"Avatar" at last

                                                                           
Let me start by saying that I've been a huge fan of James Cameron's work since before I knew who he was.  I love the "Terminator" franchise (save the past summer's McG-helmed disaster) - yes, including the oft-belittled "Sarah Connor Chronicles" that I am still naively hoping will come back as a mini-series or TV movie at some point to wrap up the loose ends - and I don't think the guy has made a movie that wasn't hugely entertaining.  I saw Titanic at least six times in the theater, which should say it all.

Certainly Cameron is not a terribly prolific filmmaker, but when he does a movie he does it right.  Even his most ardent detractors have to admit that he's as technically proficient a director as there is (and everything I've heard about his behavior on set and in post-production indicates that regardless of his people skills or ego, he knows what he wants and knows at least as much about the tech side of the craft as any other director out there).  Personally, I'll admit to even having a soft spot in my heart for his corny dialogue and emotionally manipulative tricks - indeed, part of what I love about his movies is that I know I'm being manipulated, and I even know how, and it still works.  Perhaps my favorite example comes from a scene about 2/3 of the way through Titanic (SPOILER ALERT for the two people on the planet who are both ignorant of historical fact and have not seen the movie:  the boat sinks).  The scene in question has Leo handcuffed to a pipe as the room he's in is slowly filling with water.  It's been a tense build-up to this point, and there's still another hour of movie to go, so Cameron breaks the tension with a nicely placed bit of humor (never mind if it works with the characters or not):  as Kate goes to find something to break the cuffs, Leo remarks to no one in particular "I'll just wait here, then."  Minor chuckle, the tension ratchets back a bit to give some room to grow back as the climax approaches, and we continue on.  Brilliant.

I'll also note that I remember hearing about the budget overruns on that movie and brashly doubting any profit could be made on its at-the-time record-breaking $200 million cost.  Lesson learned, and learned well:  never bet against Cameron, either critically or commercially.  Of course, it's easy to say that now that Avatar's box office is approaching the $2 billion mark, but for the record I had no doubts that the movie would do well - the reason it took me so long to see it is that I was holding out for an IMAX 3-D screening, all of which were booked at the times I was free during its first couple weeks of release (and then I was out of town and/or teaching an intensive all-day course for the next three).  It's worth noting that Cameron helmed the first movie budgeted at over $100 million (Terminator 2), the first budgeted at over $200 million (Titanic), and I'm sure the first to hit whatever Avatar's costs ultimately ended up being, and all of those made huge chunks of money.  If I was a studio head, if he came to me looking for funding for a movie, at this point it would be tough to turn him down even if the budget was $1 billion...

Which brings me to Avatar itself.  By now so much has been said about this movie, it seems almost pointless to try to add anything new.  So here I won’t try to review the movie (it's worth seeing) or discuss its philosophical/societal implications (I think those who say that it's anti-religion are completely missing the point; it is pro-environment as some have complained, but it's a sad commentary on our society that anyone finds this offensive - are they anti-environment?  It’s not like Avatar’s suggesting that all industry is bad, just that there are probably more thoughtful ways to interact with nature than blindly obliterating it without any consideration for the effects of doing so) or even argue about what it may say about our species (as depressing as it is to admit this, if humankind ever did reach another inhabited planet that had resources we wanted, there’s a pretty good chance that this is exactly how we’d behave.  I was rewatching The Matrix the other day, and it occurred to me that Agent Smith’s line about humans being like a virus, a disease, would have been equally at home in Avatar...).  Instead, I'd like to look at the movie from the standpoint of a cinema scholar/producer and muse a bit about what it accomplishes in terms of the cinema as an institution.

First, and perhaps most importantly from the industry's standpoint, it has reminded people of the magic of going to the movies.  As home theater technology has improved and ticket prices have skyrocketed, people have over the past decade increasingly chosen to watch movies at home instead of going to the cinemas.  Certainly I myself have had experiences where I've been at the theater and realized (when I just paid ten bucks to experience an out-of-focus the picture, or an incorrectly set-up sound system, or some loud person behind me talking the whole time) that I should have just waited for a movie to come out on Blu-ray and watched it at home (where I know my TV and surround system are set up correctly, I always get a good seat, and there's zero chance that I'll be seated in front of someone talking, or behind someone talking on their cell phone, or loudly unwrapping candies every thirty seconds...).  But I digress... the point is that in recent years, moviegoing has lost some of its luster while watching movies at home has gotten easier and better.  If you have a good sound system, big screen HDTV, and Blu-ray player, it seems hard to justify going out to the theater.

