Following the debut of the first official trailer for James Cameron’s Avatar earlier this morning and on the eve of Fox’s first major marketing push (affectionately dubbed “Avatar Day”), FilmStage contributor Miles Trahan weighs in on the hype and hysteria surrounding Cameron’s sci-fi epic.
Hyperbole is a dangerous thing. As per Wikipedia, one could (and should) define hyperbole as “a figure of speech in which statements are exaggerated. It may be used to evoke strong feelings or to create a strong impression, but is rarely meant to be taken literally.” With the advent of the sites such as Twitter and Facebook and a scourge of web forums at one’s disposal, it’s easy these days to see dozens of folks rushing home from a screening to wax that the film they have just seen “totally rocks!”, is “the best thing ever!” or “#$*&ing sucks, don’t waste your money!” This should, of course, be expected; it’s human nature to want to shout our opinions to the world as loud and as fast as we can, to exaggerate in hopes of separating ourselves from the pack and getting the attention we so fiendishly desire. It’s why star ratings and user reviews are so popular on sites like IMDB; it’s why critics like Armond White (professional contrarian) get so much attention despite the fact that they by and large contribute nothing to the public consensus despite finger-waging and empty rhetoric. We take these things in stride; surely there’s bound to be some give-and-take between what others say and what we take from a film ourselves — we make room for the rhetoric. We acknowledge the hyperbole and temper our expectations just so.
Sometimes the hyperbole and rhetoric surrounding a film becomes overbearing; sometimes it strikes a rational person as overblown, inflammatory, unwarranted or any combination of the three. This can certainly be said of James Cameron’s Avatar.
First, a little background: Avatar, billed as a CG-heavy sci-fi epic that’s equal part Dances With Wolves and Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, has been in development for over ten years now. In 1995 Cameron wrote the original 80-page “scriptment” which would serve as the basis for his dream project. After completing Titanic in 1996, Cameron planned to devote himself fully to producing Avatar — then imagined as a $100 million action epic which would make use of “synthetic” (read: largely CG-enhanced) actors and locales. The general public heard nothing else about the project for years; in fact it wouldn’t be until early 2005 that it resurfaced in the public consciousness, as a project Cameron was pursuing codenamed “Project 808”. Eventually it was revealed that 808 was simply a retooled Avatar, now with a wider scope and ostensibly delayed to allow for the necessary technology to be made available and perfected. Yes, Avatar incorporates some innovative, decidedly “different” technology: It uses a performance-capture workflow similar to Robert Zemeckis’ Beowulf, a so-called “simulcam” which allows one to view a rough suggestion of these performances translated to a 3D, computer-generated landscape in real-time, high-tech facial capture technology and a decked out Fusion 3-D camera system. All told Avatar is certainly pushing the boundaries of what one can achieve with 3-D and motion capture technology; you’d be hard pressed to find someone who would honestly disagree.
"...I'll just stop and have this moment of clarity, as if seeing it for the first time. And I realize that's what the lunar astronauts must have felt like. They'd be in the middle of some complex set of procedures and they'd look out the window and go "Oh, yeah. That's the frickin' moon!" It feels like that." - James Cameron, comparing filming Avatar to men landing on the fucking moon
The problem, of course, comes back around to rhetoric: Since Avatar went into production it seems Cameron and co. have been spinning their wheels at an astonishing rate; interviews began popping up every other week with Cameron or his benefactors waxing about how “revolutionary” the film was, how what they were doing would in no small measure change the way films were made from here and out and thus the very nature of the industry itself. Essentially from the get-go one could smell bullshit; unfortunately an army of drones (largely one particularly vocal subset of the “film geek community” at large) adopted this rhetoric as their own. As the years have gone by the hype surrounding Avatar has reached a rather frenzied state; the fanboys have taken Cameron’s rather careless prophesizing to heart, regurgitating sound bites left and right without much regard for context or meaning and without realizing that they have been marketed to — in a sense, hoodwinked. They have become walking billboards for a film whose shoes even Citizen Kane or The Godfather (generally accepted as the two best films of all time, mind you) couldn’t hope to fill. Expectations have skyrocketed to the point where the film has no choice but to disappoint.
And disappoint it has. At least, in the early going — though met with the expected rave reactions from a select few (remember, The Phantom Menace’s trailer was lauded too), the public at large seems more or less at odds with the first trailer and various other marketing materials they’ve been presented with. (Take, for example, this decidedly demure piece on SpoutBlog.) No, it’s not a terrible trailer — it’s rather well put together, is driven by a great musical cue, and shows off the spectacle of Cameron’s film rather well. The problem really seems to be with the content itself; its blue cats running around in forests and large mechs blasting trees, foliage and anything else that comes in its way to smithereens. It looks like a computer game — a rather well-rendered one, of course, but a computer game nonetheless. It’s missing the humanity of something like Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are, which truly utilizes CG in innovative, imaginative ways. There’s not much imagination at play in Avatar, from what we’ve seen — it’s pure spectacle in the most slavish sense. The CG looks fine, but it’s also rather lifeless; and the story strikes one as being little more than window dressing for these animated space adventures. Put simply, it looks like just about every other animated film in existence.
Of course I’ll catch flak for saying so, but with the amount of bullshit clouding Avatar someone needs to step up and try to clear the air. And don’t think that I’m attacking the film, no — I’m attacking the vocal minority who have trumpeted the film as a “cinematic revolution”, who have built it up to be something it’s not and launched their own offensive against those of us not so easily swayed by the promise of “the new film from the director of Titanic” and “the man who brought us Aliens and Terminator.” At the end of the day two things are abundantly clear to me in regards to Cameron’s latest film: A director with a geek-friendly track record does not a good film make, and a tall house of cards is tailor made to be toppled.
Apologies in advance for shaking the foundation.
Avatar drops December 18th, 2009 courtesy of 20th Century Fox.