Why Avatar is the greatest blockbuster of the… | Little White Lies

Dreaming Big

Why Avatar is the great­est block­buster of the 21st century

13 Jul 2016

Words by Matt Thrift

Blue-skinned humanoid figure with pointed ears, yellow eyes, and long dark hair against a starry night sky background.
Blue-skinned humanoid figure with pointed ears, yellow eyes, and long dark hair against a starry night sky background.
The true great­ness of James Cameron’s record-break­ing space opera is not in its con­cep­tion but its execution.

Avatard. That was the response to me choos­ing James Cameron’s 2009 behe­moth as the great­est block­buster of the 21st cen­tu­ry so far. Avaword.

The court of pub­lic opin­ion has not been kind in the sev­en years since Avatar’s release. The back­lash against the most com­mer­cial­ly suc­cess­ful film of all time was swift and severe, dom­i­nat­ing opin­ion pages on and offline as com­pre­hen­sive­ly as the film itself dom­i­nat­ed screens. What is the les­son of Avatar?” asked one Boris John­son in the Tele­graph, It is all about the fol­ly of mankind, the greed that impels us to try to grat­i­fy our wants with a sys­tem of cap­i­tal­ist exploita­tion.” Irony by any oth­er name would smell as foul.

With four sequels on the way, what lit­tle con­ver­sa­tion that sur­faces today on Cameron’s fran­chise-in-the-mak­ing revolves around ques­tions of the public’s appetite for a return trip to Pan­do­ra and its lack of vis­i­bil­i­ty in the pop-cul­tur­al hive-mind. It’s easy, of course, to glance at the filmmaker’s track record with sequels; his unwill­ing­ness to rush projects to fruition. Sev­en years passed between Alien and Aliens, sev­en more between Ter­mi­na­tors. The ice­berg of col­lec­tive­ly-willed schaden­freude dumped in the path of Titan­ic in the long run-up to its release is easy to for­get in the wake of the director’s dude­bro self-coro­na­tion at the 1998 Acad­e­my Awards.

It may be hard to ignore the air of smug self-sat­is­fac­tion he exudes, but his­to­ry insists it’s a bad bet to under­es­ti­mate James Cameron; Avatar being just the most recent proof.

As with Titan­ic, it’s not mere­ly the scale of Avatar that points to its suc­cess but the clar­i­ty with which Cameron oper­ates. It’s there in every ele­ment of the pro­duc­tion, from image-mak­ing to nar­ra­tive tra­jec­to­ry. It’s rea­son­able to argue – with lit­tle dis­agree­ment here – that char­ac­ter and nar­ra­tive are paint­ed in the broad­est of strokes. Cameron deals in arche­type, keep­ing the big­ger pic­ture sim­ple – not sim­plis­tic – as a means to uni­ver­sal appeal. It’s old-fash­ioned sto­ry­telling at its least cyn­i­cal, out­ward-look­ing in an age of com­mer­cial cin­e­ma dom­i­nat­ed by the pseu­do-grav­i­tas of ubiq­ui­tous­ly tor­tured interiority.

Like so many great genre film­mak­ers before him, Cameron appro­pri­ates and embell­ish­es. Avatar freely takes the skele­ton of its nar­ra­tive struc­ture from mul­ti­ple sources: the revi­sion­ist west­erns typ­i­fied by Delmer Dav­es’ Bro­ken Arrow and Sam Fuller’s Run of the Arrow; the fic­tion of Rud­yard Kipling and Edgar Rice Bur­roughs; the vast can­vas of David Lean’s Lawrence of Ara­bia; the eco­log­i­cal dis­tress of John Boorman’s The Emer­ald For­est. Kevin Cost­ner took much of the same for his state­ly plod to Oscar glo­ry, Dances with Wolves, a film of dec­o­ra­tive beau­ty that large­ly fails to imbue its images with any real mean­ing or the­mat­ic weight.

