 
Years in the making, a rumored $500 million budget, and enough "game-changer" hype to sink the Titanic — Andrew, how excited are you for James Cameron's Avatar?
 
I'm going to guess I'm marginally more excited than you, but less excited than... well, James Cameron. Nevertheless, it's fair to say I am intensely curious. And Mr. Cameron has only let me down once or twice before, so I'm definitely willing to give him the benefit of the doubt on this one.
I don't think anyone could be as excited as Cameron about his own work. If he were half the filmmaker he thinks he is, I probably would be foaming at the mouth for this movie. So maybe we should start with The King of the World's track record. I'd sum up my feelings thusly: "What have you done for me lately?" I'll give him all credit for the Terminator movies (well, all the credit aside from that due to Harlan Ellison, who successfully sued to have his name included in the credits). But I suspect you have more love for the rest of his oeuvre than I do.
Well, I'd have to break his track record down into three parts: the good, the bad, and the ugly. The good: even if Cameron stole from Ellison and/or whomever else, at least he stole from good writers for the Terminator movies, both of which still hold up pretty well, and both of which were much smarter than your average killer-robot movie of the era... and, needless to say, Terminator 1 and 2 were like The Godfather 1 and 2 compared to Transformers 1 and 2. So there's that. And Aliens totally kicked ass until Fincher went and ruined it for everyone.
I can't say I ever felt the love for Aliens. The original Alien was a haunted-house movie in outer space, which Cameron followed up with a Rambo movie in outer space. Except in this case, Rambo was a woman, a development that got way too much credit in undergraduate circles as a victory for feminism. (Despite the fact that Cameron has been married a million times and staged the perviest, most uncomfortable strip-tease scene in history in True Lies.)
Then there's the bad, which in my book pretty much comes down to The Abyss, which just wasn't particularly good on any level (except for maybe some cool water-alien effects).
And the ugly is, of course, Titanic... an overblown yet bluntly effective spectacle that's a big goony bird of a movie, yet one I have a hard time disparaging — partly because I saw it on a day when I'd just gotten fired from a terrible temp job and sucked in the escapism like ice water and partly because, for all the cheese, it was at least a story Cameron actually seemed to care about. So I guess that'll have to do as my opening statement for the defense.
As for Titanic, well, no one could deny its success — it's still the highest grossing movie ever, and it won eleven Oscars. But I think it cemented Cameron as the Cecil B. DeMille of our time. Titanic gave good spectacle, but story-wise, it may have been the corniest Best Picture of all time. For all its admittedly jaw-dropping action and special effects, it's not a movie that left me thinking, "This guy is such a genius, I'll gladly wait twelve years for his next movie, which will change everything!"
Genius? No, probably not. And Avatar's most passionate critics will no doubt be the aging fanboys with unrealistically high expectations for some original Matrix-style reinvention of... whatever the hell Avatar was supposed to be reinventing. (And, to be honest, Cameron's spiel about how he couldn't make Avatar until technology caught up with his grand vision may have just been a way to get people off his back about his next project, so he could laze around for twelve years playing Grand Theft Auto with real live hookers and rocket launchers... or whatever the hell billionaires do in their down time.)
But while I'm not expecting some reinvention of cinema, I'll be happy just to see a movie with a few ideas (beyond cynical Michael Bay-esque money grubbage) and some actual old-fashioned craftsmanship in the wake of recent blockbusters like the aforementioned Rock 'Em Sock 'Em franchise, Indiana Jones and the Ridiculous CGI Monkeys and Roland Emmerich blowing shit up real good. Cameron may not be a genius, but at the very least he's always been a pretty solid craftsman.
Actually, I think the fanboy audience will be Avatar's most ardent defenders. It would be unfair to blame Cameron for this, but the whole rise of geek culture over the past decade (spearheaded by Harry Knowles and his Ain't It Cool clique, which has spread like swine flu across the internet, to the point where they're now the tastemakers despite rarely displaying any taste) has brought us to the point where it's hard to be critical of the dominance of sci-fi/fantasy/superhero cinema at all without being accused of snobbery. (That's your cue, commenters.)
Maybe my real gripe is with the school of thought that suggests advances in cinema come from 3-D computer effects rather than innovative storytelling. Which brings us to Avatar itself. Obviously, neither of us has seen it at this point, but the trailers are out there. Has Cameron really spent all these years bringing the most photorealistic Smurfs episode ever to the screen — or might there be something more to Avatar than meets the eye?
Given the aforementioned notion that Cameron needed to wait for cinematic technology to evolve before he could film his latest movie, I did find the trailer pretty underwhelming. Then again, as I've previously opined here at Hooksexup, we're in the midst of a strange devolution where special effects look more and more fake the more the technology advances.
Seriously, have you seen those werewolves in the New Moon ads? They're less realistic than the old stop-motion-animated beasties in Ray Harryhausen movies (or even Wes Anderson's fantastic foxes), but nobody seems to care — as with Madonna's face, Ashlee Simpson's musical talent and Sarah Palin's leadership abilities, fake is apparently the new real in the vast consumer wasteland. (Or maybe Cameron's just psyching us out and saving the really good stuff for the actual movie.) At any rate, while the visuals do look pretty underwhelming (even in 3-D), I'm still willing to give Cameron's storytelling chops the benefit of the doubt, in hopes that Avatar's hippy-dippy tale of space exploration will at least be interesting (even if it's just an interesting Watchmen-esque misfire).
Well, I don't think Cameron would be too delighted to have you defending him in a court of law, but I will admit that as a connoisseur of train wrecks, I'm more curious about Avatar than I was about, say, 2012. After all, I don't think there was a pundit in the world who didn't predict complete, studio-sinking disaster for Titanic, so it will at least be interesting to see if Cameron can pull in the masses again. But honestly, my money is on Avatar falling victim to "Chinese Democracy syndrome."
Guns N' Roses was once the biggest band in the world, but it took so long for Axl Rose to get it together to release that album, no one in their right mind could have thought it would represent any kind of great leap forward in music, regardless of how long he worked on it or how much it had been hyped over the years. And sure enough, when that album finally showed up, it pretty much sank like a stone. I expect Avatar to have a couple good weeks — I mean, if Transformers 2 could end up as the biggest money-maker of the year, anything is possible — but I'm looking for James Cameron to be exploring the possibilities of Terminator V by this time next year. And if I'm wrong about it, I'll be the first to admit it here. In fact, if Avatar turns out to be a success, either financially or critically, I will buy you a frosty one next time I see you. Fair enough?
Sure... and, in honor of Cameron's smurfs, make it a Pabst Blue Ribbon!
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