James Cameron’s Titanic (1997) is, according to various sources, the highest grossing movie of all time. James Cameron’s rapturously received Avatar (2009) is the second highest grossing movie of all time, earning over a billion worldwide. They are quintessential blockbusters. Because of what Wikipedia calls “the secretive nature of film budgets” (I hadn’t realized information about budgets wasn’t freely available), it’s not quite possible to compare the budget with the gross in all cases, however rumours circulate that Avatar is also one of the most expensive films ever made. Suffice to say, however, that the films which gross the most are generally those with the highest budgets, and that films with very high budgets tend to incorporate the latest technological advances, or, in the case of Avatar, are instrumental in developing them.
Many breakthroughs are put to use in a subtle manner. Like, for example, the various audio innovations surrounding Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation and Robert Altman’s seventies work, or Stanley Kubrick’s work on steadicams and zooms. With Avatar, there seems nothing incremental about its visual innovation; the audience is confronted (all at once, and at many levels) with new and sophisticated imagery never before seen, or possible. Set on an alien planet in the future, the film follows a man who, inhabiting an alien body, attempts to diplomatically remove the native species from their land, so that greedy humans can mine their planet for a priceless energy source (I heard disappointingly few guffaws when it’s revealed that this priceless material is called “unobtainium”- honestly).
The idea of a film which combines mind-blowing special effects with acute (or at least not distractingly inept) characterisation and plot is something of a holy grail for producers and film buffs. The Matrix (1999), Cameron’s own Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991) and Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993) are some of the landmark special effects films of the nineties that achieve this. Avatar though, combines tepid characterisation with an altogether unreasonable plot (not just far-fetched, but irrational- the plot is more alien to human experience than the actual aliens), and I could talk for quite some time about its failures in those departments. That would be missing the point of the movie, many people would argue, and anyway, it has already left a huge mark on the landscape of Big Movies.
But equally, people’s minds are boggled by the vast disparity between technical and visual sophistication, on the one hand, and what seems like wilful narrative incompetence on the other. What I didn’t understand about Avatar’s weird political inflections, for example, was that it for some reason conflated the genocide of Native Americans (a gentle and simple race of people who are overrun by greedy humans), the latest Iraq war (I seem to recall stress placed on the word “terror” or “pre-emptive” or something), ecological issues, and, bizarrely, the internet. See, the alien people are able to connect their minds to a global network (the centre of which is a big tree) and can tap the esoteric recourses of their planet using this method. It’s always disheartening when films combine earnest and would-be worthy political cogitations, like the nods to Bush and Iraq, with extreme and offensive cultural insensitivity. How is it not racist, or tactless in the extreme, to portray a white man rising, through his tacit superiority, through the ranks of an alien society to win a war for them? And then it congratulates itself on its liberalism?
The concept of the blockbuster originated in the mid-seventies; a turbulent time for the Hollywood studio system. A new method was needed to maintain profitability, as well as a totally new marketing strategy. Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) was the first film in the rich (pun) tradition of films of which Avatar is the latest addition. Jaws’ spectacular box office performance in the summer of ’75 led studios to invest bigger amounts of money in fewer productions per year, productions that were guaranteed success – this is when “saturation”, or the simultaneous national release of a film, came into practice. The blockbuster was also marketed using a procedure known as “horizontal integration”, whereby TV shows, Happy Meals, action figures and video games surround the production and usually end up being more profitable than the movie itself (leading to charges that the blockbuster becomes a mere advertisement for its own merchandise). Though the industry has changed dramatically since Jaws, this process is largely intact today.
Though Avatar has its share of tie-ins, the singular nature of its achievements in special effects makes it the centre of attention in this case. Furthermore, Avatar was something of a pet project for its director. Cameron has stated that Avatar was written in 1995, was shelved while he went on numerous deep sea expeditions, and took four and a half years to film. He waited “for technology to catch up” with his vision. Visually, Avatar is hugely impressive. Out of all the 3D films I’ve “experienced” last year, it benefits the most from that extra sheen. And there is something genuinely thrilling about witnessing technological breakthroughs aestheticised with such bravado, especially when those breakthroughs happen for the sole purpose of being enacted on screen. With Avatar, the visuals, at every level, look so completely new that it’s difficult to point out exactly what Cameron has done; the audience is given everything at once, and the sensation is overwhelming. Avatar’s innovations centre on 3D filming, and the development of “virtual cameras” which enable Cameron to focus on any detail of his computer generated world without the restrictions this would entail in previous productions.
I suspect that people are attracted to expensive movies in the same way that some people are attracted to rich people and expensive things, and I also suspect that audiences derive a weird and craven pleasure from the authority of a gargantuan budget and powerful new technologies. And, for better or worse, there is a powerful sense of authority surrounding Avatar.
