it. Once the technological spectacle of it all faded once you left the theater, that’s it.I know I watched it. I can’t remember a thing about it, and I was a grown-ass adult when it came out.I almost think that the general lack of discussion about Avatar is a bit damning in it’s own way. With the way things are right now… bloggers itching to make posts, to get clicks… there’s almost nothing. There’s this article, which is probably only talking about it because of the format of the series.No thinkpieces. No “Avatar was good/bad, actually” articles. No Twitter screeds dragging it for various reasons. No knee-jerk right-wing reactions to counter said Twitter screeds. When people say it left no lasting mark aside from a box office record, it’s not too far off.It’s not necessary for a every big movie to leave lasting marks, but most do. Nobody references Avatar. Nobody quotes Avatar. Nobody is making homages to Avatar. It came in, stomped all over the box office record, then basically evaporated. The closest lasting impact it had was a wave of 3D movies, but even that basically went away.
I’ve seen some reappraisal of Avatar as better than it has been given credit for, but I don’t think it has led to a major overall shift in how the movie is considered.
I may be misremembering, but i recall that it was part of the early marketing that Avatar was definitely going to become the next biggest movie ever. It rubbed people the wrong way. It also came out during a stretch of time when we were rejecting overly sincere boomer media, so a Dances with Wolves riff just seemed like a bad call.
What is it about Avatar’s existence/success that pisses people off?I don’t like the movie because there’s no real emotional hook (although I don’t really care enough about the movie to expend the energy being pissed at it).
It looks very pretty, but is completely void of anything to make me give a damn about the characters, like Sarah and Reese’s’ one night of love or Uncle Bob in the desert south of the border learning to be human or the quiet bonding moments between Ripley and Newt. I’m way more invested in the failing marriage in True Lies than in anything Avatar has to offer.
I think the issue for some is how something so (lushly) banal became the #1 draw of all time. It’s akin to watching BBT and knowing that it’s one of the most successful shows in TV history, against all logic and reason.Me? I knew I could trust Cameron to pen a helluva story. Then Titanic hit, and it’s like, “Alright, sentimental shmaltz, maybe Avatar will be a return to form.It…wasn’t, IMO. It was derivative, insulting to the audience (may as well have called the military baddie Arnold McBattlefighter, as that’s the only motivation he’s consistently given), and riding almost entirely on visual flair.
I’m guessing some folks truly dislike Cameron, especially after the success of Titanic.
There’s a subset of movie nerds who deeply care about box office rankings, and take them personally. Any film that knocks their favorite out of its spot is going to be attacked. And in this case Cameron had already angered them with Titanic.
Before Avatar came out James Cameron was an excited geek in interviews and was gushing about how this was going to change cinema. And just like that too-cool-for-everyone geek turned on him. “Oh, you are gonna change cinema…we’ll see.” There were tons of people already hating it before it even came out and it became geek fashionable to dump on it.
There’s two reasons it was fun to dunk an Avatar;1) People became so obsessed with a movie that was incredibly well made but at its heart, a very average story.2) We were still a couple of years out from the MCU domination and we didn’t know how good we had it.
Plus, all those people who seriously tried to start a Na’Vi religion, insisting they really were Na’Vi who’d been reincarnated as humans. I imagine that made it very hard to admit to liking the movie for a while.
I tried to find the article from 2009 in my original post, but I remember they had to coin a new psychological condition for people who experience depression because they couldn’t live as Na’Vi.
The podcast Uhh Yeah Dude got a lot of mileage out of the crazy obsessive Avatar fans – I remember them referencing that article and repeatedly using the phrase “Help me: I’m Na’vi” in discussing it. Around the same time they started going deep on Avatar fan forums – “Post your favorite picture of Neytiri.” “Would you kill Jake Sully to be with Neytiri?” etc.I wonder if those communities are still active.
And the fact that they used fucking Papyrus as the font. A font that is supposed to resemble Ancient Egyptian Hieratic (basically cursive hieroglyphs designed to be drawn with a brush on papyrus rather than carved into stone) Yes, there was an SNL skit about that a few years ago, but even when Avatar was in theaters all the graphic design people were aghast.
“and I have come to trust Tom’s evaluations enough”This is why action-movie fans are the only people I’ll truly discuss film with. They know the value in the execution of a concept and placing all else in service to that concept. They’re very generous and appreciative movie watchers. They can hang up their expectations and really congratulate the creators on what they accomplished, and not mope about all the crap they didn’t like. Action-movie fans ain’t got time to mope.
A lot of this comes down to the fact that Avatar was the film Cameron got to make when nobody could successfully tell him “no” about anything at all, so everything that he’d been dying to get into a movie since his career started out got put into it.The six-legged tiger is a perfect example. It’s the “Skraith”, from his never-produced spec script “Mother.” Bits and pieces of Mother showed up in a lot of his films (Aliens was arguably a re-tooled version of it — “Mother” ended with the main character fighting the Skraith in an exoskeleton power-loader), and Avatar’s infinite budget meant that he got to finally use everything that he hadn’t already.
I am meh on Avatar. I save all my hate for the movie that had to be renamed because of it: once they’ve got past the “naming the elements” intro, The Last Airbender does not have a single redeeming minute.
OK I am going to give my opinion even before reading the text: one thing I admired about Avatar even before it was released was that it is the kind of feverish teenage boy fantasy that ends up being a b movie, but it is an a movie. Everything is over the top, everything is ridiculous, drama or not, and it ends up in a mecca fight. I expected this to come from Luc Besson or Roland Emmerich, not James Cameron, and this is the kind of project that usually is a box office bomb. And yet here we are.I also think it is a very literal translation of a classic scifi book awarded with Hugos from the 70s or 80s, with really good ideas, awful character treatment and really ridiculous plot points.
You know, thinking of “Avatar” as a really, really expensive and uncharacteristically un-wonky Luc-Besson-movie is a framing I kind really get behind.
Has Cameron adapted an actual scifi paperback? I know he wanted to do Jurassic Park before Spielberg got the rights.
According to Harlan Ellison, all of James Cameron’s movies are adaptations of at least of his books. Of course, he feels the same about every Star Wars, Star Trek, Disney Channel Original Movie and episode of Monday Night Raw.
Hey, be fair. Ellison claims some of those are ripoffs of TV episodes he wrote!
I love the part where the Na’vi drop the Kaaba on Quaritch.
Right there is probablya big part of why I liked Avatar so much. That’s the sort of sci fi I devoured during my formative years. Lots of Clarke, Heinlein, Niven and Pournelle, washed down with a chaser of Dragon’s Dream art books. Cameron was singing the song of my people.
The only scene I really solidly remember from Avatar is the really really stupid scene where the big blue fellow is fighting the bad guy in his mech suit, and then the robot stops to pull out a knife that it had strapped to his back. I found that so epically stupid that I’m still not over it.At least it led to this Rifftrax bit.
The funny thing is that I was blah about this movie the two times I saw it in the theatres (once with wife, once with step-grandchildren), but the robot knife fight was good for me. It was ridiculous to me at first, but later I figured that, since Quaritch is in a mechanical avatar of his own, he’s gotta be able to move and act the way he would without it. And that involves a knife.
I just wish that they had made it so the robot’s hand folded out into a knife. Or the fist fell off and a knife extended from the slot. Anything like that!
Neither one of those makes more sense than the robot having a knife as equipment.
Maybe my opinions are unpopular, but if a robot has to have a bladed weapon I just think it needs to be summoned out of thin air magically, like Voltron does. Something about keeping a knife strapped to its thigh just violates my big-robot-suspension of disbelief.
The benefit of making a robot with human proportions (instead of just using a forklift or a tank) is that it can do things humans can do. It can hold a gun or push a crate or lift a box or, yes, take hold of a bladed weapon and use it to stab things. Complaining about a humanoid mecha is something (boring and obnoxious, but there’s a logic to it), complaining that the humanoid mecha was given weapons is nonsense.
