Avatar (James Cameron film)

Go to page five of this very thread. Not a whole lot of irony in folks' love of him when they first saw the movie.

I remember watching the old Mr. Plinkett review of Avatar, and how he mentioned that the film's greatest legacy was probably showing that you can have a big-budget blockbuster released in December and have it be a phenomenally huge hit. And honestly, I think that's held up. December used to be reserved for more prestige-type films, but now you can see stuff like big superhero films released at the end of the year and make over a billion dollars.

That, at least, is a good development.

The Star Wars sequels were all released in December, that tells you something.

So was Dune, which also did very well.

Avatar is a weird case in that it has indeed made an impact on the industry level ^note (there's the above, as well as its innovation in motion capture and techniques of filming for 3D, and 3D viewing becoming more commonplace afterwards), and it has created a genuinely gorgeous world - all of which contributes greatly to stuff like park rides or cosplay - but does not necessarily make its main story all that memorable, even if it touches on relevant themes.

In other James Cameron movies, you had a novel-ish story concept in the first Terminator; interesting characters and relationships (the friendship between John Connor and the T-800 , Aliens!Ripley and her bond to Newt and distrust of Bishop); a tragedy with a love story in Titanic; and so on. All different things for the audience to connect to emotionally.

Avatar doesn't really have much of that? A lot of the characters are likeable enough (some being fun, even - I liked Grace and Trudy when I first watched it), but it feels far more like characters filling roles we've seen in similar stories, with a somewhat generic protagonist. Character development and relationships exist mostly in service to this grander-scale (and familiar) central conflict, and not much more, which doesn't help them stand out and just serves to enhance the feeling of "I've seen this before" and the comparisons that ensue.

This is why the MCU, while definitely flawed, was able to repeatedly make hero stories. Most of the movies didn't just slap a different power on the new superhero, they were able to make characters with different personalities and make the audience care about or be interested in them and their dynamics. Robert Downey Junior's Iron Man was fun to watch; the Captain America movies are not just about a war hero, but about the relationship between Steve and Peggy Carter, and between Steve and Bucky, and between Steve and his past, etc.; the conflict between T'Challa and Killmonger, etc.).

It's not that Avatar is bad, it's just a okay story with beautiful effects and worldbuilding, a relevant message (Mighty Whitey elements aside), and forgettable characters. The earlier mention of fanfic is relevant; a work may be terrible, but still have people greatly connect to the story and characters, and the amount of fanfiction often reflects that. Hopefully the sequel is better in that regard?

The MCU has mastered the ability to make viewers feel comfortable. They are the cinema equivalent of the NCIS TV show: a series of movies you go to because you will be a little bit surprised but you know that it will never push you out of your comfort zone. All potentially touchy topics are carefully avoided or watered down to make sure to elicit no strong response. It even has post-credit scenes acting as cinematic nicotine to keep viewers engaged even when the story is over.

As for the lack of Avatar fanfics, it's both because the lore is not expanded upon and because the universe is very consistent. It's quite easy to write a fanfic that takes place either in an Earth-setting, no matter how fantastic it is - like Marvel, or Harry Potter - or in a very detailed alien setting like Star Trek, Mass Effect or Star Wars.

But you don't get a big book of lore for Avatar. You have the basics of Na'vi society - not really expanded upon - and a few species of animals and plants to look at. It's not much to either write a story, or to imagine a wider setting.

That's why you have way more Inception fanfics than Avatar. For an Inception fanfic, you just have to follow the rules of the dream machines, and after that you have literally no limitations but your own imagination. For Avatar, you almost need a degree in biology to imagine a new species of animals.

On that topic, I wonder if we'll learn that the Na'vi are also aliens on Pandora, because they are the only tetrapod species we see. All others are hexapods. Unless one of their pair of arms disappeared or fused with the other, I don't know.

Edited by Bexlerfu on May 13th 2022 at 3:29:34 PM

@Bexlerfu

This one I think actually has an explanation: It's believed in-universe that they're relatives of a creature called Prolemuris, which are ape-like creatures that have half-fused limbs as part of some sort of wing.

