The Attraction of Avatar Part I: The Director and Technology

Twelve years I’ve been waiting for the next James Cameron movie. Two years I’ve been waiting for his vision of a scifi epic adventure in a time where, hell, I can’t name you the a recent example of its kind. Did Avatar live up to the hype? Is the technology behind the movie a game changer?

It sure is. And man do I fucking love this movie.

I’ve probably lost some of you already – sometimes a man with an erection for a director and his/her films is just not attractive. I’m passionate for only a few things, and when it comes to James Cameron movies, I don’t fuck around. So let me stroke one out for you because there are now four of his movies in my top five.

…Star Wars! There’s that scifi epic adventure example I was hunting for. Not really fair to compare Avatar and the original trilogy (because of their eras, not because geek culture says I should guard the pedestal), but the prequel trilogy is a recent example – and also one that went big for the computer-generated at the expense of everything else.

Both Avatar and the Star Wars prequels have excellent computer generated effects. Given enough time and money, the prequels could look as great as Avatar’s. What separates the two is the blending of what’s real and what’s post production. Computer effects that involve people, for the most part, looks awkward in the prequels; look at Episode 3’s opening space battle and then watch Count Dooku somersault off the balcony to fight the Jedi. The photorealism in Avatar is fantastic, but if people and objects don’t move like they should, then the whole presentation looks dooku.

And movement is where Avatar dances. What Avatar, what The Volume, have given us is a new kind of prosthetic – one that can be anything, one that imposes nothing on the actors so that they can do what they excel at without worrying about dress. We believe in Pandora because even though it’s a world created by designers on their machines, beneath the Navi are actors, their performances captured.

I’ve ranted about the motion-emotion capture in previous posts, and what we saw in the trailer aren’t even the highlights. Despite Cameron’s need to push technology (and not just on the computer side, because remember, for Aliens Stan Winston’s company built the fourteen foot tall Alien Queen; and even though Digital Domain and ILM generated the effects, an actual full-scale Titanic was built albeit a functioning interior) he knows movies are not just about extravagant sets and explosions, that if you don’t give the audience a believable story and characters, then what’s the point? Every other director says character drives their movies, and most of the time we either don’t care for the performances or the story or both. With Avatar, performances are even more important because while the actor’s movements and expressions have been captured, for the most part they look nothing like their character. For us to care about them we need something familiar to hold on to. We see movies to be entertained; to see people act.

And nothing looks like Avatar because no other movie has had The Volume to work with; in short, The Volume allows Cameron to view a rough rendered world the actors perform in, meaning he has complete freedom to adjust shots instead of unnaturally shifting actors or effects in post. Another way of looking at The Volume – think what Peter Jackson did with Gollum, but on a larger scale. Nothing looks like Avatar because the shots Cameron sets up doesn’t have to conform to what will be added later; a scene’s environment is already created on the computer, so while in production he already knows what the actors will look in relation to what is actually not there on the set. Everything looks uniform. If there is one thing I desperately want to get across, this is it. Know the reasons for Avatar looking the way it does and the reasons for Cameron pushing this technology.

Cameron has always been a clean director in terms of speed and camera angle. His action tends to run at normal speed, and the rare slow motion is used to heighten tension or a mood instead of allowing us a frame-by-frame as though the projectionist was working the machine like Quicktime. Look at how he uses slow motion in T2, when both Terminators have found John at the Galleria; look at how nothing slows down in the Operations scene in Aliens. As for the camera, Cameron doesn’t go for the artsy or gimmicky angles, which pleases me to no end, and he also doesn’t go documentary – for the most part I’m not a fan of this style because I like to see action framed clean and clear.

Put aside the technical. Avatar is just a goddamn fun movie.

So what if the story is space Dances With Wolves. So what if it has action movie tropes, particularly the kind where a gunpowder civilization abuses the tree-hut warrior culture. Sure it’s reductive to say all action movies are the good guys versus the bad. Broad strokes does not equal blah story. What makes Avatar exciting is the way it’s executed; the way it looks; the way the actors emote despite their appearance. The writing might not be as sharp as The Dark Knight’s, but Avatar doesn’t fall apart in the third act because of a convoluted plot and characters whose motivations flip flop in the absence of a rationale collision. Telling is more important than story.

Cameron described Avatar as a scifi fantasy adventure. And what a fun ride it is. There are no complicated setups or mythologies you have to know beforehand. Even though this is a big budget studio movie, it doesn’t have to please all demographics to make its money back; there are no kids to save-the-day; there are no funny sidekicks to entertain morons. Characters live in the moment, are not troubled by their past or at least there are no dedicated scenes a monologue for sympathy.

So for now let’s stop this essay, and in the next post I’ll talk as though we’re dining after having watched the movie.

Thank you, James Cameron and the cast and crew of Avatar.