Damn you, I had managed to forget about that.
Username checks out.
Agreed that it was dumb. Since they are destroying the forest, if it was a chainsaw attachment it would have made more sense.
At the time of its release, my primary experience with Avatar was seeing an episode of Bones where the b-plot was basically a 15 minute commercial for this movie, where the nerdy side characters were camped outside a theater for weeks to get tickets, which was both played for laughs (“haw haw, the nerds are passionate about something, what total losers!”) and to hype up the film (multiple characters explain in minute detail why Avatar is destined to be the greatest film of all time. Cameron’s name is dropped, as is Titanic’s.)
I found the whole thing so obnoxious that I lost all interest in Avatar AND in Bones (this was the first episode I’d ever seen.) But several years later I gave Avatar a fair chance, and….eh. It’s fine. They made Smurf Pochahontas, except the cartoon at least had some good songs to keep things from dragging.Bones deserves no second chances, though.
Congratulations. You are the first person to ever mention Bones since Bones ended.
If you had told me that Bones was still airing, an undying zombie of network TV mediocrity like NCIS or Grey’s Anatomy, I’d have believed you, and never developed enough interest to verify it.
This is my favorite internet comment ever.
What, you don’t like a slow-burn romance, dumb jokes, and gross corpses in tight close-up? (I mean, clearly people do like those things or it wouldn’t have gone on for so long.)
For me it was South Park, I had no idea this movie was a real thing until that episode. The episode both ripped on Glenn Beck and this movie, calling it “Dances with Smurfs”
Avatar was something else: A wholly original story, with wholly original charactershahahahahahaOh, wait, you’re serious?!HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!
I just rewatched The Phantom Menace as the start of a full SW rewatch. Much as I was dreading it, it was better than Avatar, if only because it was shorter.
Amazing, how popular Avatar is in China. It’s thanks to them that its recaptured its No 1 Box Office position.
Why not? It’s a film about how the capitalist American military-industrial complex is evil and destructive that, as another commenter pointed out, pretty much just adds floating rocks to stock video of Huangshan for several shots, hehe.
I read some interpretation of that fact during the dirst wave of internet retrospectives. Apparently, there was some controversy about land ownership reform in the PRC- there had been forced evictions and Avatar felt relevant. In fact the government apparently pulled it from cinemas, as a result.https://latimesblogs.latimes.com/entertainmentnewsbuzz/2010/01/avatar-pulled-from-2d-screens-by-chinese-government.html
I think what this has become in my head is a really great Sunday afternoon hangover/day-off-with-a-bad-cold film – large, hearty and satsifying, if not particularly refined. And I think that’s quite an achievement, seeing as most of the really good ones of those seem to be from the 60s and 70s (I’m talking really long war movies, what they used to call ‘adventure films’, wildly ambitious sub David Lean (or indeed actual David Lean) period epics, that sort of thing. Millenial Zulu, basically.
Thanks for this. Yes, all (well, most) of the criticisms of Avatar are valid, but it’s still an extraordinary piece of film making, and seeing it in 3d imax remains one of my most memorable cinema visits.
Agreed. It’s one where people dismiss it as a spectacle but is that really a criticism? Being a spectacle is enough, particularly when seeing it on the big screen is such an experience.
And it’s a spectacle that works. Cameron is such a coherent film-maker. His talent is arguably wasted – he’s never made a Schindler’s List – but the sense of what, where, when, and why rarely falters in his movies.I’ve watched it a few times on a semi-reasonable 2d tv, and the set-pieces still stand up to repeated viewing.The only thing that’s always bugged me is the white-saviour narrative being so front and forward – particularly as Sully has relatively little to lose if his avatar body dies. It adds a strange quality of weightlessness, which is not what I associate with Cameron.Sully, I have to say, is a problem – I’ve seen the arguments before that his blandness makes him an everyman – an avatar for the audience – but I can’t agree. He’s badly written, badly plotted, and badly played. The only thing in his favour is that he’s fairly easy to ignore.
It was easily the best 3D movie to see in the theater during that entire craze, since it actually was filmed specifically for that rather than adding things in post-production. I would take the opportunity to see it again in 3D IMAX.
And the visuals are amazing, to this day. Not so much in photorealistic models, but that everything looks so convincing, I never once am aware of the fact EVERYTHING on Pandora is basically shot in a black box studio somewhere. I just accept everything on the screen is THERE, and that is a monumental achievement.
I’ve never seen ‘Avatar’, but it did end up having an effect on me: something about the way the CGI of it was hyped up solidified my preference for puppetry and prosthetic effects. Don’t get me wrong, there are some things you can only do with CGI, but I still look at something like the orc armies from ‘Lord of the Rings’, and they excite me so much more than the weightless, glossy N’avi.
But, then again, you’ve never seen it, so who gives a shit?
http://copyright.nova.edu/avatar-lawsuit/On the prog front, Roger Dean (mostly known for Yes album covers) apparently thought enough of it looked like his work to sue Cameron without success, but the side by sides in the article above are pretty damning.
When I was a kid I had some Roger Dean posters on the walls of my bedroom. That’s as close to seeing “Avatar” as I will ever get.
This might be the first column on AV Club in a decade that didn’t simply snark on Avatar as a forgotten blockbuster. And it’s a spot on assessment of the film, what it gets right and its flaws. I haven’t watched the original film since it was in theaters, but I’m far more interested in what Cameron is going to do with the series than whatever crap Disney does with Marvel or Star Wars, two series that I’ve become kind of sick of. Maybe it’s better to disappear for a decade than to oversaturating the market.
Agree. I will always see what Cameron decides to make, his track record is spotless in my opinion. He constantly defies expectations. I haven’t seen a Marvel movie since the 2nd Captain America one, they bore me to death.
Marvel movies are formula.But it’s a good formula.
Funny thing is I didn’t even realise how little he did actually make overall, not a lot of movies, def a lot of hits
The difference between AVC’s longer, recurring features and its shorter, snarkier news articles is night and day.
Writers instead of bloggers, if you will
The write up on Breakfast at Tiffany’s from the Romance Met Comedy column still holds a special place in my heart. Hell yeah the long essays are worth it.
This itself might come across a little snarky, but most longtime AVC readers looooooooooove Nathan Rabin and The Dissolve, and it’s Rabin’s FORGOTBUSTERS column at the Dissolve (which to be clear, I read religiously) that really went in hard on Avatar as a movie with “no impact,” as the indistinct Twitter criticism goes.This was on my mind because I wrote about it recently!https://bsquad.substack.com/p/avatar-judd-apatow-and-movies-with
I feel like 40YOV is incredibly quotable…and the Apatow house style is still going strong, even if Apatow himself hasn’t been crushing it at the box office, anymore.
Rabin’s article is where I first encountered the idea as well (RIP The Dissolve), and then from there it just became this internet truism. I guess that speaks well of Rabin’s ability to impact movie discourse. I’ve always enjoyed his writing, but that argument never sat well with me.
His Forgotbusters on Avatar was dead on, but this is a great piece too. At the end of the day no one other than James Cameron can name a character from Avatar without the aid of Google.
There are dozens if not hundreds of well-liked and/or “impactful” movies where I doubt most people could name a character in them.
Maybe, but I don’t think there are any in the unadjusted top 20 where even movie geeks would struggle to name a character. It doesn’t really have any ‘holy shit’ scenes or quotable lines of dialogue, either. About the only thing people remember is that ‘unobtanium’ somehow made it into the final draft of the script.
