Avatar

James Cameron began his career in horror and science fiction films, B-movies, and sequels. I first became aware of him with the 1984 low-budget film The Terminator, a movie that helped skyrocket Arnold Schwarzenegger’s career and began a franchise that is still going, even if it has been limping along for the last few decades. He followed that up with Aliens, a sequel to the 1977 classic Alien. With Aliens, he brought a different sensibility than the original survivor-horror genre picture, ramping up the action and excitement while soft-peddaling the slow-burn dread the original is known for. His instincts were right, and that film scored high with audiences, so high in fact that when the series tried to go back to survivor horror for the third movie, it was panned by fans who wanted more of what Aliens had brought. 

With the success of Aliens came the inevitable increase in budgets and aspirations. The Abyss, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and True Lies followed, all of which struck a chord with audiences and made a profit for the studios. The real turning point, though, was Titanic, a massively expensive passion project that many felt was going to be his downfall. When it skyrocketed into the most successful film at the time, it seemed like James Cameron could do no wrong. This paved the way for him to basically do whatever he wanted going forward. So he disappeared from the scene for a while, filming underwater documentaries, producing, and occasionally picking up writing credits. All the while, he was hatching a high-concept project that would turn out to be so successful that it has since dominated his Hollywood career with a sequel released three years ago, another one due next month, and plans for two more. 

I, like nearly everyone else in the world, saw the trailers for Avatar and was intrigued. The advertising for this feature was relentless. It was selling us a whole new world with giant blue aliens, stand-ins for the Native Americans on Earth. The aliens, the Na’vi, live on a lush, habitable moon, Pandora, orbiting a gas giant in the Alpha Centauri star system. This film was going to be telling a story we were already familiar with: man coming into a new frontier and pillaging its natural resources with no care for the ecological consequences. Like Hedy Lamarr in Blazing Saddles, the only thing standing in their way was the rightful owners. 

The title comes from man-made constructs that resemble the natives. These avatars, human/Na’vi hybrids, are controlled remotely by humans whose brains are synced up with the Avatar allowing them to traverse freely on Pandora and interact with the natives. These are designed to work with a specific person’s DNA and are very expensive to manufacture. So, when an unnamed marine dies before he can take up assignment in one of these avatars, luck would have it he has an identical twin brother, paraplegic former Marine Jake Sully (Sam Worthington). Jake is brought to Pandora to take his brother’s place. There he is tasked to interact with the Na’vi, to gain their trust, and eventually convince a major tribe to relocate so that the Resources Development Administration (RDA) can strip mine the area they live in. But in the course of acclimating to the Na’vi way of life, Jake begins to realize that there is more to life than grabbing up resources.

He initially gets separated from the rest of his team and nearly dies when attacked by a wild panther-like animal. But Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), a native Na’vi and princess of her tribe, rescues him. Against her better judgment, she is tasked by her own people to show Jake the ways of the Na’vi. This leads to him learning all about their race, their religion, and their dedication to the lifeforce of the moon, a biological neural network that ties all lifeforms on the moon together. A major focal point of this is Hometree, where Neytiri and her tribe reside. Jake is ordered to get them all to vacate Hometree so that it can be bulldozed for mining. Predictably, he falls in love with Neytiri and sides with the natives, leading a full-on battle against the humans, but not before a brutal attack, led by Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), decimates Hometree, leaving many of the Na’vi killed or wounded. The remaining Na’vi, along with some support from a small group of altruistic scientists led by Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver), and a sympathetic pilot, Captain Trudy Chacón (Michelle Rodriguez), take to the skies in an all-out battle to save their home and remove the human invaders from Pandora. 

If this plot sounds familiar, it’s because it is. We saw a similar story back in the 1990s titled Ferngully: The Last Rainforest. This comparison was being touted almost immediately when Avatar hit theaters in the fall of 2009. The themes and story beats were very similar between the two projects. James Cameron, who famously didn’t receive a screenplay Oscar nomination for Titanic, would once again find his script ignored come time for the Academy Awards. He predicted a repeat showing at that year’s awards for Avatar, sweeping the awards and winning Best Picture, but that was not to be the case. Still, the film was seen as a pioneer in several areas, especially in the visual effects department, where technology captured the performances of the actors and translated it into fully rendered CGI characters who were virtually photorealistic, even when interacting with live-action actors. 

On top of the photorealistic characters, the world of Pandora was beautifully rendered in such a way that it felt like you were in a living, breathing new world; one that you could conceivably actually go to. Pandora was so well established that whole groups of people began obsessing with their desire to live there and experience that culture. This would be further explored in the sequel Avatar: The Way of Water and is expected to be even further opened up in Avatar: Fire and Ice and the inevitable fourth and fifth films. 

Even more impressive than the visuals, though, was the use of 3D. This new 3D technology was still in its infancy at this time, and Avatar became the film where even those reluctant to adopt the new format felt the need to see this one in it. This is the gold standard for 3D cinema, and the sequel pushes that even further. James Cameron is so behind the 3D movement that, even as home video has left the format behind, he still made sure Avatar: The Way of Water got a 3D home video release, and ideally, he will keep pushing that through on the remaining films in the series as they come to home video formats. 

While the basic plot of Avatar is nothing to get excited about, the world building is what ultimately sells it. That is why people keep coming back to this franchise again and again. It has become a bit of a joke in recent years to attack Avatar for being poorly written and shallow, comparing it to FernGully or Dances with Wolves, and those comparisons are fair. This plot isn’t original in the slightest, nor is its message of nature over industry. That doesn’t make this film any less exciting to watch. Unfortunately, it does hurt the replay value when you start to analyze the story further and discover more of the flaws in the storytelling. This is something James Cameron has improved in the sequel, even as he has opened it up to new flaws such as his overemphasis on world building over telling a compelling story. 

Whatever the flaws, this film was a massive success at the box office. It currently holds the record, thanks to some rereleases to compete with the Marvel Cinematic Universe, for the highest box office returns of all time, proving that, despite his shortcomings, James Cameron knows how to build films that people simply have to see. From his early low-budget schlocky productions to the massive budgets of his later works, he has his finger on the pulse of audiences and doesn’t seem to be letting up on it anytime soon. 

Academy Award Nominations:

Best Picture: James Cameron and Jon Landau

Best Director: James Cameron

Best Art Direction: Rick Carter, Robert Stromberg, and Kim Sinclair (won)

Best Cinematography: Mauro Fiore (won)

Best Film Editing: Stephen Rivkin, John Refoua, and James Cameron

Best Original Score: James Horner

Best Sound Editing: Christopher Boyes and Gwendolyn Yates Whittle

Best Sound Mixing: Christopher Boyes, Gary Summers, Andy Nelson, and Tony Johnson

Best Visual Effects: Joe Letteri, Stephen Rosenbaum, Richard Baneham, and Andrew R. Jones (won)

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Release Date: December 10, 2009

Running Time: 162 Minutes

Rated PG-13

Starring: Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Stephen Lang, Michelle Rodriguez, and Sigourney Weaver

Directed by: James Cameron