LET'S START THINGS off right.
I have a poster on my wall for
The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms which boasts,
"CAST OF THOUSANDS! OVER A YEAR IN THE MAKING!" It's on my wall because I found the ad strategy funny—the implication that the duration of its production time somehow justified decent film quality. It doesn't, and we know this now; nothing about the film itself seems particularly impressive. To look at
the imdb user reviews, we can see that "Superior F/X Sets This One Apart" (and 15 out of 17 users agreed with that review).
Some trends never die.
Avatar, lauded as one of 2009's best films, is like a meal at Olive Garden: it looks pretty, but it tastes like a shitty script.
The movie dimly explores the concept of self-identity in a very metaphorically familiar "New World" of Pandora, but its shallow investigations only lead to conclusions like "We have a lot to learn from native people" and "Spirituality with the natural world could maybe lead to a union with rhino-type creatures that will save our asses one day." If the film had investigated any real spirituality or native tribe and produced a significant analysis, it would be easier to sit through, because Cameron could have balanced brilliant filmmaking with intelligent storytelling. As a story,
Avatar embarrasses itself spectacularly.
The question is not why they opted for ecologically-friendly themes and filmmaking methods (in
an interview with The Globe and Mail, ego and director Cameron responds to the question of justifying an environmental message with making the world's most expensive film by stating simply that "the greenest decision [we made] was not to shoot in a rain forest," and leaving the answer at that), but rather, if they were planning on spending $300 million dollars, why not hire a decent writer? Why not produce dialogue that, frankly, doesn't suck? Most pertinently, how can Mr. Cameron justify making a film with such an impeccably weak script, and how can audiences and critics allow him to get away with it?
The justification, as
Rotten Tomatoes critics say, is that the visuals are simply that good, that the film is more than the sum of its parts—because it's really just the one part that makes the film. This implies that if one facet of a film is remarkable enough, the rest can be forgiven. Though the same has proven historically false for movies like
The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, and visually unique movies like
Star Wars (given a particular comparison by most critics) are more remembered for their fun characters (there is no Han Solo in
Avatar) and witty one-liners ("Now let's blow this thing and go home!" has been updated to the villain's clever lines like "Come to papa!") than their "good-in-their-heyday visuals".
It is true that
20,000 Fathoms was probably not historically groundbreaking, whereas
Avatar is literally a new style of visual filmmaking. That's fine. It can have that distinction, alongside
A Space Odyssey and
Toy Story, and I appreciate its significance on a purely visual level; to call it a great film, however, is to misunderstand what a "film" truly is.
Space Odyssey and
Toy Story, like
Star Wars, have qualities beyond their visuals that make them worth watching.
Avatar's failing is that it can only be enjoyed on a singular, shallow level.
It is my hope that
Avatar is forgotten in a decade's time, and if it is remembered as a monument of groundbreaking filmic techniques, then it is remembered as
Birth of a Nation is remembered—an epic film that, while having redefined certain film terms and technologies, nobody feels the need to really see anymore.
So please, everyone: Stop giving this movie "10/10" on imdb.
THIS IS THE KIND OF MOVIE that inspires a faintly reassuring, "Oh yeah... I remember that one" whenever it's brought up in conversation. Gary Ross's high-concept allegory recalls more fairy-tale symbolism than gripping character drama, though really it supplies both; it's a cute story told in a cute way that sent a message once and has since been forgotten.