If you adjust for inflation, I’d guess a lot of people, even self-professed film geeks, can’t name characters from The Sting or maybe even The Exorcist, depending on their age. Or Airport. Good lord, Airport! Some of those are outside the strict top 20, but they were all massive hits. In a lot of ways, Avatar is, weirdly, not unlike a massive hit from the ’70s, in that it didn’t arrive pre-branded like so many big hits of its actual era, stuck around for a long time, and seemingly attracted a lot of infrequent moviegoers.And if you don’t mess with inflation, I’d say something like Jurassic World certainly qualifies for the name game. (It’s hard for me to tell because I can’t un-know the fact that I remember Worthington’s character’s name in Avatar and Pratt’s character in the Jurassic movies, but I think they both qualify as characters who are less beloved/popular/remembered than their movies’ own special effects.)Avatar definitely feels like an outlier in a lot of ways, but I’d say it’s a reminder that not every hit movie hits the same—and that using that lack of sameness to say, ergo, no one really likes it and it had no impact is a little shortsighted.
The things it, both takes are right. It was a HUGE blockbuster that hasn’t had a big impact, but I think it’s a matter of the technical limitations of watching it at home more than any fault in the movie itself. Seeing it in 3-D one IMAX was a hell of an experience. The only other movie that comes close as far as far as being totally immersive is Gravity (which I also saw in 3-D). It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that I forgot that I was in a movie theater watching both movies. I loved them both in the theater but don’t have any plans to watch them at home, becuase it just wouldn’t be the same. If Avatar held up to re-watching at home I think it would have a better reputation now. And for
Rabin’s the best thing that ever happened here. That said, he still has his ‘Happy Place’:https://www.nathanrabin.com/… And the guy’s gotta crowdfund, for God’s sake. What are you thinking, AV Club???
What has me interested in the Avatar sequels is the fact that Cameron is investing TWO DECADES of his life into these three or four films.Regardless of the final results, I’m extremely curious to watch the results of what’s clearly a labor of love over a long period of time.
And I’m of the mind that we should be more interested in the work of crazed auteurs who bend studios to their will than big studios pumping out “content.”
Like Zack Snyder? >_>
While the singular vision of an ‘auteur’ might be more likely to produce something weird and personal and incredibly unexpected in a good way, it’s also entirely possible for that vision to be something that completely fails to resonate.See also: Heaven’s Gate, Super Mario Brothers, Howard the Duck, Batman And Robin
For me the best films are the ones that have some personality, but where it’s also clear that everyone’s on board and bringing their energy to the piece.Look at Thor: Ragnarok – it was a big franchise film, that followed up from and set up other entries; but also very much a Taika Waititi film, Chris Hemsworth bringing his comedic chops, Jeff Goldblum being Jeff Goldblum, etc. It was so distinct and full of character, while also clearly a collaborative piece; and it was all the better for it.Usually when a blockbuster/franchise film has no creative juice, it’s less an issue with collaboration, and more an issue with producer/executive notes (or just lack of effort). Writing by committee works great when it’s a committee of actual writers.
What you described, though, can easily be referring to one person bringing their vision to the fore and everyone else signing on. Taking Batman and Robin, it managed to pull in Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jim Carrey, Uma Thurman and Alicia Silverstone while they were all at the height of their careers. Joel Schumacher had the vision, he won over a lot of people with his vision (Arnold playing a bad guy was unprecedented!), and all of their efforts ended up being a big mess. I’ll concede that George Clooney with his too-cool-for-school attitude was a terrible Batman, but if everything else in a movie is good then a poorly done central character isn’t a fatal blow. Point is, even if enough people in the production are putting their whole ass into it, it can still fall on its face if the creative direction they’re all running toward is the wrong one.
“What you described, though, can easily be referring to one person bringing their vision to the fore and everyone else signing on.”I feel like if everyone’s signing onto the vision, then to some degree it becomes everyone’s vision.“Point is, even if enough people in the production are putting their whole ass into it, it can still fall on its face if the creative direction they’re all running toward is the wrong one.”That’s just Sturgeon’s Law – 90 of everything will be shite anyway. It’s why it’s so frustrating when people say video game movies, female-led movies etc. don’t work – sometimes a bad movie is just a bad movie.tbh I’m not saying auteur-driven movies are inherently better or worse; nor collaborative ones: I’m mostly just irked by the false dichotomy people like to push between high-quality, high-art auteur works and trashy collaborative franchise fare. It’s a dumb axiom that really harms critique and discourse.
Ha! I guess there’s always an exception. But also, this is why I could never get too upset about those Snyder nerds trying to get WB to pony up money on another Snyder movie. Unless that tips into harassment, I’m fine with those sort of campaigns, even if Snyder’s movies leave something to be desired.
As indifferent as I was to Avatar I know better than to question Cameron’s commitment to work and am positive it’ll be a smash hit.
I’ll be there watching it on the biggest screen I can find, and I fully expect Cameron to fulfil his promise of making me shit my pants.
This. And what I like about this article is that it drives home Cameron’s true skill as a filmmaker. He’s a heavily formulaic guy — even Terminator 1 is at its narrative heart, an 80s slasher movie where the killer is a time-traveling robot — but what he does is speak the “cinematic language”, like Spielberg, to make spectacle-laden action cackle like no one else can, and make archetypes feel in the right place in the story (one of Spielberg’s best also polishes a straightforward story and thin characters in this way: Jurassic Park). Everyone likes to snark on the movie, but there’s more to legacy than Lucasfilm-level merchandising after the fact. It’s first and foremost, “how does this movie appeal to people”, and for months in 2009-10, it did in ways only a literal handful of films have ever done (remember, Avatar opened with a “mere” $75 million domestic. This thing LEGGED). So no, Avatar’s story is not profound, its characters not on par with the instant-classic crop of A New Hope. It doesn’t matter. It was three hours of being transported to an exciting and beautiful thrill ride that doesnt involve leveling an American metropolis. What I remember most is the genuine gasps of wonder at various points from several audiences (I saw it multiple times) that had nothing to do with action move or an appearance of a famous person/actor that we’ve been conditioned with the blockbusters today, but the discovery of a lovingly-designed creature or locale. For all the talk of how it doesn’t feel original, it moved people in fresh ways blockbusters rarely do today.
I remember almost seeing it in theaters with my parents, but when we got to my theater, a bunch of my friends were there about to see the Sherlock Holmes films with R.D.J., which, being a high school senior at the time, sounded more fun than seeing a movie with the parents, so I saw that instead (which I found an enjoyable enough film).
I saw Avatar about a year later on DVD and found the entire film more or less meh, so in the end, I think I made the right choice.
A bit of an odd year for me & blockbuster cinema. I still haven’t seen anything Cameron has done since True Lies (I also haven’t seen Dances With Wolves or The Last Samurai), but Up is the one Pixar film I’ve seen other than Toy Story.Avatar always makes me think of this, from someone who also hadn’t seen it:https://worthwhile.typepad.com/worthwhile_canadian_initi/2010/04/lloyd-george-and-avatar.html
No Titanic either?True Lies is a classic and I wish Cameron would make more “grounded” films with actual human relationships. I think between divorces he forgot how to do that.
I already know how Titanic ends.I think Cameron peaked with the original Terminator. I suppose at some point I should see the French film which was adapted into True Lies, but I’ve never felt any need to do so.
Do you now?
and
Note: These are two completely different Italian Titanic movies with talking mice
Yeah I’d like to see the original that True Lies was based on. I also prefer the original Terminator to the second one, as great as that was
The Abyss (Directors Cut) and T2 were both excellent films. But starting with Titanic…Cameron’s films just feel…”meh”.
I thought I was the only person who hadn’t seen Dances With Wolves.
There are dozens of us!
FernGully… IN SPAAAACE!!!!
The military biopic American Sniper, the biggest hit of 2014Wait, what???
We all watched it for the doll. Don’t deny it.
I honestly have never seen it, but I don’t mind the doll stuff, just because I hate seeing babies cry in movies more than anything. Babies can’t act, so if they’re crying they’re in real distress.
That’s fair. And they did do what they could with the doll.