This description is itself pretty funny when the film we are discussing in this thread has about as much to say on the topic of colonization as a 15-minute long afterschool saturday morning special from the 1980s. Guess the MCU perfected Cameron's method, the absolute madmen.

I think the reason for Avatar's lack of fanfics is much more likely a combination of the aforementioned lack of characters that stuck and just that setting isn't particularly interesting. It's a hodgepodge of native american-colonial metaphors but the horses have six legs and the colonialists have mechs. The closest thing to a unique hook is the primary concept of the Avatar thing but it's not something the film particularly explores aside from it being a storytelling device. Fanfics are often borne of those hooks (the whole dreamwalking mechanics from Inception as an example) that generate stories.

Edited by Gaon on May 13th 2022 at 6:48:07 AM

I should note that while AO3 only has about 295 Avatar fics, Fanfiction.net has substantially more at 1.3 thousand.

Granted, that wouldn't put it in the top 50 for fandoms listed on the latter (even going by just the movie categories). It's just that AO3, being the newer site, is more skewed towards works that were popular during the 2010s and beyond.

And yet it's still more than all MCU movies put together, excluding Black Panther.

And Avatar has an "anti-human" or misanthropic setting that is uncommon and does elicit responses among viewers. That's rather mild and yet still more audacious than 95% of superhero movies.

Blockbusters nowadays are incredibly inoffensive as a whole.

Edited by Bexlerfu on May 13th 2022 at 4:14:35 PM

That's a very debatable statement, Black Panther or no Black Panther.

I guess it might be more than both Ant-Man movies put together, though. I'll give you that.

Edited by Gaon on May 13th 2022 at 7:14:51 AM

Ah yes, sorry.

There is the beginning of a message about saving natural resources in Infinity War which is thrown out of the window in Endgame where everything is cancelled, nothing is solved, and the villain is made one-dimensionally genocidal to make sure that everybody remembers he is eeeeeevil.

Audacious. Compared to that, Avatar is almost a Marx essay.

Edited by Bexlerfu on May 13th 2022 at 4:19:34 PM

I mean, there is an MCU thread right over there if you want to talk about these films. I was trying to keep the topic on the matter of James Cameron's Avatar and its remarkable capability to say nothing of substance.

My point is that saying that it is the reason it did not stick as much in pop culture is nonsensical because the blockbusters movie that did stick in pop culture for the last ten years have been even more empty substance-wise with a few exceptions you can probably count on one hand, and not all fingers.

Edited by Bexlerfu on May 13th 2022 at 4:30:25 PM

I think you're making a lot of broad-brush, objectively-defining statements about a lot of complex and subjective things. Myself, I think James Cameron's Avatar is a extremely shallow film with storytelling capabilities somewhat on the level of a Fast and the Furious film (but with higher pretenses) and well-below a average MCU film, so I just don't think the idea that it particularly stands above other blockbuster films of the last decade has any real merit to me. But it is a genuinely interesting dichotomy that its cultural legacy seems so underdeveloped in contrast to its astonishing success, particularly in comparison to the so-thoroughly-reviled-alleged-sin-against-cinema that is the MCU (granted, those have a 28 films advantage in that market and a cultural wealth of comic books going decades and decades) or Cameron's own Titanic.

Are we missing something? Is there a hidden legacy going on (a good point was raised about the whole December conundrum, for example)? Are people just "stupid" to understand the hidden cinematic brilliance of James Cameron while simultaneously making it the hihest-grossing-film ever? You could try to operate on a doomsaying "end of history" axis and assume Avatar is just the least intellectually bankrupt of a intellectually bankrupt era that might be leading to the long-prophetized death of cinema (that every generation seems to think is about to happen over X or Y trend), but that seems to me very apocalyptic and very incorrect.

Edited by Gaon on May 13th 2022 at 7:46:44 AM

I'm looking back at the original opinions from earlier in the thread and the general consensus is that the plot was meh, but it was very pretty and fun to watch.

Also, to whoever mentioned District 9 and Inglorious Basterds, this was also said at the beginning of the thread:

That's an amazing statement.

I don't think I should have to preface every post with "In my obviously subjective opinion, ...".

