Does "Avatar" Resonate at All After 10 Years?

Scene from Avatar (2009)

It all seems like a myth nowadays. How could there be an original story in a major Hollywood production that grossed $2.78 Billion (with a 'B')? In 2009, earning over the 10-digit threshold was a rarity made by enough films that you could count on one hand. In some ways, that is what Avatar represented ultimately at the box office when it premiered on this date 10 years ago. It was a film that promised a new kind of spectacle, where motion-capture and 3D technology could be used to create a world of awe for audiences, creating the new essential for a theatrical experience. Yes, to wade through the majestic world is known as Pandora is to see the capabilities of computer technology to create fascinating landscapes where everything down to the moss growing on a tree feels thought out for hours and days. It was the spectacle that forced audiences to return in droves week after week.

And yet the world it promised would not amount to much. At some point following the film's release, director James Cameron declared that he would only be making Avatar movies for the rest of his career. It is 2019 and amid many deadlines not met the joke has become that these films will never get made. Is it to blame for why the film feels like such an anomaly nowadays? Kind of. The film was released in the wake of Marvel starting their cinematic universe and surging ticket prices made the road to a billion dollars easier (Disney has seven films this year that have achieved that goal this year so far). It could skid by so long on merchandise, popping up on the front page of Disney+ on release day as this weird reminder that the studio that made it (Fox) no longer exists. To complete the irony, Avengers: Endgame became the highest-grossing movie of all time just a few months prior. However, its status as the phenomenon that changed the world has been reduced to a fad, and one not entirely earned. As the joke goes, it's the most popular movie that nobody remembers, and that's a bit of a bummer. 

Part of the issue with Avatar is not so much that it so far remains a one-and-done, it's that everything it created has been emulated and become the norm. While Pandora wasn't the first fully rendered CGI landscape, it was one that set the bar high for everything that followed. To watch any major film released since is to see some influence seep into the DNA of the fantasy landscapes, where practical effects are held to a minimum in favor of wild images with far-out conceptual framing. While many of the early adopters weren't capable of capturing the story with as much clarity, it wouldn't take long until films like Rise of the Planet of the Apes or Guardians of the Galaxy created worlds on a computer that could compete. Suddenly Avatar wasn't special. It was the first in a long line of films that would embrace the abstract, finding ways to make our world greater than we could ever possibly envision.

That is probably the hardest thing to appreciate about Avatar through a modern lens. While it remains a cutting edge use of technology, it doesn't exactly have anything exclusive to offer. Yes, the characters are original and there's enough agriculture to fill several textbooks, but as a story, it was always criticized for its simple dialogue ("Don't shoot, you'll piss him off.") and possibly being a rip-off of Dances with Wolves, or the prized possession's name being a tad too on the nose (Unobtainium). Much like Cameron's best work, it was reliant on you entering the film and just letting the details waft over you for three hours, feeling the high-quality sound audio boom in the excellent James Horner score, and the 3D makes it feel like you're flying past those floating waterfalls. Yes, to some extent the experience was invented for the big screen. If anything, it helped redefine what a blockbuster was as many tried to catch up (post-conversion films, notoriously Clash of the Titans, only hurt Avatar's reputation as it created the false sense that every big film needed that extra dimension) and the few who succeeded (Step Up 3D, Hugo, Gravity) proved how rarely it worked well. Ironically, it remains a dying fad over the past few years serving as one of the last vestiges that the film had on the industry.

To talk about Avatar's legacy now feels more like it was meant as a commentary on a few years when it was promised to rock the world. Even stoner comedies like 2011's A Very Harold and Kumar 3D Christmas would make the joke that their film was "Avatarded." Still, what was the cultural cache after maybe the five-year mark? Cameron was promising multiple sequels as lead star Sam Worthington's career failed to capitalize on the film's success. Sure, Disney World has gotten in on making an interactive park for the film, but nobody really talks about it. It's overshadowed by Star Wars at every turn as the quintessential space-fantasy franchise. The issue is that the legacy can be more associated not with anything in its story, but what is presented visually. That isn't to say that it doesn't deserve love for its groundbreaking effect. It's just that it really puts into clarity why Avatar 2 isn't out. It needs to have something even greater in a world where technology feels churned out faster than ever to make films pop. Not only that, but they're franchises. Cameron was building a franchise, only his took much longer than an average Marvel film (there have been three releases over the past few years) and in an age where people need constant reminding, that hurts a little.