Yet Avatar is packing theaters, week after week.  A lot of pundits (who either have some axe to grind with Cameron, or are just the type of people who want to attack anything that's successful, or are pissed that their own particular favorite box office draw has been surpassed in the record books) have been loudly griping that Avatar has not really been as successful as its grosses would suggest because its box office numbers have been falsely inflated by ________ (your choice of 3-D surcharges, IMAX pricing, and/or inflation).  Not to act as an apologist for the movie, but give me a break.  By any measure, the movie is an enormous hit, and if it’s been successful than at convincing people it’s worth the extra cost to see it in IMAX, 3-D, or both, that’s hardly a strike against it – rather, sounds like a smart business move.  I’ve read numerous people arguing that Gone With the Wind is the “true” box office champ, yet none of them seem to care that moviegoers seeing that film in its first run often paid a premium, or that the box office numbers cited for it today include its multiple rereleases over the seventy years since its original release in 1939.

None of this is to say that Avatar is the undisputed champ of the box office – certainly inflation makes it difficult to compare movies from previous decades to one release today – just that regardless of how you slice the numbers, it’s bringing a LOT of people to the theater (idea:  what about instead of charting box office numbers, we compare movies by number of admissions?  That model would have its own drawbacks, but at least would shut people up about inflation, 3-D pricing, etc.).  That’s a rarity these days, and something about which the movie industry is rightly excited:  this film is reminding people that going to the cinema can be something extraordinary.  And because of this, Avatar is increasing not just its own box office, but that of other films as well.  At least anecdotally (I was discussing this with some students the other day, and they had the same feeling), it seems some of the people who were not regular theater-goers but went to see Avatar remembered that there IS something different about seeing a movie in a theater (as opposed to at home) and have gone back to see other movies as well.

Whether this is a long-term trend (or even one verifiable with hard evidence) remains to be seen, but it’s a start.  My gut feeling is that it might continue if other movies can do the same thing as Avatar, which is to remind us of the “magic of the movies.”  I’m not sure they can, which brings me to my second major point:  Avatar does something new.  Once in a long while a movie comes along that shatters expectations of what the cinema can do and be.  In my film history textbooks, I read about the first audiences to see the Lumiere films, or the original King Kong, or the first Star Wars movie in its original release, and always envied them a bit:  they got to see barriers being broken, see the movies really doing something new for the first time.  Myself, I saw all these movies but too late – I had grown up in an era where they had always existed, where it was expected that pictures moved, that anything filmmakers imagined could be realized onscreen with special effects, where the Force had always been with us.  Now I’ve had my "Star Wars moment."  I can’t say that Avatar will take the same long-term place in popular culture as King Kong or Star Wars – to my mind, the story doesn’t hit quite the same primal nerves as those films – but I do think that looking back, we’ll remember it as a watershed for moviemaking that changed the landscape of cinema.

Why?  Certainly the quality of the performance capture and level of integration of human and CG characters are pushed to new levels.  I remember reading the script for Avatar (well, actually the extended treatment that itself ran longer than most scripts) when it was floating around the internet back in the late 1990s, and thinking vaguely that it would have to be animated since I could not imagine it being executed believably in a live-action film.  Well, Cameron did it.  Some have claimed that this is not quite the “photo-realistic” level of CG that the movie promises since the entire world is imagined, so we have nothing with which to compare it, and this is a reasonable argument.  But it’s hard to deny that this may be the first movie to rely so heavily on main characters who are completely computer-generated, interacting with real live humans (Gollum in Lord of the Rings certainly comes close, but he was only one character in a large ensemble, and existed in a real-world environment rather than an entirely created one).  There’s a shot near the end of the movie (SPOILER ALERT) where Neyteri (one of the Navi) and Jake (in his human form, i.e. Sam Worthington sans CGI) share an embrace, and for the life of me I couldn’t tell that they weren’t actually both there in the same space.  Of course, it may say something about my level of emotional involvement that at this climactic moment I was trying to figure out how they did the visual effects rather than focusing on the emotions of the characters, but I’ll save that discussion for a bit later... the point is that the CG and human characters and environments were pretty seamlessly integrated.

