Thirteen years after its original release, and two months before the arrival of its sequel in cinemas, James Cameron’s Avatar was shown for a fortnight in IMAX 3D. Curious to find out how it held up over time, and suspecting that I had simply been bamboozled as a teenager by the novelty of 3D technology, I decided to give yet more money to the highest-grossing film of all time. Would it disappoint me as it did a reviewer for The Guardian, for whom even the special effects looked dated? I had noticed upon a few Christmas viewings over the years that the movie was not at all the same experience on the small screen. When it comes to Avatar, is the medium the message?
The resounding answer, I discovered, is that over a decade later Avatar remains an amazing achievement. Yes, there is still the same silliness: did they really have to call the mineral harvested by the humans unobtanium? Yes, there is the wooden and at times cringe worthy dialogue (although, I have to admit, in its unabashed cheesiness, this grew on me): “This is Papa Dragon, I want this mission high and tight, I wanna be home for dinner.” And yes, the plot, as many have pointed out, is basically Pocahontas in space. However, the key word here is experience, and this is why watching Avatar on your home TV or your laptop is just not the same: to witness this film in the cinema is to be immersed for almost three hours in the world Cameron has created.
In interviews, the director has shared his belief that modern humans, in our concrete urban environment, suffer from a kind of nature deficit disorder. According to Cameron, what made the movie so successful was that people had “[…] a dreamlike sense of yearning to be there, to be in that space […] Whether that was flying, that sense of freedom and exhilaration, or whether it’s being in the forest where you can smell the earth. It was a sensory thing that communicated on such a deep level.” I think that here Cameron has successfully analysed the widespread appeal of his own work. What was particularly interesting on this occasion was noticing how certain themes, for me, now prevailed over others. The first time around, I was hyper-aware of the Iraq War, the invasion by an imperialistic superpower for a region’s natural resources: the language of the film, with its references to “hearts and minds” and collateral damage, directly evokes this. I was also reminded of Ursula Le Guin’s novella The Word for World is Forest, the plot of which is very similar to Avatar, and which is a thinly disguised critique of the Vietnam War. Of course, all of that is still there; however, perhaps unsurprisingly, in 2022 I was more inclined to reflect on connections to climate change. The human colony, through technological prowess, has managed to subjugate nature around the mining camp. The Na’vi, Pandora’s indigenous people, by contrast, live in harmony with their habitat. Strikingly, when Sam Worthington’s Jake Sully is allowed to learn the ways of the tribe, its matriarch muses aloud if “perhaps [his] insanity can be cured.” Indeed, as civilisation faces its greatest ever challenge in the form of climate breakdown, it is difficult not to read Avatar as a plea for humanity to stop pillaging the natural world. I anticipate that the same will be true for the upcoming sequel.
Some of the sci-fi aspects of the film now seem less outlandish than in 2009. Elon Musk may not be about to colonise Mars for a while yet, but Jennifer Doudna’s revolutionary breakthrough in gene editing, known as CRISPR, means that we can now intervene in the creation of life, as the scientists do in Avatar. Furthermore, thanks to the popularising work by the likes of Peter Wohlleben in his book, the Hidden Life of Trees, a wider audience is now conscious of the interconnectedness of forests, another prominent theme in the film. Additionally, Richard Powers wrote a Pulitzer prize-winning novel, The Overstory, on precisely this subject. Viewers familiar with these ideas can more easily perceive the kind of research being carried out on Pandora by Sigourney Weaver’s Grace Augustine, and why, for example, she pleads with the CEO of the whole operation, Giovanni Ribisi, not to destroy the home of the Na’vi.
Unsurprisingly, the humans, led by the macho, genocidal Colonel Quaritch, played with terrific gusto by Stephen Lang, press on and blow up Hometree. This culminates in one of the film’s most impressive moments, as we watch Sully awaken in the wreckage, surrounded by particles from the fallen tree. Other highlights include the ascent of the floating mountains while James Horner’s music swells , and of course the spectacular final battle between the humans and the Na’vi. As Pandora’s many species emerge to help defeat the humans, one cannot but be reminded of our planet’s current rage in response to human activity, like a fever fighting off a virus.
Finally, afterwards, there was a clip from the forthcoming Avatar: The Way of Water, which was missed by those members of the audience who marched out the theatre too promptly. In this next installment Cameron will focus on the ocean, one of his abiding passions, as viewers of The Abyss and Titanic will no doubt be aware. Cameron, a deep-sea explorer, once descended in a tiny submersible eleven kilometres into the Mariana Trench, and has been described by oceanographer Sylvia Earle as “a marine biologist at heart”. For this next film, motion-capture technology was used underwater, and we can only guess what visual treats we will be exposed to. I fully expect the film to push the technological boundaries as the original did in 2009, and I would not be at all surprised if the environmental message is even more pronounced. Here’s hoping the script will be a little stronger this time!