Close-up of a man's face in a blue-lit environment

Giv­en the range of think pieces gen­er­at­ed in the wake of its release – both pos­i­tive and neg­a­tive – Avatar cer­tain­ly isn’t want­i­ng for alle­gor­i­cal inter­pre­ta­tion. From ques­tions of its anti-impe­ri­al­ist stance to its racial pol­i­tics, its pan­the­is­tic imagery to its eco-anx­i­eties, each is as valid as the next. Yet while Avatar might not best be described as ambigu­ous, no sin­gle the­mat­ic ele­ment is fore­ground­ed at the expense of anoth­er. Argue all you want about the extent of its com­plex­i­ty in any giv­en area, but it remains as cohe­sive as it is inclu­sive in its read­abil­i­ty, no doubt a part of its broad appeal.

If on a macro-lev­el Avatar oper­ates as a series of grand ges­tures – Cameron knows all too well that the dev­il is in the detail. As the very embod­i­ment of the cin­e­mat­ic van­guard of inno­va­tion, it’s no sur­prise that the alle­go­ry most unique­ly Cameron’s exists at a cross­roads. Avatar makes mul­ti­ple allu­sions to the act of see­ing – from the slow-reveal of the world and cus­toms of Pan­do­ra to its (eye-)opening and clos­ing shots – the moral impli­ca­tions of which are trans­ferred to the audi­ence through a dis­tinct use of 3D. It’s a film that ques­tions (as the Ter­mi­na­tor films did before it) the hubris­tic pur­suit of tech­no­log­i­cal advance­ment while rely­ing on just that to bring its audi­ence-proxy – Sam Worthington’s delib­er­ate­ly blank slate, Jake Sul­ly – to a prim­i­tive state of grace and its audi­ence to an unprece­dent­ed lev­el of hyper-immer­sion. Teach me how to see,” says Jake, an invi­ta­tion Cameron extends to the audience.

The influ­ence that the director’s oth­er career (under da sea) exerts on the real­i­sa­tion of Pan­do­ra is pal­pa­ble. It will have an enor­mous impact on human­i­ty if we find life in an ocean on anoth­er world, but in order to find it we have to go there,” says Cameron in his 2005 doc­u­men­tary, Aliens of the Deep. Unable to go there, he cre­at­ed anoth­er world from scratch. One of Avatar’s great­est plea­sures lies in our grad­ual expo­sure to Pan­do­ra, a liv­ing world realised to the small­est detail. One of the best apoc­ryphal anec­dotes of the film’s release relates to press reports of depres­sion among those a lit­tle too invest­ed in Avatar’s world. For­tu­nate­ly, Boris was back on hand to bring them down to earth, unable to resist a casu­al­ly racist swipe at a fic­tion­al people:

I can’t believe that many of these gloomy post-Avatar West­ern­ers, when they real­ly think about it, would want to up sticks to Pan­do­ra and take part in Na’vi soci­ety, with its obsti­nate illit­er­a­cy, unde­mo­c­ra­t­ic adher­ence to a monar­chy based on male pri­mo­gen­i­ture and com­plete absence of restau­rants.” There’s just way too much to unpack in that state­ment, even on a fac­tu­al lev­el. Suf­fice to say that the Na’vi’s matri­ar­chal cul­ture and Cameron’s focus on strong female char­ac­ters remain con­sis­tent with his career-long vision.

Final­ly though, where Avatar tru­ly attains its great­ness is not in its con­cep­tion but its exe­cu­tion. Cameron stacks images of breath­tak­ing­ly ren­dered ambi­tion, build­ing his world in stages marked by set-pieces of stag­ger­ing vir­tu­os­i­ty. A mas­ter of rhythm and move­ment, of chore­og­ra­phy and screen-geog­ra­phy, the film’s epic final bat­tle proves a peer­less exer­cise in action con­struc­tion. The co-ordi­na­tion of the sky-bat­tle – it’s esca­la­tion, sub-scenes, re-esca­la­tion – before its reduc­tion to a two-on-one death match is a sequence of which the likes of Joss Whe­don or JJ Abrams can only dream. Shock and awe, indeed. Ooh Rah.

What do you think is the great­est block­buster of the 21st cen­tu­ry? Have your say @LWLies

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