JamesCameron's scifi epic Avatar returns to theaters13 years after it broke records. Will audiences still care?
There were plenty of reasons to wonder, in the autumn of 2009, if James Cameron had finally flown too close to the sun, burning a big budget on a boondoggle. Nearly a dozen years after emerging from a troubled production with the biggest movie of all time, the disaster-weepie phenomenon Titanic, the blockbuster maestro had once more secured enormous investment in pursuit of a bank-busting special-effects spectacle to rule them all.
A slightly less impressive technical marvel To watch Avatar in its original run, seated alongside other curious witnesses in theaters that became cathedrals devoted to his vision, was to feel really, truly transported. That remains the movie’s singular achievement — the way it marshaled impossible resources to plunk the whole world into a meticulously rendered new one. Where Cameron was really depositing us, of course, was his own imagination.
Yet if the seams show more in Avatar’s once revolutionary motion-capture — the Na’vi moving and emoting a little less convincingly — it’s still relatively easy to fall under the spell of Cameron’s wizardry. However detrimental it’s proved to the larger art of event-movie spectacle, the director’s decision to essentially thrust the entire film into the digital realm rescues it from a full plummet into the uncanny valley.
Cameron has never denied the patchwork nature of his vision. He once called Avatar a product of “every single science fiction book” he read in his youth — a bit of candor that accounts for how much it feels like a mélange of other stories, mashing together spare parts from his own filmography with archetypal elements from a library of sci-fi classics. Some one-size-fits-all critiques of military occupation and colonialist atrocity are alsowoven into the mix.
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