But this isn’t really how Avatar “changes the face of cinema,” though it is cool.  My sense is that these enhanced visual effects will be useful in a significant niche of the market, but hardly all of it (at least in the immediate future).  Sci-fi and fantasy aficionados have to be licking their lips for the possibilities Avatar’s enhanced performance capturing makes possible, but it’s not like this will suddenly show up in every movie.  Despite George Lucas’s claims to the contrary, it’s simply not cost-effective to do a whole movie with performance-capture and CG if it’s something that could easily be staged in the real world.  Most dramas and comedies I expect will not find a whole lot of use for this technique.

No, what’s groundbreaking about Avatar (to my mind, at least) is that it shows how 3-D can be used in a way that engages the audience rather than pulling them out of the movie (as in:  “ooh, look at that thing coming out of the screen at me, 3-D is so cool!”).  Put another way, what’s amazing to me about Avatar is that it uses 3-D in a way that let me forget the movie was in 3-D in the first place.  Paradoxical as it may seem, this is actually quite an accomplishment.  Historically, 3-D cinema has more than once appeared, made some money as a novelty, and then disappeared once the novelty wore off.  This cycle has been repeated at least three times, and possibly several more depending on who’s doing the counting.  I’ve seen some 3-D movies, including both oldies like The Creature from the Black Lagoon (in the so-bad-it’s-good red/green version of 3-D) and some more recent releases such as Beowolf and Superman Returns in more advanced 3-D systems.  In each case, I felt like the 3-D was a distraction as much as anything.  With Avatar, I quickly forgot I was watching 3-D, except that I felt more like I was actually on Pandora than I would have in 2-D.  If future 3-D releases can follow the roadmap laid out by this film (start the audience off with more wide shots, hold shots longer, and don’t pull the usual in-your-face 3-D stunts), then the current wave of 3-D may actually hang on and 3-D could become the “norm” for cinema.

If 3-D does become the standard for what “cinema” is (and its ridiculous grosses can’t help but make studio executives want to release all their future films in 3-D), James Cameron and Avatar will deserve the lion’s share of the credit for this.  Isaac Newton famously said "If I have seen further than others, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants."  Fair enough, and it’s worth pointing out that Robert Zemeckis has for years been working on the performance capture and 3-D techniques, and that Peter Jackson and his Lord of the Rings crew laid a lot of the groundwork for Avatar’s breakthroughs (it’s no coincidence that Weta Digital, Jackson’s New Zealand-based FX house, did a lot of the work on Avatar).  But just as we remember Isaac Newton for taking a giant leap forward from what the philosophers before him had imagined, Avatar is the film I believe we’ll remember for really showing what 3-D can do if integrated into the moviemaking process from the get-go and used as a tool for immersing and engaging audiences rather than simply “wowing” them.  I noted above that I wasn’t always 100% engaged with the emotion and story throughout the movie – certainly I was not as emotionally involved as I was the first time I saw T2 or Titanic (though that may also have something to do with the fact that since I first saw those movies I’ve had years of training in making and studying films, so that it’s a lot more difficult today for me to completely ignore the filmmaking aspects of a movie than it was back then).  But I was never not entertained, and a lot of that had to do with the fact that I felt like I was really in the space of the film, and it was so beautiful I was happy to just be there and look at the environment, the creatures, and the characters.  If I movie can hold my interest for nearly three hours largely just through being beautifully immersive, that’s saying a lot...

I’ll leave with this thought:  as the Oscars approach, there’s been a lot of talk about whether a crowd-pleaser like Avatar can win Best Picture against such more serious fare as The Hurt Locker.  Obviously both are good films and worth seeing (since it seems everyone in the world has seen Avatar, I’ll assume you've already seen that one and exhort you here to go see The Hurt Locker, which deserves a much larger audience than it has drawn thus far).  I think Bigelow’s film is more important to society as a whole and is more thought-provoking.  But ultimately it’s a (very, very good) dramatic film like many others before it.  Avatar’s something new, and changes the rules of what cinema itself is.  And if I were an Oscar voter – that is, a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, I’d choose to recognize the film that advances cinema as both an art and a science beyond what anything before it has done, even if the story of that film is not as unique or socially significant as that of its competition.  Of course, this has not always been the case in the past (Annie Hall over Star Wars; How Green Was My Valley over Citizen Kane), so whether the voters agree with me this time, we’ll have to wait until March 7th to discover.  But whether it wins or not, my guess is Avatar'll be the one the history books remember...