Avatar

It's Avatar, What More D'You Want?

Every time James Cameron directs a film he seems to smash some paradigm or parameter in the business. He's been doing it for some time now so we shouldn't be surprised, but that being said each of the films he's made this side of the original 'Terminator' have gone on to redefine the parameters by which films are made.

So Avatar finally made it to the big screen 12 years after 'Titanic' which was the last time Cameron directed a MEMEM (Most Expensive Movie Ever Made). When I was location hunting over in NZ in 2007, I kept hearing James Cameron was bring Avatar to Peter Jackson's studio and WETA, so I did have some warning on the scale of the project. I was something that was going to make 'King Kong' look, well, small.

Now that I've seen it, it's everything that it's been billed to be.

What's Good About It

Do I have to count them all? The effects, the vision, the 3D thing, the sound, the production design, the cinematography that keeps it uniform, the editing, the pace, the whole damn thing is good. It's exactly as advertised - a spectacular piece of event cinema.

What's Bad About It

Picking nits with this film is going to look like I'm envious of the achievement so I'm not going to go there. If I had just one complaint about the whole film, it would be that it was a little didactic and message-heavy. But then I would be the very choir Cameron is preaching to, so maybe even that's not such a big deal.

What's Interesting About It

This is a beautiful film. It looks like a phantasmagorical assembly of Roger Dean album covers and 'Magic:The Gathering" cards. From landscape to life forms to objects to the aliens, everything is beautiful.

Which brings to mind the problem of aestheticisation. Imagine the same story if the planet wasn't so beautiful. If the aliens weren't these blue felinoids but instead were the Geiger Alien. Imagine now that Jake Sully has to project his pscyhe into an Avatar that is like the Geiger alien in an attempt to communicate with them. Imagine instead of the beautiful forest, Sully's Avatar, shaped like the Geiger alien had to travel into the hive of aliens like in 'Aliens' and communicate with the big Queen alien in the hive...

The repulsiveness of the Geiger Aliens justifies the Gung-Ho militarism in 'Aliens', just s the attractiveness of the world of Pandora in a sense justifies Jake and Grace's betrayal of their human heritage in favor of the alien world.

Thus we have to ask, would we be so happy to be on the side of the aliens if the planet weren't so beautiful? In a sense, what happens on the planet Pandora in this film, where the natives beat the human colonists is exactly the same thing which brings about the trip the Marines and Ripley make to the planet where the Queen Alien resides in 'Aliens'.

The bookmarking is quite weird and interesting. The aestheticisation in turn brings up the question, are we getting propagandised? In a sense, this film is the prequel to 'Aliens'; it's just dressed up way too pretty to be noticed.

James Cameron Films As Survivalist Fantasies


There's a strong link between James Cameron's films and the survivalist fantasies of an apocalypse and guns. The Terminator universe is built on this stuff. If anything, I would have categorised James Cameron as a pro-Gun lobby, Pro-Republican, global-warming-denying sort. Even 'Aliens' seemed like a pro-military, reactionary romp in the 1980s which fuelled the popular politics towards the first Gulf War, together with 'Top Gun'.

Then there was the immensely racist and somewhat prophetic 'True Lies' which rested on a truly fascist paradigm where US might was right because it was American and mighty, and the bad jihadist Arabs just had to cop it sweet as Arnie meted out the punishing blows.

It's really surprising to see James Cameron making a movie that is pro-environment and somewhat anti-military. I never would have guessed such a transformation was possible. Then again, it is full of romanticised imagery of people with bows beating up on a high tech military.

Moving Goal Posts

James Cameron's predilection for making the MEMEM never seems to get addressed properly in Australian Film Making circles. This is possibly because it just seems too far away. The thing is, it didn't start yesterday. As far back in 1991 when he came out with 'Terminator 2', it was clear that the cutting edge of cinema had changed. 'T2' with its bone-crunching metal-rending action cost $120m when Bruce Willis was reviled for making 'Hudson Hawk' for $40m. It was 3 times more expensive than anything that had ever been shot to that point in time - and it still made its money back in the first week.

One of the many things 'T2' signaled, was the end of the Australian film industry as having any kind of budget ratio with American cinema. American cinema went on to make more and more films in the same extraordinary budget range while Australian indigenous cinema was consigned to the dustbin with its tiny budgets, aiming for ever-shrinking niche markets.

Looking at 'Avatar' today, it's amazing how far James Cameron has moved the goal posts once again. It's like he's taken them out of the park, past the next 6 suburbs and into the next city. I doubt Screen Australia's taken notice of this. If our industry was screwed yesterday, it's about 6 times more screwed today. Not only are we not in the league, we're not even qualitatively playing the same game any more.  We're not even in the minor leagues, we're beer league softballers next to the A-Rod of Cinema.

Nobody in Australian cinema can catch James Cameron. Not Peter Weir, not Fred Schepsi, not Bruce Beresford, not Jane Campion, not PJ Hogan, not any of them.  This is no disrespect to these directors, but seriously, James Cameron has kicked all their asses, all our collective sorry asses, and as Hudson says in 'Aliens' "it's Game Over man".