So the BAFTA nominations are out, and the predictable contenders are there. The BAFTA members have picked the most solid, experienced runners in the game.
Avatar, that big, brash, undeniably bold movie has confirmed its place as an awards season juggernaut. It cleared up at the Globes, allowing Cameron to earnestly jabber about the power of cinema. I fear we may hear this spiel on an all too regular basis over the coming months, because can anything out there realistically compete with it?
It’s clearing up at the Box Office, and will almost certainly soon overtake Titanic as the highest grossing film of all time. I wouldn’t be surprised if it performed a clean sweep, winning Best Film at the BAFTAs and the Oscars.
I’d love to know how James Cameron really feels about the finished product. He first conceived the idea in 1995. It cost way over $300 million to make, and was in production for most of the last decade.
But has it fundamentally changed the game? Cameron didn’t spend that long with the aim of making a great movie; he wanted to make today’s equivalent of the Star Wars franchise, the next Terminator, the new Aliens.
But the film’s impressive combination of cinematic innovation and precision is consistently let down by its quasi-liberal politics (reckless use of the military for capitalistic gain is bad, apparently) and self-indulgent attempts to construct the Na’vi’s cultural and theological life.
I would love to have seen the conversations the production team had at the outset…
Cameron is sat in a massive, leather-bound chair, drinking the tears of aspirant directors from a whiskey tumbler as a minion massages conditioner into his hair. Cameron wears a troubled expression. A host of eager consiglieres sit, poised and waiting.
Cameron: “So we’ve got this big lovely tree that somehow possesses the souls of the Na’vi’s ancestors, but we don’t have a name.”
Silence.
Slowly, a young-buck from the back pipes up.
Young Buck: “Well, sir, I know this is a pretty left-field idea, sir, and I’m thinking outside the box here, but how about the Tree of Souls?”
Cameron takes a deep breath. His finger slides along the table towards the trap-door button. Everyone shuffles in their seat and looks even more nervous.
Then a smile spreads across his face: “I think we’ve got it, give that lad a Caribbean island.”
The thing I find amazing about Avatar is that for all the innovation and modernism, it is full of old, worn-out action movie tropes. From the psychedelic, tie-die worm-holes that the Avatars go through to reach Pandora (which haven’t changed since the days of Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey) to the giant walkers that were in the Matrix films, to the grunts continually shouting phrases like “Get some pain.” Avatar is like a shiny new husk hiding the same old dross.
Cameron may very well deserve all the gongs, but he hasn’t changed the game, and for all those Davids who believe in fresh stories and style over substance… Well, Goliath just got bigger.
