Taylerama

On “Avatar,” the future of cinema, and how stupid I may be.

After an opening weekend clouded by an East Coast blizzard, “Avatar” has skyrocketed into that rarefied box office air where our collective pop consciousness takes shape. Look at the list: “Titanic,” “The Lord of the Rings,” “Harry Potter,” “The Dark Knight,” “Pirates of the Caribbean,” “Jurassic Park,” “Star Wars.” I didn’t love all of these movies, but I knew plenty of people who did.

Conversely, I have yet to have a single conversation, email, or tweet with anyone who loved, or even REALLY liked “Avatar.” Despite praise from some critical fans like Roger Ebert (who’s usually better than anyone at spotting and championing grand popular entertainment), I dismissed this disconnect as a byproduct of the 3D dog-and-pony-show: even if you don’t LIKE “Avatar,” you still have to see it because it’s “the future” and all that. Ebert and some hardcore fanboys aside, I didn’t really believe anyone liked “Avatar” as anything other than a tech demo.

Then the nominations and awards stared piling up, chief among them the usual Oscar signposts from the PGA and DGA, and now James Cameron’s triumph at the Golden Globes. Immediately after the Globes telecast I searched #avatar on Twitter, looking for Na’vi-tongued tweets of joy from blue-faced profile pics — looking for the self-proclaimed “Avatards” who love this movie and who have been all but invisible to me. Instead I read one pissed-off tweet after another, wondering, as I do, how “Avatar” beat 2009’s three certifiable live-action classics: “The Hurt Locker,” “Up in the Air,” and “Inglorious Basterds.”

I don’t care about the Golden Globes or the Oscars — it’s pointless to get worked up about groups who have pinned their shiny stars on the wrong movies, actors, and directors for more than 80 years. I care about the conversation, that free-flowing dialogue among film lovers that’s much more influential than any statue in determining which movies matter. So I guess I’m wondering, is “Avatar” now part of this conversation? To compare it to what will soon be Cameron’s second-biggest movie, “Avatar’s” detractors seem far more numerous than “Titanic’s,” its admirers far fewer.

I realize that discussing a general “feeling” that I have about “Avatar’s” popularity is a weak argument in the face of $1.4 billion. “Titanic” may have seemed more ubiquitous and beloved because in 1997 I was in high school, surrounded by the movie’s fawning target audience. Maybe if I was in high school now, or working in a traditional office environment, “Avatar” would “seem” more popular. Plus in 2010, the niche-nature of mass communication makes it far easier to avoid a movie you dislike, or to burrow into every molecule of its CGI soil. I am not an Avatard, so I don’t spend my time riding butterfly-colored dragons on Pandora websites, or discussing the indigenous flora and fauna. Or whatever.

So that leaves me with the numbers. I’ve yet to see figures for “Avatar’s” box office performance that adjust for the $5-$10 3D surcharge — high ticket prices don’t necessarily translate into a bigger audience, which is why “Gone with the Wind” is still the highest-grossing movie of all time when adjusting for inflation. Of course, those numbers might not be as significant as the fact that people are willing to pay such a surcharge — more than once in some cases — in the middle of a recession, as entertainment profits decline across all media.

I think this is where “Avatar” really will be a cinematic game-changer: movie economics, not the art of moviemaking.

The two aren’t quite as intertwined as some pundits would have you believe. I don’t think “Avatar” will take a place alongside “The Birth of a Nation,” “Citizen Kane, ” “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” “Open City,” and “Breathless” as one of those epochal shifts in film grammar — the movie’s blockbuster ordinariness will become more apparent once it’s widely seen at home in 2D, where I doubt many will find it nearly as rewarding as Cameron’s earlier movies. If you want to throw CGI into the mix, “Toy Story” and “The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers” were far more revolutionary in terms of using 1s and 0s to create living, breathing, FEELING characters.

