“I was a warrior who dreamed he could bring peace. Sooner or later, though, you always wake up.”
Checking in on James Cameron’s Avatar in anticipation of its long-gestating sequel (Avatar: The Way of Water), I was once again taken by its scope and vision as well as the extraordinary tactical and technical effort that brought it to the screen. Revisiting the richly imagined world of Pandora, with its majestic flora and fauna, blue-skinned shamanic cat people, psionically controlled native-human hybrids, and futuristic terran military is an escapist joy now just as it was in theaters. It’s true that watching it on a television knocks its stunning visual achievement down a peg or two, but it’s an excellent four-quadrant popcorn epic nonetheless.
Sadly, I was also reminded of the untold criticisms that it has received in the thirteen years since its release. It’s too long, its story is recycled and thematically reductive, its dialogue is alternately self-serious and cornball, its main character gets lost in the shuffle, its supporting players are one-dimensional, its love story is derivative. For many, Avatar stands as the most overrated movie of all time.
But the term overrated is almost certainly misapplied here. I mean, do that many people really hold Avatar in such high regard? It got solid reviews from serious critics, but serious critics laud tentpole action films all the time. And what high concept blockbuster doesn’t suffer from a handful of the same issues that mark Cameron’s film? For points of comparison, just take a skim through a list of the highest grossing movies of all time, a list which Avatar happens to top. And therein lies the real root of all of this crying foul—that an original auteur-driven IP somehow beat out established franchise films with extremely large fan bases that all but guaranteed they would make beaucoup bucks.
Sure, when set against, say, Rear Window or The Godfather or Mulholland Drive, Avatar doesn’t stand up as an all-around cinematic experience. (Although, it is probably the only blockbuster fantasy film that bears mentioning alongside films image-driven films like Baraka and Koyaanisqatsi.) So what? When among its kin—your Star Warses and your Marvel mash-ups—it holds its own in terms of story, theme, and character, and surpasses most others in terms of spectacle. Which, of course, is the whole point of its existence. Cameron didn’t wait ten years to fine tune his story, he waited ten years for the tech to catch up to his vision. And what a brilliant and thorough vision it is—maybe the closest a live action film has come to matching the animated fantasy worlds created by Hayao Miyazaki in films like Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and Princess Mononoke.
People like to point out that nobody remembers Jake Sully’s (Sam Worthington) name—and so how could Avatar possibly have been a huge cultural event if it had so little lasting impact?—forgetting, it seems, that the franchise characters they know and love have been constantly spoon fed to them for literal decades. Look, I like A New Hope as much as the next casual Star Wars fan, but if there hadn’t been a dozen more movies and oodles of spin off novels, cartoons, action figures, Legos, comic books, video games, board games, card games, what have you, A New Hope would still just be called Star Wars, and people wouldn’t talk about Luke Skywalker like he’s a real person, okay? It would be a great film that’s almost fifty years old. There are hundreds of great films that are almost fifty years old and the general population has never heard of most of them. So it seems that what’s really making people chafe here is that Avatar appeared out of nowhere as a standalone film without any pre-existing legacy, made almost three billion dollars, and then receded into the background while James Cameron tinkered away on the sequel(s), instead of capitalizing on its success by launching spin off television shows and whatnot.
I can’t be the only one who considers it liberating that I was able to thoroughly enjoy a mega-expensive science fiction epic in 2009 and that I can look forward to watching its mega-expensive follow-up in 2022 without having to backtrack through hundreds of hours worth of lower caliber supplementary media.
Anyway, I realize I’ve scarcely written anything about Avatar itself, which is fine, because everyone with a pulse and eyes has seen it, right? It’s everything high concept, big budget filmmaking should be.