So There's This Movie We'd Like to Recommend . . .
Avatar, James Cameron’s muscular fantasy of cross-cultural warfare and romance, has spent its first month in release bludgeoning its way nearly to the top of the all-time grosses pile. And it inches ever closer to unseating the highest grossing (without adjustment for inflation) film of all time: James Cameron’s Titanic. As of this writing, it’s taken home Golden Globes for Best Director and Picture, and now seems destined for Academy Award success. It’s taken us a while to get around to reviewing it, but there’s value in viewing a film like Avatar from this vantage point, well in the wake of the weekly critics, the blogs, the backlash, the backlash to the backlash, the film’s massive financial windfall, and the curious cases of fans suffering a “blue dip” from their inability to join the Na’vi race on Pandora (not to mention amateur Na’vi porn sites). Larger questions than how successful the film is as art enter into the equation; assessment of the film’s aesthetic merits shouldn’t be avoided, but it’s clear by now that Avatar represents something important, something very big to the industry—in the sense of how films are made, distributed, exhibited, and received—but what that is remains unclear. It feels likely at this point that we’ll look back on the last major release of the aughts as a watershed moment and feel that big budget entertainments were different post-Avatar. But how?
1 Comment
jcshumate | January 23, 2010 7:23 AM
Two (3?) things: 1) I love you guys at Reverseshot, you provide both perspective and access (at least to me) unavailable elsewhere. 2) Whenever a mainstream release has a delayed appraisal from you guys lately it seems to wear the clothes of a movie chewed and re-chewed, juggled both are the movie itself and its response at large-- a gift provided by the weeks elapsed between its wide release and your reaction. Bruno (a film, admittedly in some respects, truly profound) springs to mind. Sometimes things at RS seem doggedly against-the-wind-against-the-wind. Avatar, for instance, is precarious. It's been an enormous smash and I can't argue with the appeal of any movie that galvanizes the entire filmgoing public in a way that no film since Cameron's previous has been able to, but to me (despite any film commerce forecasting we can inscribe upon it) nothing can repair its across-the-board ineptitude. Cameron's course (to me) has been true until now, but Avatar is the site of total collapse for everything he has represented.. He's always aspired to "mounting something HUGE" but he has finally drowned himself by trying to mount something revolutionary. Subjectively, Avatar's effects were underwhelming which may have been forgivable had everything else not been objectively VOID. Pandora felt hollow and two-dimensional to me--I kept waiting for Sam Worthington to run into a wall of trees and continue his stride in vain as the Cameron-designed absurd camera rig desperately explored his digital enclosure. Perhaps the technology's deficiency would've been negligible or moot had its surrounding pageant not been positively absent. Maybe I'm knee-jerk because I was the rare RS-esque filmgoer who went into Avatar expecting something significant. As a gesture of concession I must say, Hype can destroy (I was 11 when Twister came out) and the fact that it only inflames Cameron vehicles is indeed evidence of...something. But, despite its smug pandery, I liked Up in the Air far more than Avatar. 3) To (even ambivalently) suggest a superiority (beyond ABSOLUTE SPECTACLE) of Cameron to Spielberg in some way bestows a certain economy upon Spielberg's methods that is most certainly ridiculous but probably, even more to the point, true. Of course, I don't know and I've yet to be content in my own reactions to Avatar; certainly a credit to its splintery complexity. Maybe its good that a Hollywood movie places itself at the intersection of "everything."