“It’s the biggest, the most spectacular, the most expensive, and it will reign supreme,” they said. And yet the crew of the H.M.S. Titanic barely had time to warm up the toasted sandwich makers before everything went aft side up. Big, brazen, bold, declarative: these things speak of folly, the debunked legacy of an infinitely scaled modernist perfection. Such monoliths tear through neighbourhoods, crush the individual, and perpetuate themselves at the altar of capitalist production. It is human nature to want to see them fail. So what to make of the most expensive film ever made?
‘Avatar’ cost a reported $500 million. Whether this fully takes into account the staggering marketing budget, the cost of creating new camera equipment and digital effects programs, or the tertiary expenses of kitting out half the cinemas of the Western world with projectors capable of coming within spitting distance of the reels, is all immaterial. Taking the figure as a given, the math works out as follows: ‘Avatar’, running at 162 minutes, costs $3 million per minute. Yet, in a world where David Schwimmer gets a cool mil every time he acts like a berk for twenty minutes, that isn’t all that staggering. So phrase it this way: my annual salary could buy me just over half a second of this film. A first class flight to Australia converts to less than a single frame. (And if the factoid that each of these frames involved no less than fifty-seven man-hours of work is accurate then the average wage of someone working on the production was $37 an hour.) Maybe the scariest part is that a Tom Cruise cannot be blamed for gobbling up forty or so million of it – whatever you may say about stars Sam Worthington and Zoe Saldana, ‘box office sure things’ would not be top of the list.
So what has all this been spent on? The film is screened, where available, in 3D, and was filmed using cameras designed by the writer, director, producer, and contributing editor James Cameron. Much of it takes place in what can only be an entirely digital environment; but unlike the glazed-over narco-scapes of Jar-Jar-period George Lucas, the world of ‘Avatar’ is competently, comprehensively and wholly realistically drawn. The result is something somewhat staggering to behold.
In the 2150s humanity has found a far-off planet with an incredibly valuable natural resource. Eager to mine as much of it as possible, a base is set-up on what is tellingly labelled Pandora, and the local inhabitants – blue humanoids called the Na’vi – are dealt with first diplomatically then combatively. Our guide is Jake Sully, a marine who by a strange turn of fate is called in to pilot “a remote-controlled avatar”, his consciousness downloaded into a Na’vi body with which he can explore the hostile climate of the planet and interact with the even more hostile inhabitants.
If an audience member were themselves hostile, they could criticise the film for being the dry run for a computer game. The environment of Pandora seems, on the surface, like what we have seen before, with its lush forests, cascading waterfalls, exotic creatures, floating islands and the like. But Cameron – an aficionado of deep-sea diving and the life forms that can be found there – has created a nearly-believable eco-system based on tropical climates, energy transference, and bioluminescence (although personally I could have done without the six legged horses). These images are so breathtaking as to edge towards indescribable. The fact that they start to feel almost pedestrian towards the end of the film is its own strange achievement.
When Aragon took to the fields before Minus Tirith to fight the good fight in ‘Return of the King’ he always seemed to bob on top of the ground below him, and his interaction with his foes was somewhat wobbly. No such criticisms here, the digital environment an integrated part of the world on display, rather than a show-stopping splurge as in the ridiculous ‘2012’. For all the “breakthroughs” and “bar-raisings” of the past fifteen years, Cameron has offered the first genuine revolution in the extensive use of CGI.
That he links this revolution to the 3D format is particularly canny. ‘Avatar’ was my first 3D film, and indeed the first of its kind to offer the entire running time in three dimensions, rather than just selected, ‘Wizard of Oz’-esque moments. From the first scene of the marines being woken from hyper-sleep, medical technicians drifting across the frame and the corridor they’re all in seeming to extend out the back of the cinema screen, the audience is immersed in a way that could not previously be experienced. For all the knives shoved towards the camera and swooping through tree canopies it is the quiet moments in which people just sit in a room and chat that the format is most engaging, allowing you time to absorb what amounts to a wholly fresh cinematic experience.
This has always been one of Cameron’s strengths, from the groundbreaking T-1000 of ‘Terminator 2’ to the sinking titular ship of ‘Titanic’. It could be expected of such a man that his stories would be clinical devices for the delivery of his brand new toy, and indeed when scripting ‘The Terminator’ he made a list of the ten things the biggest grossing films ever made had in common (presumably including #3. The violent death of Bill Paxton and #7. Comedy Austrian accents). Yet the quasi-Proppian formalism such thinking breeds has led to narratives constructed with such care that they cannot fail to entertain, even as they wholeheartedly fail to surprise. Perhaps the vital ingredient amongst this almost ceremonial deployment of story elements is that of the feminine: from Sigourney Weaver’s amped up heroine in ‘Aliens’ to Jamie Lee Curtis tearing the sleeves off her dress in ‘True Lies’ (and all via Linda Hamilton’s conversion from 80s airhead to 90s Unabomber in the first two Terminators), women tend to have their say around James Cameron. Here it is the Na’vi Jake falls in love with, the hunter-warrior Neytiri, whose portrayal by Saldana is one of the hidden strengths of ‘Avatar’: expressive, gestural, and invested with a dignified emotionality, she is a brilliant counterpoint to the occasionally dim-witted and goofy Sully. Just as Ed Harris’ anguished screams when confronted with the corpse of his ex-wife in ‘The Abyss’ make up for much of the stilted nonsense in that film, so the gale-force drama on display here is considerably more convincing than the expositional necessities.
The most bluntly entertaining character in the film is inevitably the villainous Colonel Quaritch, a military man in the mould of Duvall’s surf-obsessive in ‘Apocalypse Now’ or Nick Nolte’s Homer-reading megalomaniac in ‘The Thin Red Line’. The role is oversized and ridiculous, but at the same time entirely believable. As played by Stephan Lang (in a second stand-out part of the year, after playing the man who shot Dillinger in Michael Mann’s ‘Public Enemies’), Quaritch is fearsomely single-minded and bullish individual unburdened by the cognitive dissonance that affects other Cameronian antagonists. Drinking from a metallic coffee cup he congratulates his brigade’s efforts at genocide by saying “the first round’s on me tonight.” The wider cast of human extras is also impressive, looking as they do like real people in real roles rather than central-casting professionals, or embarrassed day-players larking in front of a green screen.
There are qualms with some of the subtexts. The film encodes imperialism as a wholly white male pursuit, while the Na’vi are played entirely by Black and American-Indian actors, as though spirituality and Gaia-awareness were solely the privilege of the under-privileged, and Sully’s journey were not so much learning about another culture as shucking off the burden of white power and ‘going native’. Two of the converts to the needs of the Na’vi among the human classes are even conspicuously non-white. (Indeed, when considering the infinitesimal role of racial minorities in Cameron’s films a simplistic pattern evolves, and that is before one gets to the white-marines-against-black-aliens Vietnam allegory of ‘Aliens’.) There is also the disturbing lack of irony in the presentation of a movie that could only be created by a massive corporate entity like Twentieth Century Fox pedalling a message of eco-awareness and anti-imperialism.
As my viewing companion underplayed after the screening: “there’s certainly a lot there”. ‘Avatar’ may be a behemoth of spectacular construction which worships technology and by-the-numbers story-telling, but it is also a genuinely pioneering work of art. Whether it will usher in the new age of a new medium (if not a new message) we can only wait and see. For now, go see it, and let yourself be amazed.
