Why Avatar Matters - GetTheNew.com

Published on Tuesday, February 09, 2010

Avatar has become a global phenomenon. It's become the first movie in history to gross more than $2 billion worldwide, and has surpassed Titanic's domestic gross to become the highest grossing movie domestically and worldwide. Personally, I've seen the movie three times, all times in 3-D, once in IMAX, and loved it each time as much as I did the first time. It's a highly engrossing movie that I believe has recently unfairly become the victim of a lot of vitriol among critics and bloggers. Naturally, whenever a movie becomes this big it's going to gain its fair share of detractors, but I honestly believe that Avatar is being judged too harshly. I'm not here to say that it's the greatest movie ever made, or even the best movie of the year, but I do believe that it has become an important movie in our generations film history, but also in the history of film in general. I think the debate of its merits is a healthy debate, and I just want to be another voice chiming in.

First, I think we need to examine the gross of this movie. A lot has been made of how if we adjusted for inflation Avatar has not even broken through the top 20 yet (a goal I think it will achieve by the time it's done in theaters, even if it doesn't get much further than that), but no one ever looks at what other movies have come before it and the factors attributable to its place when adjusted for inflation in those articles. If you look at the top five movies of all time you'll notice that all of them were made before 1990 (Gone With the Wind, Star Wars, The Sound of Music, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, and The Ten Commandments). Of the top 20, only three have been made after 1990 (Titanic, Jurassic Park, and Star Wars: Episode I-The Phantom Menace), and if we look at the top 25, Avatar is the only movie made in the last decade to break the top 25. When adjusting for inflation, why are so many movies so old?

Well, we make a lot more movies these days so movies have more competition now than they had in the past. Also, we watch movies differently than we have in the past. When Gone With the Wind came out it was the time of The Great Depression (not too much different than it is today, in a way), and the only way you were going to see a movie was to see it in theaters. Movies didn't play on TV, and there was no videos, DVD's or Blu-ray. Even when Titanic came out in 1997, VHS was still a large part of the way people watched movies. And, even now compared to then, pirating has become more prominent than it has then. These days there's also the fact that studios will rush a film through its theatrical release to push it out on DVD and Blu-ray so a lot of films don't have the staying time in theaters they used to. When Star Wars came out it was released in limited release and was expanded. We haven't even gotten into releases of movies in theaters. Eleven of the top 20 movies adjusted for inflation have been released in theaters more than once. But even looking at the top five films of all time that have been adjusted, had those films been released today would they have performed the same? Now, I'm not trying to discount the greatness of the movies that have come before, I'm trying to prove a point on just how different things are these days to how they were then, and what Avatar has had to overcome to make it where it is today. In a way, at least in my estimation, inflation helps to account for the obstacles a movie has to go through to reach the heights of the movies that have come before it.

Of course, that's not all there is to talk about when it comes to Avatar's gross, as the detractors will attack IMAX and 3-D sales as the reason for its high grosses. There is something valid in that observation, and unfortunately with the slate of 3-D movies released so far the waters have largely been untested for the possible 3-D revolution. Something that must be said though is that people don't mind paying the added surcharges to see this movie in IMAX and 3-D. With Avatar, and its grosses, this largely proves that 3-D isn't a gimmick anymore, but a viable new way to explore film in a new dimension of sight. That, of course won't stop detractors, but The Wizard of Oz had its detractors in its day when it set off the color revolution. I don't know if 3-D's going to stick or not, but Avatar has proven that it's got staying power and is a viable choice for the future of cinema.

Recently, there was an article titled "Are the Standards Lower for Avatar." I think since then there's been proof to the opposite. Of course this article was citing the plotline as being too generic as people see so many similarities between Avatar and movies like Dances With Wolves, Pocahontas, and even Ferngully. I can see the similarities, but I can also see the similarities between a lot of buddy cop movies and District 9 which was hailed as being highly original (and I still hold it as my favorite movie of the year). The point of originality isn't to come up with something completely different, but can even be defined as taking something old and making it your own. If you boil something down to a few sentences you can make any movie sound like several others movies or stories. "A boy, through the help of a mentor, learns that he has great power and how to wield such power; through this power the boy grows up and changes the course of history." This sentence can be ascribed to Star Wars, Harry Potter, and even the story of King Arthur. Even if you choose not to be that vague, Star Wars borrows a lot from Akira Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress, Harry Potter borrows a lot from Lord of the Rings, The Lion The Witch and The Wardrobe, and the story of Jesus Christ. Yeah, Avatar might borrow from other sources, but it would not be the first movie to do so.

It should also be remembered that a lot of movies these days, as the studios believe that only films based on some other sources make money, are either sequels, prequels, remakes, or movies based on other sources. With a budget well over $200 million (I've heard $237, $300, and $350 million) do you really think Fox (known for believing that sci-fi does not make money) would greenlight a movie, even one made by a film maker superstar like James Cameron, if they didn't think it had something that would click with people. In reality, Cameron had no choice but to make a movie that was familiar to a certain extent. Of course, that was really a great idea to make the plot familiar, it insured that people would have something familiar to equate the movie with. Let's be honest, in this day and age of the MTv generation, with everything in film based on familiarity, something had to be familiar to audiences. Not to mention that the movie is about exploring new lands and cultures, meaning that it was the perfect plot to use in a movie like this. In opera, it was common to reuse plot lines to write an opera, but they would change the music and the lines, and you never hear critics and opera enthusiasts counting out Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro because it was the first take on The Marriage of Figaro.

But also in the debate of Avatar's originality, no one looks at everything else that went into making this movie. The world that Cameron as created, the attention to detail with every frame of film you see on screen, is meticulous. This is, at the least, the most fully realized world to be committed to film since Star Wars, if not of all time. Cameron has spent the past twelve years not just writing the script, but creating the creatures, the flora and fauna, the humanoids, etc. And all of that appears on screen. There are so many movies that you can say the money doesn't appear on screen, but with Avatar it does, down to the last penny. No one seems to think about the work that goes into creating a new world. You can throw extra legs on a human, that doesn't mean that things will work on an anatomic level, or that people will identify with it. In the end, Cameron was able to make a movie that not only expressed what he wanted to get across, but also appealed to people.

There have also been grumblings about the dialogue in the movie, but as a former Marine myself, I have to say that the way members of the military talked was right on target. That's one of Cameron's strengths, he doesn't make the dialogue stylish like, say Quentin Tarantino, but he makes characters that are real, regular people that find themselves in extraordinary situations. The dialogue argument could be made about any one of Cameron's films, and has been made about great films in the past like Star Wars. Clunky dialogue doesn't always make a movie bad, but can mean at times that the movie in a way transcends its peers by making its characters real rather than just cool archetypes.

Don't get me wrong, while I love Avatar, it's not the greatest movie ever made, or the greatest movie of the year. I would definitely say it's one of the greatest of the year, and of the decade, and a highly important movie in the history of film though. I honestly think that this film needs to be reviewed again by those who have tried to detract from its accomplishments. Yeah, it has its problems, but no film is perfect, and I think Avatar gets a lot right where many films do not.

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