I always hope they wait until the baby’s crying anyway (since they always do it periodically), then film. You could schedule it, just do the shoot close to naptime. But that’s probably just my wishful thinking.
The crying is usually foley for this reason.
It had a limited, gimme-Oscars release at the very end of 2014, which was a very weak year for the Box Office (second biggest hit, or biggest depending on how you count, was Hunger Games 4, closely followed by Guardians of the Galaxy). It made almost all of its money in 2015, which was a monster year with Force Awakens, Jurassic World, Avengers 2, Inside Out and Furious 7 all making more. Still it’s technically the biggest 2014 film at the US Box Office, albeit the only one of the decade to make less than $400million.
Remember when it was a huge deal that Spider-Man had an over $100million opening weekend and an over $400million gross
It struck a hardcore cord with conservatives. I know…….yeah……
Avatar, huh? Is that still a thing?
Making money? Is that still a thing?
I have a 3D projector and this movie really is an exponentially more potent experience in 3D, one of the few 3D movies that actually justifies use of the format. I got emotionally swept away by it that last time I viewed it in a way I hadn’t watching in 2D. I like this movie about as much as you can like something without actually loving it. If the film had a touch more nuance in all areas of the writing it would be a masterpiece.
This movie was one of the only movies that made 3D worth the eye pain I felt afterwards. Genuinely lovely. And my god, did it ever fall off a cliff when I tried to watch it a year later. Unobtanium? Holy shit.
One issue with the film I actually don’t see brought up that much: the whole thing with the Na’Vi being completely in tune with their planet and able to call on all its resources means that for the Colonel to be any kind of legitimate threat, he has to be made so ridiculously badass that it’s hard not to root for him on some level. Add in that the movie is so sanctimonious to a Season 1 TNG level and it’s even easier.
I have to admit, when I saw it with my brother and his girlfriend, we all agreed that he was our favorite character. He kept fighting, even after his mecha windshield broke and he was breathing poison air!
Stephen Lang is also a great and charismatic actor, so that helps. How that guy can be Freddy Lounds, Ike Clanton, and Miles Quaritch is just crazy.
Ike Clanton is one of the most cowardly villains in movie history, and Quaritch one of the most badass (what else can describe a guy escaping a downed helicarrier in a mecha, WHILE ON FIRE, and hit the superhero landing on the ground?). That’s RANGE.
He was so great in making me hate Ike Clanton that every time I watch the end of that movie I am yelling at the screen to catch him.
When I irrationally yell at the screen for something different to happen, then you have done a great job.
Dances With Wolves, Ferngully (apparently, I’ve never seen it), and even Broken Arrow (the one with Jimmy Stewart, not Travolta) might take exception to the “wholly original” part.I’ll give Cameron credit for floating mountains and the bio-engineered avatar ideas. Would have been nice if he found a better plot for it.
And Dances with Wolves and Pocahontas.
The bio-engineered avatar idea is very similar to an old sci-fi story “Call Me Joe” and anime/videogames have been doing floating mountains for decades!
Hey! Credit revoked, Cameron!
Can’t fucking believe you didn’t mention Tim Curry’s amazing performance in this movie:
Up’s 12 years old? What the heck?
Dug’s definitely dead and Carl is finally in a home.
The thing that frustrated me most about Avatar was that Mauro Fiore won the Oscar for Cinematography. But his involvement was limited to the live action scenes, which amounted to something like only 40 percent of the film. Avatar was groundbreaking visually and deserved the Cinematography award. But it should’ve gone collectively to the post-house who pioneered the many techniques involved in making that virtual world so plausible. Truth be told, I think it’s time the Cinematography award was split again, like they did in the past when they awarded two statues, to black adn white, and color pictures. Because there is a very clear distinction between films shot in the real world, and films created in the virtual. And neither is any better or worse, but they’re fairly incomparable. Pixar has done some Oscar worthy cinematography (Wall E absolutely deserved such an award, had it existed), just a different kind that can’t really be compared to something like Nomadland which is entirely natural.If it were up to me, I’d have two awards: one for cinematography where more than half of the footage is natural with no greenscreen, motion capture, or other CG enhancements, and another where the majority, or all of it is.
I saw it back when, and left the theater thinking “Meh” and musing on plot holes and where a bit of script doctoring could have improved it.Unobtainium – Why was it so important?Parker Selfridge (the Corporate Bad Guy): “Yeah, some wag gave it that name as a joke, and it stuck. It turns into a room temperature superconductor, which makes fusion power possible. We need it if we’re going to save the Earth….”On the biosphere of Pandora – there’s a LOT more going on there:Dr. Grace Augustine: “You need to wake up, Parker. The wealth of this world isn’t in the ground – it’s all around us. This world didn’t evolve naturally; it was CREATED. Figuring out how it works and how it was done can be more valuable than anything you can dig out of the ground!”On the romance between Jake and Neytiri: As it is, it makes very little sense. She’s got no reason to fall for him. Massage things so that it’s clear that his enthusiasm and excitement over every little thing makes her see her world in a new light. Play up the tragic “Dido and Aeneas” aspect – she falls for him, even though she knows he’s going to destroy her world in the end.
Unobtainium—now that has the feeling of a first-draft idea that stayed in because Cameron was just like fuck it, the whole point is it doesn’t matter what it is or why it’s valuable or why it has such a goofy on-the-nose name.
Unobtanium is essential! It establishes Avatar as taking place in THE CORE Cinematic Universe.
The other name was McGuffianesium. Not sure which is better/worst.
Oof. Unobtainium has the edge there. Although I sometimes wish, e.g., the MCU would be as frank as Cameron about the true nature of whatever glowing doohickey is being sought or fought over.
Eh, one of the great strengths of Cameron is that he knows what can be left out. The movie is plenty long without dropping more obvious exposition, and the talky bits drag.
It doesn’t matter why unobtanium was important. It’s a commodity that can be harvested for a profit. That’s the point. It doesn’t matter if it’s a perfect superconductor or if it’s just table salt, the end stage of capitalism will strip mine an entire planet for a single resource if it can turn a profit
“It’s been more than a decade since a wholly original film was the biggest hit of its year.”Oh good GOD, get lost. You and everyone else knows there’s nothing original about Avatar’s story. Forget the visuals, forget the 3D dazzle, strip it down to the story and it’s beyond derivative.
UP was the real story hear, THE best, most original and most meaningful film of 2009, and you buried it as the ‘runner up’ because…I honestly don’t know why.
Uh, because the column is specifically about the high-grossing film of each year?
I don’t know if we can still call this movie a “forgotten blockbuster.” Clearly some guys are still thinking about it:
I got swept up in the craze when Avatar came out. I saw it twice. The story was definitely weak, but the effects and environment were amazing to see on a big screen.
I’ve never actually seen Avatar, but I have seen the Bones episode with the subplot of the interns camping out in line to see it. I’m assuming the episode came out before it had made a zillion dollars and was Fox’s way of trying to drum up business for the movie, but it’s sure weird to watch after the fact.
