As of the most recently published results, Star Wars: The Force Awakens is now within $10 million of passing Avatar as the highest grossing film of all-time at the domestic box office. It’s likely that today, Wednesday, will be the day Star Wars officially moves into the #1 slot. The moment it became clear that The Force Awakens would eventually topple James Cameron’s 3D extravaganza, the conversation around Avatar and its quality began. Being that it was released more than six years ago — ages in Internet time — it seems as if many have forgotten whether or not they really liked Avatar. To be completely honest, I myself had to go back and look up my own review. As it turns out, I was pretty high on Avatar during its theatrical release. In my review, I was concerned about how the “hype” around the film would affect me. And with tempered expectations, I found myself enamored with a vibrant 3D world full of Pandora and its Dances with Wolves knock-off story. The impressive visuals were enough to lay down my critical stamp of approval.
Earlier this week, before re-reading my own review, I attempted to answer the question: is Avatar a good movie? It was a harder question to answer than I expected. Which is perhaps part of the greater problem on the web this past week. Avatar was a movie that millions of people saw, in theaters, with 3D glasses on. But not everyone seems to remember whether or not they liked it. This has led us to re-evaluation of the highest grossing blockbuster of all-time. Over at io9, Charlie Jane Anders made a splash arguing that Avatar is a much better movie than you remember. Looking over the copious amount of comments on her article and the responses on Twitter, the collective doesn’t completely agree. “It’s a pretty movie with a derivative story,” seems to be the consensus. In hindsight, that was about the consensus when it came out. So perhaps Avatar has always been properly rated. As a Film School Rejects team, we decided to revisit the film and find out for ourselves.
My own revisit included opening, for the first time, the Deluxe Edition Blu-ray set. I found it on my shelf with a healthy layer of dust across the top of its jacket, which speaks more to my need to go through and dust my Blu-ray collection, but also to the fact that it’s remained unopened for six years.
Upon completing my re-watch of Avatar, one thought continues to stick in my mind. We use the word “spectacle” nowadays in a way that’s usually negative. We look at movies like the Transformers films or even some of the Marvel films and say, “Eh. These are all spectacle.” What we really mean when we use the term with a negative connotation is that they are empty spectacle, experiments in style over substance. And in some cases, this is true. But what James Cameron created with Avatar was a movie in which the spectacle was the substance. It’s true, the story is derivative. It’s a mishmash of Dances with Wolves, Ferngully and Pocahontas. A very classic story about reluctant hero who finds love and a new perspective by immersing himself in a foreign culture, ultimately finding his place fighting an an unexpected side of a great battle. That’s nothing new. But we have to appreciate all the things that Avatar did accomplish. It’s a spectacular accomplishment in both world building and visual storytelling. Just like Cameron’s previous highest grossing movie of all-time Titanic, it’s a technological marvel. Re-watching it at the onset of 2016, very little of what was created at the end of the last decade fails to hold up. Some of the animals of Pandora look like they were extracted from video game cut scenes. But all of the humanoid stuff — especially the completely-CGI Na’vi — is still astonishing to behold.
There were things that stuck out a little more on this, my third time seeing the movie (I saw it twice during its theatrical run.) James Horner’s score isn’t particularly present or impactful, save for the scene in which the giant tree comes down. And when it is present later in the film, it’s somewhat distracting. Sam Worthington’s performance really is terrible. Like a block of wood, that guy. It was hard for me to watch it now and not imagine what the movie would have been had Cameron chosen a better actor. Worthington’s existence in this franchise is the only thing that has me worried about all those sequels Cameron is going to make.
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But on the whole, Avatar is still a spectacular experience. So to answer the question, it probably is better than I remember. But just as good today as I rated it in 2009. The difference seems to be that there’s nothing to Avatar outside of the movie Avatar. It’s not like Star Wars or the Marvel Cinematic Universe, both of which exist as part of the fabric of my everyday geek life. I’m not playing Avatar video games or scouring the Avatar Rumors subreddit for new details about the sequels. When I’m enclosed within the Avatar movie experience, it’s the best thing going. But once the credits roll and the Celine Dion-light Leona Lewis song starts playing, Avatar gets placed on the shelf, to collect dust. Sadly, that’s its legacy. As both a monumental cinematic experience and a dust-collectingly forgettable franchise. That’s a weird sort thing to say about the soon-to-be second highest grossing movie of all-time.
On the next page, I asked the Film School Rejects team to weigh in with their thoughts on the great question of the day: is Avatar better than we remember?
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