Would Avatar still be as revered in an age where the third or fourth sequel was out by now? Maybe. It all depends on how those stories build. Most franchisees who take more than a decade to produce something always end up having a quiet legacy anyways. They're more likely to suffer reboots than maintain the same creative team. That itself is a miracle that the sequels will have. But will the wait really be enough, provided that day ever comes? The skepticism that a sequel will ever appear grows by the day. Even the report that shooting of the film wrapped recently doesn't suggest that we're even a year out from a plausible release. Sure, some would argue that this isn't how Cameron works, but to look at his filmography suggests that his best work has been in sequels such as Aliens or T2: Judgment Day. Any Avatar 2 would've been anticipated with that guideline alone.

Maybe that is the issue. 2009 was the break in modern cinema where franchises went from being selective to the main draw. While there's still the argument over quality, Marvel has a franchise with over 20 sequels made in the time that Avatar is taking to make one. Not only that, but each sequel interweaves in a manner that makes the plot crucial to the other. Basically, it's more of an investment and makes cinema more about continuity and commitment over years. Basically, you need to know details to even understand some films. The experience of discovering a film with a singular story devoid of any larger context is shrinking in a way that hurts Avatar. So you love the 2009 film? What do you watch to continue the experience? You can't. You can read fan fiction or buy the merchandise, which in the old days would've sufficed. Instead, there is a need to constantly be updating and that causes rifts between more traditional filmmakers and the modern blockbuster. 

There's a lot to love about films like Avatar from a modern perspective. It's almost antiquated to see an epic with unrecognizable properties do so well at the box office. It's a celebration of original thought. However, Avatar's bigger issue is that it had no resonating plot. It was always about the visuals, and the average viewer is likely to remember Pandora more than what the third act is. It's what makes satirizing the film especially confusing, such as when The Simpsons did it in "In the Na'vi." The imagery is striking like a Coke can is striking, but what is it doing there? That's the tough question. Fantasy and sci-fi are tough sells in cinema anyways, but Cameron's ultra-success makes one have to ask why the story doesn't have an ounce of the memorable plot. In some ways, that's its greatest downfall.

Which is a bummer because Avatar feels more ambitious than the competition that's come in its wake. Cameron built an entire world from scratch, free of any existing mythology to make a story that felt personal to him. In that way, it deserves some respect. It is one of the few films that will allow the viewer to stay in an atmosphere and just enjoy the visuals. It is more patient than Marvel's many films eager to get to the finish line. The Horner score is phenomenal and gives the planet even more of a unique life as the scope slowly unravels before the viewers' eyes. Then again, one of the biggest issues is what plagues every movie: it eventually leaves theaters and has to survive on home video. It looks nice and serves as a decent cable TV standard, but how does it resonate to audiences who didn't make it out to the multiplexes in 2009 or 2010 during its less successful rerelease? You have to use your imagination, and it's difficult when fantasy has found better ways to be quicker and more accessible.

In some ways, Disney+ prominently promoting Avatar on their front page was the best possible way for the film to celebrate a decade. While its place on that page may symbolize its failures to make Fox a towering studio full of competitive original works, it at least is available on one of the most promising and useful original streaming apps in an age where they're increasingly useless (does anyone care about Apple TV+?). If anything, it can try to recoup its image slowly with this approach as audiences wonder what the second-highest-grossing moving in history looked like. It may not necessarily be the whip-speed masterpiece they think that Endgame is, but it deserves its place in history. Maybe if those sequels happen to ever exist (especially now as a Disney property) the legacy at 20 will look differently. That would be an amusing turn of events. For now, it's still the most popular movie that everyone forgot about, and there's some truth to it. That's in part because things just have changed in what popular movies are. It's also maybe because it was always more about how it made us feel in the theater in the moment, and not as a work of provocative plotting.