I absolutely hated Avatar, for a number of reasons—for one thing, all the things Tom lists as “not complaints” (entirely predictable story, uninteresting characters, supposedly-imaginative environments that were all too familiar) absolutely WERE complaints for me. Also, I’ve never been that big on 3D, and the movie gave me a raging headache (though that’s probably more the fault of my physiology than the movie’s, so we can give it a pass on that one).But my biggest problem with Avatar was that it was such a clear symbol of the cinema-as-product mentality that’s been dogging cinema since, well, pretty much since it was invented. We all know studios view movies as products; that’s not news. The goal is always to make as much money as possible, we get it. And sometimes you get that rare moment of synergy when something succeeds both at a product-level (i.e. makes a ton of money) and on a cinema level—the last subject for this column, The Dark Knight, is (in my opinion) an example of a movie that both made a fortune for its owners and actually succeeded as a well-made piece of art. With a movie like Avatar, though, the conversation was always about the money, never anything else. How expensive it all was, how cutting-edge the technology was, how much it made at the box office. But where’s the actual FILM? It’s a whole bunch of nothing, is what it is; an incredibly derivative, dull, predictable mish-mash of stereotypes and narrative shortcuts that has no actual substance at all. (Centering the whole thing around a charisma-void like Sam Worthington is certainly part of the problem, though the genuinely talented actors surrounding him all do their best.) The ultimate effect, for me, was just to underline how fucking EMPTY Hollywood can be. The “biggest movie of all time”, with the biggest budget, the biggest special effects, and the biggest box office—it’s nothing, it’s worthless as a narrative, it’s an afterthought as an actual film. Hollywood had all this money, all this technology, all of this attention from everyone in the world—and they wasted it. Flushed it all down the drain with some nothing-burger of a non-story full of non-characters and a plot that held exactly zero surprises. And now all anyone can talk about was how much money it made, which is the sad cherry atop this depression-sundae. Of all the movies in the world to be the “biggest of all time”, OF COURSE it would be this one, this testament to anti-creativity with nothing resembling an original idea to offer. OF COURSE it would. How could we ever expect anything more?That’s why I hate Avatar. It feels like an indictment of cinema, or at least of the cinema-consuming population’s tastes–like the thing we celebrate and reward the most is the thing which least deserves it. Please, somebody make a movie to make more money than Avatar, just so that the taste of this can be washed out of my mouth, and we can all finish forgetting about it forever.
I walked out of the theater with a headache after Avatar. Granted, it was probably the 3-D glasses, which tend to do that to me, and not the movie itself that brought it on, but the movie didn’t help. I didn’t hate it, but it was just so generic. The effects were gorgeous and very well done, but all the elements of the story were just so unoriginal I felt like I had seen it before even as I was watching it for the first time. Never had any desire to revisit it until I got Disney+ last year and I tried to give it a shot. It took me a solid week to get through it. The longest I could go without zoning out was about 15 minutes at a time.
Actually Up was my first 3D movie and it also gave me a headache.
I wear glasses, so I think it’s the 3D glasses over my regular pair that does it, but the longer I wear them the worse it is. So something as long as Avatar will really do a number on me. It wasn’t long after that that I just started avoiding 3D completely unless it was something that was really made for it, like Gravity.
I was reading this column and trying to remember why I’ve never seen this massively, massively popular movie and duh, here it is. Fellow glasses-wearer who cannot handle 3-D, so I gave this a pass in the theaters and never felt the urge to watch what was obviously a big theatrical experience at home.
This is the problem I have. I remember when the 3DS came out, the novelty lasted way longer for me than it seemed to for most. Shame glasses-free 3D never really took off.
Yep, even the fancy-ants new-style 3D glasses (in contrast to the cheapo paper ones) are aggravating to wear for too long. It’s lenses over lenses; your eyes have no idea what they’re supposed to be doing!
I said previously that I don’t care about Avatar enough to summon up the energy to be pissed at it. That’s not 100% true – I absolutely fucking HATE what it did with movies and 3D. That stuff gives me a migraine for the entire day – cant stand the process.So having Hollywood take away the message from Avatar that “Holy crap! 3D movies make BANK! Everything will be 3D now!!!” was annoying. Thank god the 3D fad has gone away again.
The thing with 3D is that it always makes the world look small. I go to the theatre to watch a larger then life screen and enjoy a movie. There is something lost for me having to watch it through 3D glasses that constrain your viewing field. It always feels like I’m watching a movie through a window.
The effects were gorgeous and very well done, but all the elements of the story were just so unoriginal I felt like I had seen it before even as I was watching it for the first time.I didn’t see it in cinemas, but this was definitely my reaction to it, too. I found it a slog to watch just the first time. I almost certainly won’t be revisiting it – or seeing any of the sequels.
“But the last two sequels that James Cameron made were Aliens and Terminator 2: Judgment Day. The man knows what he’s doing. Let him cook.”Goddam right. Can we please all agree to discuss box-office grosses using only inflation-adjusted numbers? It’s just fucking stupid to do otherwise. Saying Avatar or Endgame grossed like five times what the original Star Wars did is a completely misleading and pointless statement to make, until you put them on a level playing field by adjusting first for inflation. Ugh. Sorry, just fucking irks me.
Was so pissed that I missed seeing Aliens in the theater when I was a kid. Mom forced me to go to one of her co workers wedding while she took my brother and cousins to see it.
SO…..The first Alien movie? My mom took me to it when I was a little kid thinking it would be like Star Wars. There was some trauma…
I get what you’re saying and the frustration at how inaccurate the comparisons can be but both methods are flawed. The availability of media and the way people consume it are also factors (if the cinema is the *only* way to see a film then there’s a chance it’ll sell more tickets than films that can be later watched at home) so the playing field is never level.
Doesn’t mean I don’t wish there was an accurate way of seeing how many tickets were sold per film ever released – both as an indicator of the film’s popularity and general cinema business – but I can also see why the box office figure is used as an easy signifier of success.
Agreed, money generated is a somewhat blunt instrument to begin with. But we can’t let perfection be the enemy of good. Doing nothing is the worst option.
You probably already know this but The Numbers, the Frank to Box Office Mojo’s Sylvester, includes information of the number of tickets sold in addition to gross. Of course patchy information before 1975, and I don’t know if it’s based on facts or a formula of gross/ticket price, but I did find some interesting trivia; e.g. Mortal Kombat ($70million in 1995) actually sold more tickets than “record breakers” Detective Pikachu and Sonic (>$140million in 2019/20).
I’m aware not *everyone* would find that interesting
I work in theatre, and we keep a list of our highest selling shows for comparison. I make sure there is always a column where we account for inflation because it’s unfair to compare the hit show from this year that made 50% more than the one from 15 years ago.
To be fair, Avatar’s ticket prices were inflated by the increased cost of 3D and IMAX, and it absolutely deserves to take credit for that. I dropped over $30 to take my son to see it and felt that it was money well spent. So you really can’t inflation-adjust for things like that. And it’s gotten worse since then as theaters have raised prices in exchange for things like the big fancy seats and real restaurant food. The whole pricing model has changed as people pay more for the whole movie theater experience less often and move the bulk of their movie viewing to home theaters and streaming. a lot of Star Wars’ ticket sales were repeat viewings that simply wouldn’t happen in a theater these days.
Of course, by that standard, Gone With the Wind is probably still the reigning champion. There’s no doubt that there’s a large amount of baloney involved. It’s really about being able to stick “We’re Number One!” on the their ads.
Yeah, anyone wanna bet against the guy with two of the greatest sequels ever under his belt? Sure, I’ll take that action. And I’ll be there for Avatar 2 on day 1
It is funny. I haven’t rewatched the film since seeing it in theaters, but I am still annoyed by the huge miss of using all this 3D technology… and then just NOT using it during the destruction of the world tree. If there was ever a time to punch you in the face with 3D, that was it.
But art is subjective. I may not like it, but it is a gorgeous and passionate work of art.
My god, the way you bend over backwards making excuses for this so-cliched-you-can’t-believe-it-got-the-green-light flick is so pathetic. The characters literally could not be duller, more cliched, or more predictable. The whole movie is a snoozefest of “here it comes” dull trope moments. If a college sophomore handed in this script to a screenplay class, he’d get a D-.And why no interest in this all-time box office winner? Because the public has caught up to its utterly predictable “storytelling” and finds it doesn’t wear well. Dull is dull.
