Scepticism towards James Cameron’s long-gestating 3D extravaganza, Avatar, is beginning to crystallise.
First came the distinctly underwhelmed response to Fox’s so-called ‘Avatar Day’, when IMAX cinemas around the globe previewed 15 minutes of footage. That event was the first real glimpse into the world that Cameron has created, completely from scratch, and launched on a giddy public with promises of nothing less than the reinvention of cinema. Buoyed by expectations of genius, many film fans left nursing grievances and disappointment.
In the months since, the murmur has turned into an authentic backlash, with the film re-christened Captain Planet with cats while being ripped online for everything from the Jar Jar-like character design to the nausea-inducing reality of live action 3D. If this is the revolution, Cameron could keep it.
I have some sympathy with this. I’m not impervious to hype, but I like to think I’m relatively level headed. Let’s say Avatar is as good as Cameron says and it really does revolutionise cinema. So what? It’s still just a film. A jumble of digital bits sitting on a hard drive. He’s not solved world hunger or anything.
Even so, I was disappointed with the 15 minutes I saw. Or maybe not disappointed, maybe just concerned that it was both too much and too little. Too much in the sense that I found myself unable to absorb the implications of its three dimensionality, and rather than being immersed in the film I felt pinioned by it, as if it was sitting on my chest screaming at me to be impressed by its wizardry. And too little in that the extravagant attention lavished on the film’s visuals seemed – once again – to have been in inverse proportion to the effort put into the script.
Then there are the posters and the subsequent trailers, which seemed too bright, too safe, too child-like to have come from the man who gave us the T-800, Colonial Marines and those sentry guns. It also concerns me a little when I hear Cameron talking about the details that went into the film – the photorealistic plants, the new language they invented – rather than the emotion and energy in the storytelling. It reminds me of (and I hate to say this) George Lucas pre-Phantom Menace.
But I saw the trailer a second time in 3D the other night, and I’m still excited. For all my concerns about the story and the art style, I’m excited because I want to be excited. Because it’s too easy to be cynical in an industry that gorges itself on hype as a matter of course. Avatar is a legitimately Big Deal. It actually is The Film Event of the Year. Perhaps the decade. It’s the biggest, maddest, most expensive film ever conceived from a titan of entertainment. There’s plenty of schadenfreude being stored up, plenty of people who are rooting for Cameron to fail. But not me. I’ll be abroad when the Avatar wave finally breaks, but I’d sacrifice a day of any holiday for the whispered promises of Jim Cameron.
For anybody else who’s still excited about December 18, here’s a few bits and pieces to get you in the mood.
First up, The New Yorker’s epic profile of Cameron based on some outrageously jammy access to the man himself.
On a similar note, Wired recently went long on the filmmaker too.
And he filmed a 60 Minute special.
Enjoy.
