James Cameron’s sci-fi epic Avatar returns to theaters13 years after it broke records. Will audiences still care?
There were plenty of reasons to wonder, in the autumn of 2009, if James Cameron had finally flown too close to the sun, burning a big budget on a boondoggle. Nearly a dozen years after emerging from a troubled production with the biggest movie of all time, the disaster-weepie phenomenon Titanic, the blockbuster maestro had once more secured enormous investment in pursuit of a bank-busting special-effects spectacle to rule them all. Except this time, the movie in question looked, from a distance, like the height of overreaching silliness: A sci-fi fantasy about a species of lithe, ocean-blue, vaguely feline aliens, prancing through a tropical paradise. The first trailer prompted chortles. Cameron, however, would have the last laugh.
Avatar, like Titanic before it, did more than silence the skeptics. It vindicated all the grand, hubristic ambition of its creator, at least from a commercial standpoint. Somehow, Cameron had done it again, and unbelievably surpassed the box-office success of his last conquest of the record books. Avatar, a hodgepodge of science fiction tropes in a cutting-edge package, was the big-screen event that everyone had to attend. Globally speaking, it quickly became the biggest movie of all time — a title it lost a decade later to Avengers: Endgame, then won again thanks to a rerelease in Chinaduring the pandemic. Even adjusted for inflation, the movie sits toward the top of the all-time charts.
Cameron reached such heights by promising something like the ultimate F/X eye-candy experience, and then arguably delivering on that promise. On the big screen (especially the towering IMAX variety), Avatar was as immersive and retina-tickling as advertised. Certainly, no blockbuster before it had better justified the upcharge of 3D, making the most of that cyclical fad (and, in fact, extending its life span over the years that followed). The movie opens with its hero, the disabled military grunt Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), awakening from cryosleep, and as he emerges into a zero-gravity hull, Cameron uses the latest in stereoscopic technology to create the impression of vast depth, reaching back almost infinitely through this enormous fictional space. The movie had barely begun, and it was already dazzling us with its innovation.
To watch Avatar in its original run, seated alongside other curious witnesses in theaters that became cathedrals devoted to his vision, was to feel really, truly transported. That remains the movie’s singular achievement — the way it marshaled impossible resources to plunk the whole world into a meticulously rendered new one. Where Cameron was really depositing us, of course, was his own imagination. He built Pandora, the deadly but beautiful outer space nirvana where the movie takes place, from a supercut of past sci-fi visions, all swirled together in his noggin over a lifetime and then recreated on the most advanced computers 20th Century Fox’s money could reluctantly buy.
This weekend, audiences will have a chance to enter his mind anew. Avatar is back in theaters, where it belongs — an attempt to add a little more to the mountainous heap of money the movie has already amassed, and also to drum up fresh interest in Cameron’s long-awaited sequel (the first of four), which finally opens this December.