Avatar is okay. I don’t love it, I don’t dislike it. I think for all of the effort that went into it, the script came last. It drives me a little nuts that we see none of Jake’s struggle. He’s happily selling out the Na’vi one moment and leading the revolution the next. I don’t have a lot of personal interest in the sequels, but I’ll see them for my dad, who I lost in January, and who whole-heartedly loved this movie.
and yet i never liked the movie crazy
Like so many people, I’ve seen Avatar once. In true non-Christmas celebrating American tradition, I went to a Chines restaurant and then the movie theater for Christmas Day 2009. After that it was Waffle House because I am a terrible human being.I remember enjoying the movie well enough despite Sam Worthington being a charisma-free void at the center of the film, and the plot being fundamentally Dances With Wolves but with blue cat-people.It’s because Cameron absolutely commits to the verisimilitude of the world of Pandora. This completely CGI world feels real, because Cameron know how to build and respect an environment or atmosphere. I’ve never re-watched it. I probably should but I feel that it would lose a lot being 2D.
Yeah, I never had any desire to see it again, especially if I can’t see it in 3D. I thought it was beautiful, but the plot was blah.
Whatever else it did (or didn’t,) Avatar gave us “Flight of Passage” at Disney World, one of the very few (arguably the only) amusement park rides that manages to integrate motion and video screens for an immersive effect. The lines for it are always enormous, and they’re worth it. I can’t wait til Disney uses that technology for a rides based on a property that I actually like.
I almost didn’t try that ride because I wasn’t that big of a fan of the movie. Glad I decided to try that ride, it’s incredible. Somehow they trick your brain into thinking you are doing a loop like a roller coaster even though you are essentially on a stationary bike.
“Worthington’s Jake Sully is a blank—an empty glass waiting to be filled.”
One might even say he’s…an avatar.
As soon as Breihan mentioned “Alice in Wonderland,” my heart sank as I feared it might’ve been the #1 movie of 2010. Thank god it was not. Now let’s never speak of it again.
1000%. Its success still troubles me.
I think it makes a certain amount of sense if you look at both Burton and Depp’s filmographies: they were both still wildly popular at that point, and specifically their previous collaboration had been Sweeney Todd which was reasonably well received and moreover had the built-in advantage of being Sweeney Todd: I’m not saying it’s impossible to ruin Sweeney Todd, and in fact Burton tried pretty hard by casting a lot of non-singers, but at the end of the day when your silent third partner is Steven fucking Sondheim, you can paper over a lot of gaps with that.So while in hindsight Alice is absolutely the moment when it became impossible to hide that Burton and Depp both were running on fumes (literal booze fumes in Depp’s case), it got to coast in on a lot of pent-up good will. It wasn’t until Dark Shadows, a long two years later, that it became obvious to everyone that the wheels had fallen off.
Depp as Sweeney worked despite his mediocre singing, you could chalk it up to the character himself being a bad singer. Alice just completely flopped for me.
I watched it in cinema. I felt robbed. Still the second worst movie I’ve seen in theaters – Worst was Son Of The Mask, which I’m pretty sure I walked out on. Third worst is either Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief (Also 2010! Banner year for disappointing SFX crap) or Rise Of Skywalker, which I’m pretty sure caused COVID singlehandedly, and which we fortunately won’t see in this column.
I saw it because I was fifteen, thought Burton made some dope movies over the years, and I loved the Alice books so why the hell not. I knew it was bad from early on, but the moment that stupid hatter breakdance happened I knew it was a stinker for the ages.
One billion dollars…. for such a goddamb awful adaptation of a genuinely great story. And its not even Tim Burtons fault. This washed out grey warzone Wonderland was writer Linda Woovertons idea.
I still blame Disney at the end. They saw this garbage movie, made a sequel to it and then eventually made Wooverton’s Maleficent.
Yep. She has written four of these remakes. Four garbage films. To think she once wrote Beauty and the Beast…
That was my first 3D movie, and put me off the entire concept until friends convinced me that Doctor Strange was worth it.
Oh, no. You’re not getting me today. Not watching that Up clip.
My hot take: Avatar’s “cultural impact” is people talking about how it has no cultural impact. For a movie that seemingly “no one talks about,” I feel that I’m hearing that argument a lot over the past few years. And with increasing frequency. That’s a lot of Avatar talk for a movie that’s supposedly had no impact. (And kudos for calling out Cameron’s track record. The man has only really made 7 movies – not counting Piranha 2 – most of which can legitimately be called classics and two of which are STILL in the top 3 highest grossing movies of all time worldwide. The boy can make a movie – let’s see where he takes this thing.)
Let’s not forget that it is a business, and making money for studio shareholders is a must. No shareholder ever said “Stop!”
So basically Avatar is to film what post-finale Game of Thrones is to TV?
Ferngully takes issue with the “wholly original” thing.
Considering that Orion settled a lawsuit with Harlan Ellison that Terminator ripped off one of his Outer Limits episodes, it’s a bit much to give Cameron’s dreams all the credit here. Avatar’s story seems to draw a decent amount from Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Word For World Is Forest too…
Well, one of the side-effects of Ellison’s lawsuit is that neither James Cameron nor anyone else in Hollywood will ever again talk honestly about what their influences were. Cameron was unwise enough to mention in an early interview that he’d had Ellison’s Outer Limits episodes somewhat in mind when writing The Terminator and for his troubles Orion ended up underwriting Ellison’s retirement.Now, I’ve seen and enjoyed Demon with a Glass Hand, and you can definitely see an influence on The Terminator from it, but had Cameron not explicitly mentioned it, Ellison would have had a hell of a time proving copyright infringement in court: other than the shared plot element of a time-traveling android creating a bootstrap paradox, the stories are frankly not much alike. But Cameron had gone on the record, Orion decided it would be simpler to just pay Ellison to go away, and now here we are: nuisance copyright lawsuits against successful films are a regular fact of life (like the crazy lady who keeps claiming that she actually wrote The Matrix) and nobody in the scriptwriting business will ever again credit an idea to anything other than “a dream I had when I was a kid.”
“Well, one of the side-effects of Ellison’s lawsuit is that neither James Cameron nor anyone else in Hollywood will ever again talk honestly about what their influences were.”
Really? Join the rest of us in 2021 and see if you’re right?
Avatar also owes a helluva lot to Poul Anderson’s “Call Me Joe.”
I’ve been scrolling trying to find someone who pointed this out. Technically, it’s an original screenplay, but it is definitely not an original story.
Ugh, that fucking Papyrus
As I heard on a recent podcast, someone – I believe it may have been Jason Mantzoukas? – said how despite Avatar’s massive undeniable success, it also had zero pop cultural impact. Compare to, say, Titanic, or Terminator 2, which both became cultural touchstones.
It’s a fascinating achievement, and worth discussing – not solely to drag the movie, which I’ve never seen and don’t particularly care to, but to consider how something was SO popular and yet had zero staying power in the zeitgeist.
I think it suffers a bit from something I call the Vegas effect: when everything is amazing, nothing is. And when everyone has seen something so spectacular and says “Yeah, that was good”, then there’s nowhere for the conversation to go, unless you feel like parsing gradations of “amazing” vs “exciting”. Everyone just sort of agrees that it is what it is and we all saw it and we go back to playing Pokemon.
I also think it’s more the fault of the golden age of TV we got going here. Hell, GoT held a lot of our collective imagination for 9 years, even in its final descent into rushed mediocrity. Yet now it’s just the butt of think-pieces talking about why no one talks about it any more.
It’s because it was a beautiful movie with amazing effects, but a boring and tired plot.
There’s just nothing in it to reference where it doesnt make more sense to just bring up whatever it was avatar was referencing itself.
Agreed. When I saw it I said to my friend that it felt like Cameron did a copy and paste from all his other movie scripts and came up with this movie. While it may be an awesome clip show, it’s still a clip show and that doesn’t have staying power.
rewatched it earlier in quarantine, it’s still a blast. not sure i ‘care’ about sequels, but i’ll obviously watch them and probably enjoy them.