Myself, I think that Avatar took risks in creating a world from scratch and making it incredibly vibrant and realistic, even though it was at the cost of the originality of the plot, and that it is several degrees of magnitude better than the rather mediocre average MCU movie, a series of 28 films of which roughly a third are more than braindead popcorn flicks following a repetitive formula.

And it is a movie that did not really try to have a deep cultural legacy because we are absolutely drowned under studio projects with long-term marketing in mind which are battling for strategic release dates. Cameron took 13 years to make the sequel to Avatar.

If the Russo brothers asked for, I don't know, three years without Marvel movies to craft a super ambitious one, they would be shot dead on the spot.

Basically, it's chiefly a personal project, not a studio order. Cameron is not George Lucas, he doesn't have a hyper-layered business plan for the Avatar franchise. And his project belonged to a studio which was struggling for the better part of the last decade.

I mean, I'll drop the MCU: let's talk Star Wars. We got 5 Star Wars movies in the last decade. I would say that one (Rogue One), maybe (if I am charitable with the utterly unoriginal Ep VII) two were good. And yet Star Wars is as culturally prominent as ever because we got a fuckton of merch, TV shows, video games, and even now that the new trilogy is over we have I don't know how many other things that have been announced to keep the hype up. Another example is Harry Potter: the Fantastic Beasts movies have not exactly had stellar receptions, but they are an important reason the franchise remains important ten years after the last movie aired.

How is one guy who, by all accounts, is not the friendliest and easiest to work with dude around, is supposed to have his own project dominate it? The actual quality of a movie is but one of the factors that participate to its cultural legacy. And I think it is a minor one compared to marketing power.

Another example of a very good sci-fi movie that has next to no cultural legacy despite its quality: Edge of Tomorrow.

Edited by Bexlerfu on May 13th 2022 at 5:49:48 PM

Yes, this whole dichotomy with the MCU is really unnecessary in my opinion. It is not just because the movie criticizes colonialism that it is instantly more daring and deep that 90% of modern blockbusters, that's honestly a bit pretensious imo, considering the movie was an unambiguous box-office success. Besides, a movie can be uncomfortable to viewers and still not make any social statements, vide many horror movies.

Anyway, I saw the trailer and I thought it looked pretty beautiful. I also liked how the recent poster invokes the one from the first movie with Neytiri staring at the viewer, it even gave me some nostalgia.

Edited by good-morning on May 13th 2022 at 12:50:20 PM

It's also not really about what franchise is better or deeper but about lasting impact in pop culture, which has nothing to do with having the better message or taking a bigger risk and, since this is media, a lot more with emotional connection. An apt comparison to Avatar I think would be Disney's Dinosaur, which is an original story that with important themes^note its critique of social darwinism can be applied to ableism and the initial global response to COVID in regards to disabled people, for example and some technical innovations (if not as many as Avatar) that did well commercially, but is mainly remembered as a bland story compared to something like Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King or any Pixar movie before Cars. When I mention fanfiction is not just because of lore - a lot of fanfiction is written to explore and have fun with characters and character dynamics (no, not necessarily shipping).

With the poster and trailer showing new Na'vi characters, I'm genuinely curious about them and whether the characters of the first film evolve in interesting ways. James Cameron knows how to make fun sequels and I do hope Avatar turns out to be one of them.

Yup lol

Edited by DNAe on May 14th 2022 at 12:26:13 PM

I’ll go out on a limb and say the missing reason for Avatar’s absence in cultural memory is shipping. Not kidding.

Of those 11,000 Inception fanfics, 3/4ths of them are Arthur/Eames fics. Titanic sticks around because people still think fondly of Rose and Jack. And I don’t even need to explain the MCU, Harry Potter’s, Star Wars’, etc abundance of shipping couples. Heck, people still remember the Lorax movie a decade later for all those Onceler/Onceler ships, the horror. Avatar’s central romance is barely remembered, and there’s no one else more interesting to pair either of the leads with. So the fandom market moved on.

Edited by Tuckerscreator on May 14th 2022 at 11:24:28 AM

That makes so much sense.

Yeah, that's probably a big driver of fanfics.

Those damn shippers shipping things!