What Cameron has done with “Avatar” is more prosaic: he has legitimized 3D. I hope you don’t mind wearing tight plastic glasses on your head for two hours — this is how we’ll be watching our comic book movies and space operas from now on. Not because 3D makes these movies “better,” but because people are willing to pay that $5-$10 surcharge. 3D technologies helped balloon box office numbers for various animated movies in the last five years, and now Cameron has made the format viable for live-action-CGI hybrids like “Avatar” too.

That’s a “Star Wars” or “Jaws”-style innovation, not a “Citizen Kane”-style innovation. The Coen Brothers will never pick up a 3D camera, and I doubt Quentin Tarantino will either. Your local Landmark art house won’t need to install 3D projectors to accommodate Michael Haneke’s next movie. “Avatar” changes the business model of one specific type of movie — the type of movie that underwrites the bottom line at every major studio in Hollywood.

Maybe that’s why “Avatar’s” hype doesn’t match audience enthusiasm in my experience: Hollywood and all the businesses that depend on its products to sell more products need this movie to be the biggest movie of all time, and they’ve been acting like it already is for the better part of a year. Hollywood’s very survival depends on an experience that can’t be pirated off the Internet, and can’t be approximated on home theatre systems (yet) — it needs butts in theatre seats. So “Avatar” stays on the front page, and it wins awards from the very industry so invested in its success, and if we keep hearing it’s the best and most important movie ever then maybe we’ll all start believing it.

I can’t think of another explanation for “Avatar’s” box office success and the audience indifference I’m perceiving, because as spectacular as it often is at vindicating 3D, “Avatar” is far and away Cameron’s weakest movie not featuring piranhas; I even liked “True Lies” better. Haters mock the film’s earthy “Dances with Wolves” noble savagery and simpleminded liberal politics, but these are just symptoms of a filmmaker going uncharacteristically soft, who seems far more thrilled with his gizmos than with his story.

Cameron has always been a horror filmmaker at heart. In their own unique ways, “Aliens,” the “Terminators,” and “Titanic” all fall into that classic B-movie formula where a ragtag band of survivors tries to escape an unstoppable evil. Cameron’s genius is in how he elevates that primitive concept into a dread-laced struggle for humanity itself, whether people are trying to scramble back to the top of the food chain or stave off the apocalypse. For all its cheese, “Titanic” was the purest and most accessible expression of Cameron’s steely fatalism, a widescreen catastrophe both dooming a small-scale love story and rendering it timeless.

“Avatar” has it’s own doozy of a mini-Titanic sequence — the felling of the Na’vi tree — that’s also the only green-screen scene in the move that seems like it’s part of a James Cameron movie, rather than some sub-“Phantom Menace” “Star Wars”-knockoff. The vintage Cameron chill never kicks in, as it does in the far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far superior, far cheaper, and far flatter “District 9,” because, by construction, “Avatar” puts no compelling human element at risk. To identify with, to really care about, the Na’vi, no matter who’s wired into their blue bodies, is to root AGAINST humanity, flawed and caricatured though it may be. No matter what’s floating in front of our faces or diving at us from some floating mountain, “Avatar’s” self-hating pretensions underly and dull even it’s most exciting moments. Spending 3 hours on Pandora is less an adventure than a lecture: the T-1000 is us, cheer our destruction. It’s the first Cameron movie in which the filmmaker isn’t particularly invested in the survival, or even the betterment, of the human race.

My indifference to “Avatar” as a movie aside, I fully allow for the possibility that all this exists only in my head, that “Avatar” could be as beloved as “Star Wars,” even without the blessing of my friends, family, and acquaintances. In the run-up to the 2005 Oscars I was so off-put by “Million Dollar Baby’s” treacly final hour that I convinced myself “The Aviator” would be the night’s big winner, and said so in a newspaper article. I let my opinions get in the way of calling one of the easiest Best Picture races of the decade. If loving “Avatar” is a similar slamdunk for you, well, that’s the beauty of the movies: you can visit Pandora again and again, and I can stay far, far away.

Image from screenrant.com