I’d rather have True Lies 2, or 2 Lies. Arnold and Jamie Lee Curtis as spies just works so well.
2 True 2 Lies
Cameron is full of shit. He just remixed a bunch of old stories. I think I stopped watching around the time Sigourney came on and I went home. All the 3D motion made me nauseous.
Star Wars was Flash Gordon mixed in with The Hidden Fortress. Star Trek was every pulp science fiction story from the ‘50s with a few WW films and Westerns blended in. Nobody creates in a vacuum, and “original” just means their ignorant of the source material.
Jesus fucking christ, this is the av club. Time was, the commenters here might have been smart enough to recognize that literally every story ever told is remixed from hundreds of other points of inspiration, but not anymore
“A wholly original story”Using this account for the first time in like 3 years just to say that literally 90% of the plot is lifted from ‘The Word For World Is Forest’ by Ursula LeGuin.
I haven’t been frequenting this site that long but it feels like it’s been revisited three or four times. Is it that fun to shit on? Dances with SmurfGulley! Yadda Yadda Yadda! We get it. All style, no substance.
Up is kind of a hard watch, especially the beginning music, as it was used for my wedding to what’s now an ex
What would’ve happened if they had casted a Michele Rodriguez as the lead, and Worthington as the Zoe Saladena part? Would the constant harping of the last 10 years of “white saviour” trope have gone away, or just morphed into something more nuanced?
I’ve tried watching this several times, I’ve never made it to the one-hour mark.
Just. So. Boring.
“Michael Bay’s Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen, the year’s No. 2 hit”Missed a letter in the last word there.
I don’t like Avatar. It’s cliched and predictable, but that’s not necessarily why I don’t like it. Pacific Rim is equally cliched and predictable, and it’s absolutely amazing.I’m having trouble articulating what the difference is. Pacific Rim’s characters are walking cliches, but almost all of them are brimming with warmth and personality regardless — they’re larger than life, every minute they’re on screen. (The ensemble cast make up for Charlie Hunnam, who is kind of similar to Sam Worthington in this — not particularly memorable.) Meanwhile, all the characters in Avatar are bland nothings.Pacific Rim is a dumb, over-the-top blockbuster — and that’s what it wants to be. It’s about giant robots fighting giant monsters. It can’t possibly work if it isn’t a little silly — and I think that’s what gives it its charm. Meanwhile, Avatar wants to be an over-the-top blockbuster while still being taken seriously — and as a result, it has no personality whatsoever. (And it doesn’t even have an original, interesting plot to make up for that.)I guess it comes down to personality and originality — you need to have at least one.
Ccounterpoint, you can actually see the action in avatar, which makes it exponentially better
Fair point, I guess.
Nothing in Avatar has had the staying power of Idris Elba bellowing: “Today we are cancelling the apocalypse!”
Obligatory Top 10 Highest Grossing Movies Of 2009 Post: The Numbers1. Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen, Paramount, $402,111,8702. Avatar, 20th Century Fox, $352,114,898 3. Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince, Warner Bros., $301,959,1974. Up, Disney/Pixar, $293,004,1645. The Twilight Saga: New Moon, Summit Entertainment/Lionsgate, $287,954,6556. The Hangover, Warner Bros., $277,322,5037. Star Trek, Paramount, $257,730,0198. The Blind Side, Warner Bros., $208,476,067 9. Monsters VS. Aliens, Paramount, $198,351,526 10. Ice Age: Dawn Of The Dinosaurs, 20th Century Fox, $196,573,705Wikipedia1. Avatar, 20th Century Fox, $2,749,064,3282. Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince, Warner Bros., $934,416,4873. Ice Age: Dawn Of The Dinosaurs, 20th Century Fox, $886,686,8174. Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen, Paramount, $836,303,6935. 2012, Sony/Columbia, $769,679,4736. Up, Disney/Pixar, $735,099,0827. The Twilight Saga: New Moon, Summit Entertainment/Lionsgate, $709,711,0088. Sherlock Holmes, Warner Bros., $524,028,6799. Angels & Demons, Sony/Columbia, $485,930,81610. The Hangover, Warner Bros., $467,483,912
Jesus, 2009 was a fucking terrible year. Of those two top-10 lists the only ones I’ve seen are Avatar, Star Trek, Transformers, 2012, Angels and Demons and Hangover. Star Trek and the Hangover are the only two I’ve revisited more than once.
Obligatory Every Movie Featured In These Articles Ranked From Best To Worst Post: The Godfather (1972)2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)The Exorcist (1973)Jaws (1975)Saving Private Ryan (1998)The Dark Knight (2008)Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)Raiders Of The Lost Ark (1981)Blazing Saddles (1974)Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1980)Star Wars: A New Hope (1977)E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982)Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid (1969)Rocky (1976)Jurassic Park (1993)The Graduate (1967)West Side Story (1961)Beverly Hills Cop (1984)Back To The Future (1985)Batman (1989)Lord Of The Rings: Return Of The King (2003)Spider-Man (2002)Toy Story (1995)Star Wars: Return Of The Jedi (1983)Spartacus (1960)Titanic (1997)Rain Man (1988)Kramer VS Kramer (1979)Harry Potter And The Sorcerer’s Stone (2001)Top Gun (1986)The Longest Day (1962)Aladdin (1992)Independence Day (1996)Three Men And A Baby (1987)Billy Jack (1971)My Fair Lady (1964)Cleopatra (1963)The Sound Of Music (1965)Avatar (2009)Star Wars: Revenge Of The Sith (2005)Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (1999)Spider-Man 3 (2007)Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (2006)Forrest Gump (1994)Home Alone (1990)Grease (1978)Shrek 2 (2004)The Bible: In The Beginning… (1966)Love Story (1970)How The Grinch Stole Christmas (2000)
I only finally watched Avatar a few years ago. I’m sorry, but it is REALLY not my bag. I remember at one point I paused it not quite an hour in, and when I saw how much there was left to watch, I exclaimed in marked dismay. (By contrast, first time I watched Seven Samurai, a movie 50+ years older and about 45 minutes longer, I had planned to go to bed in the middle and resume the next day, but I could never find a point where I wanted to pause, so I ended up staying up until about 3 AM to finish it. So I am not opposed to long movies when I’m enjoying them.) It wasn’t even that shit about the movie hadn’t aged well. As Tom notes, the CGI holds up really well (although the CGI parts look more like a CGI animated movie than live action, but whatever). The plot and characters are boringly derivative and predictable, and the spectacle was not enough to make up for those flaws. I just wasn’t feeling it. I doubt I’ll bother investing the time to see any of the sequels, but if you were a fan, have fun.
One thing that kind of surprised me the post-Avatar era is how few filmmakers seemed to truly embrace 3D or try interesting things with it. 3D is a striking innovation in movie technology, and though it had been around for many decades (with a golden era in the 1950s), digital technology finally made it less clunky to work with than in the film days. At least in the US, it seemed to be used more as a cash grab by studios, rather than a tool that directors really played with.
I agree. I think Life of Pi is a movie that did really well with 3D, but that’s the only one that immediately comes to mind.
What I thought was great was the ESPN 3D channel. Sports in 3D were really cool. I would always watch the 3D broadcast when it was available. Unfortunately no one else did.
“Hugo” is another good one, and Godard’s “Goodbye to Language” had some interesting 3D moments, including one in which the two eyes presented completely different shots. You would never see a Hollywood blockbuster play with the form like that!Perhaps “Avatar 2″ will be another shot in the arm for 3D and will spur filmmakers to try something new. Or it’ll be an outlier and not lead to a 3D revival. Who knows?
I heard good things about Language, but didn’t get to see it. I saw Hugo (not in 3D), but didn’t enjoy it enough to seek it out in 3D. I do hope Cameron has something cool cooked up for Avatar 2.
