![]() No joke: There were reports of people experiencing depression after leaving the film because Pandora was too real, too enticing, too beautiful. One can lose oneself in this world, and as I recall, back in the day, many people did. Cameron and his artists have so lovingly imagined the moon of Pandora that every shot of the film contains new wonders. All that fussing over maxilla bones and gill-like membranes, it turns out, pays off. One of the side benefits of there not being dozens of other Avatar properties out there is that, watching Avatar again after all these years, one realizes just how special it is. Others’ failure can be a measure of your success, too. Maybe that’s another measure of Avatar’s pop-cultural impact: All the movie graveyards filled with wannabe blockbusters that couldn’t live up to the promise of Avatar. In fact, after the unprecedented success of Avatar, Hollywood spent so much time trying to retrofit big releases into 3-D that they all but killed off the technology. Now, to prime us for the sequel, Avatar itself is back in theaters, which remains the ideal setting in which to see it - especially in 3-D, as it’s one of the few productions to use the technology properly. Let Avatar be Avatar, and let its sequel succeed or fail on its merits, and not on whether it fits into an exhausting and inane extended universe, or whether it sells enough lunchboxes.īut like I said, a shift is coming, and recent months have seen a massive surge of interest in Avatar: The Way of Water, perhaps because people have suddenly begun to care about movies and the theatrical experience again. ![]() No, there haven’t been dozens of Avatar sequels and spinoffs and reboots and TV shows and streaming series Hulu is not currently working on an origin story for the Home Tree, and there is, as far as I can tell, no Disney+ animated series following the adventures of a family of thanators. Perhaps more importantly, to play the pop-culture-footprint game is to play right into the hands of the corporate IP overlords who have stuffed us full of second- and third-rate Star Wars and Marvel and DC offerings for the past decade or so. If Avatar is so forgotten, how come some new person needs to remind us every week that it’s so forgotten? That silly take, of course, contains its own rebuttal. For years, Avatar - both the extant original and this ever-so-slowly approaching follow-up - has been the butt of jokes and narrow-minded hot takes, the most prevalent one being that the film has left no pop-cultural footprint. One can sense a similar sea change coming for Cameron’s much-delayed sequel, Avatar: The Way of Water, which after years of false starts and date changes is now set to arrive this December. The word went forth, and the word remains: Never underestimate James Cameron. The rest is history - as it was with Titanic, as it was with Terminator 2: Judgment Day. After the film’s first brain-melting all-media screening at the Lincoln Square IMAX in New York, suddenly, all anybody wanted to talk about was Avatar. I love what you did with the translucence on the teeth, and the way the quadrate bone racks the teeth forward.”)Īnd then, we saw the damn thing. ![]() (“That fuckin’ rocks! … Look at the gill-like membrane on the side of the mouth, its transmission of light, all the secondary color saturation on the tongue, and that maxilla bone. ![]() I recall Dana Goodyear’s epic New Yorker profile that depicted Cameron geeking out over seemingly imperceptible VFX details. For months, so many of us expected a much-delayed, over-indulgent monstrosity from a filmmaker who was clearly living in his own head and had nobody to say no to him. The tide similarly turned on Avatar back in 2009. I still remember the week in 1997 when Titanic went from being thought of as an incoming disaster, one that was going to take two major studios down with it, to being thought of as a blockbuster that would remind everyone why we kept Hollywood around. Photo: Moviestore Collection Ltd/Alamy Stock Photoįor all his technical expertise and storytelling prowess, James Cameron might well be cinema’s master of the vibe shift. ![]()
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