I think a good gauge of the impact of a movie like this is how kids react to it. Were kids watching Avatar over and over when it was released on DVD? Were they begging their parents for Avatar toys, bedsheets, etc.? Genuine question for those of you who were kids at the time or who had kids at the time old enough to watch it.
To me some snark was warranted at the time because the movie was sold to us as this mind-blowing, immersive, original, “you’ve never seen anything like this before”, from-the-mind-of-Cameron, etc. etc. etc. Then it’s basically alien Dances with Wolves. Mind you, GOOD alien Dances with Wolves, but still. Took some of the “originality” polish off it. Had Dances with Wolves never existed, I might consider Avatar an all-timer.Given some time and some perspective, I think this article is spot on about the good and the bad. I’m interested to see where Cameron goes with this in FOUR sequels he’s been planning for over a decade. I have no hatred for it, and if I see it on TV I’ll usually tune in for a bit and possibly get sucked in for the whole thing.But I remember the marketing, and how it was mildly disappointing that a movie with such visual flair basically recycled a plot from another movie. That deserved some snark. Not that it doesn’t happen all the time. It’s the same feeling I had when I realized Cars was animated car Doc Hollywood.
the film exists in a long line of movies about white guys who immediately become the most awesome people in the societies that adopt them.Yeah…on a related note, I’m not too excited about Villeneuve’s decision to make Paul Atreides white and the Fremen not white. Might be a bit distracting.
It’s been more than a decade since a wholly original film was the biggest hit of its year. All our reigning blockbusters since 2009’s Avatar have been sequels or adaptations or sequels to adaptations.Does John Wick not count because it was modestly-budgeted (only in blockbuster-world would $20-30 million be modestly-budgeted)?
john wick doesn’t count because it wasn’t #1 in the box office for the year of its release
Cameron has said that he got the idea for his 1984 breakout The Terminator from a fever dream that he had – when he fell asleep watching the Outer Limits episode “Soldier”, written by Harlan Ellison, I’m pretty sure.
The people in the Abyss are oil-rig workers. It is an underwater oil rig!And Avatar sucks. I literally laughed out loud in the theater at some of the stupidity and there is something colonial itself in the idea of making a movie out of, “Dances with Wolves, but the Native American religion is provably true.”
Since we’re talking about Avatar, and that’s bringing back fuzzy memories of what happened in the movie, and there was something that bothered me when I saw it. Jake goes and tames his banshee, and it’s a thrilling sequence, and supposed to be a big moment in the story, key to him being accepted by the Navi and the formation of a deep personal bond between him and his new steed. And then, in short order, it’s revealed that he has to tame the bigger banshee, which of course he does in short order, because he’s Jake Sully, best of the best.So what happens to the first banshee? Is the first banshee okay with sharing Jake? Does it go back to the wild? I kind of feel bad for the first banshee, who seems like a big deal and then just turns out to be a stepping stone toward Jake acquiring a bigger and more badass flying alien creature.
Everyone saying that Avatar had no lasting cultural impact is proven wrong by the fact it spawned the single best SNL filmed bit since Lonely Island left.
I own Avatar, so I guess I like it, despite it’s flaws. Even though it’s derivative, I still appreciate that it was new at a time when originality was already beginning to die. Surprisingly, I haven’t heard Avatar described as pastiche before. But yes, that works, and it is how I will defend this film from now on.
[Cameron’s] best source for intellectual property isn’t comic books or
young adult literature or even the sci-fi paperbacks that he so
obviously loves. It’s the unconscious mind.
I love this. You think it’d be a prerequisite for any filmmaker. But directors and their movies these days are becoming more and more workman like, even (especially) the big budget stuff. I don’t think another fantasy film has captured a similar sense of wonder in me in the years since Avatar came out.
Saw this movie in Imax 3D. And it’s still the greatest 3D visual spectacle I’ve ever seen. That said, the movie today looks rough outside that format. The CGI is super noticeable and uncanny. And the story is generic.
Complain about Avatar and James Cameron all you want but every time he makes a movie he brings his A game. The genius of his 3D was that immersion. He didn’t bring Avatar out to our world. He created a depth that you looked INTO.
For that matter, so does the white-savior stuff; the film exists in a long line of movies about white guys who immediately become the most awesome people in the societies that adopt them.
Why does the “white savior” trope exist?The “white savior” is an outsider. Typically, he is an outsider to a more technologically primitive people, as in Dances with Wolves. But the main thing is that he is an outsider. He comes form a different cultural tradition with different knowledge and skill from the locals. In learning the ways of the locals, the “white savior” is in a position to combine his own culture’s knowledge and traditions with the knowledge and traditions of the locals. He thereby achieves a greater knowledge, a greater competence than either the locals or his previous self.If a Manhattan doctor goes to live among the rustic natives of Myanmar, he perhaps does to learn the wisdom of the local healers – what remedies they use, how they are concocted and administered, etc. But he still has his preexisting knowledge of western medicine. He is therefore in a position to combine his medical knowledge with the medical traditions of the locals to improve the medical care available to those locals – to make their own traditional medicine more effective, to introduce new medical practices unknown to the locals, etc. And in doing so, he becomes the most awesome doctor in the society which adopts him. Just as he also becomes a better, more knowledgeable doctor among his own people when/if he returns home.This is less a “white savior” trope than it is an “outsider savior” trope. It’s a trope that works because the underlying concept is valid. No one person knows everything. No one culture knows everything. Each knows what it knows, and what it knows is often very localized in scope. By learning from others, we improve ourselves. With luck, we also improve those others. This process is not a denigration of the other. It is a recognition of the value of the other as the “white savior’s” salvation is not due solely to his outsider knowledge. It is due to his combination of his outside knowledge with the knowledge of the locals.So, to criticize the “white savior” trope as racist, which is often the case, is to fundamentally misunderstand what is going on. It is a criticism that exposes the bigotry of the critic more than the supposed bigotry of the criticized.
Everyone wants to bring up FernGully, but that one is a REAL forgettable movie, and would have been better served interjecting itself with banshees fighting helicarriers itself.
For me, this movie’s only standout feature was the best 3D I’d ever seen in theaters, bar none. Then I saw Gravity in IMAX, which surpassed it as a visual experience in my opinion. So now this movie exists in my mind as… probably my least favorite Cameron movie.
You could have mentioned that just as the film was a lazy, tired retread of plots from better stories, the score was a carbon copy of James Horner’s prior work.
This whole piece seems to crash into the barrier of reality with the sentence ‘The military biopic American Sniper, the biggest hit of 2014, could be considered an exception, but it was based on a widely read memoir, and it was about a real-life famous person.’ Oh, okay, so you don’t understand why people who aren’t exactly like you might enjoy films.
Avatar is James Cameron’s usual mix of extreme competence with visual effects and plot building.
“It’s been more than a decade since a wholly original film was the biggest hit of its year.”
No.
“Avatar” is not a wholly original film in any way except the visual effects, and while those were stunning at the time, their impact fades quickly when you realize how derivative and problematic the story is and how most of the characters are awkward clichés.
Fern Gully in Space
so awful
It’s one of the first movies I watched when I finally bought a truly big TV two Christmases ago.
That being said, “wholly original” is stretching a bit when the main story beats are lifted from other movies. Dances with Wolves stands out as very similar.
Jesus. Thanks for the apologetic claptrap about this movie with massive inherent flaws, and for lightly dunking on Lord of the Rings without giving it enough credit.
I do give it some credit that it “was” sort of original (in that it just ripped off dances with wolves, if that qualifies as “original”), but really, this film is the most underserved box office champ ever. It basically rode a fad (3D) that no one even does anymore. I will not go over the many criticisms (no article, the criticisms ARE a complaint) of the movie other than to say, everyone of them are true. The plot is so hooey you shake your head at it, from the literal McGuffin of a plot to the comic book sneering villains. It was all a 3D fad. That is the only reason it was as big as it was.