James Cameron regains his place as the preeminent film director in the use of technology and technical effects in the filmmaking process. Cameron is best known as the self-proclaimed “king of the world” director of Titanic, which spent an estimated $200 million in tackling the technical challenge of re-creating the ill-fated voyage of the S.S. Titanic. Avatar is Cameron’s first feature film since Titanic was released in December 1997. Cameron hasn’t exactly hidden under a rock over the past twelve years since Titanic sailed forth into theaters with its ill-starred lovers on their rendezvous with an iceberg, but his work as a documentary film director, as a writer for a couple of television series, and as the producer of several films and television programs hasn’t exactly maintained his profile as a film director to the same degree that Martin Scorsese (four feature films released between Titanic’s release and Avatar’s), Steven Soderbergh (fifteen feature films released), or Steven Spielberg (nine feature films released) have. Titanic was, of course, an extraordinarily noteworthy film amassing eleven statuettes out of the thirteen Oscars for which it was nominated and reaping an even more impressive box office harvest that won it the title of U.S. and world-wide film box office champion. Cameron’s new film is making a significant challenge to his old film’s records. 

So why is the film so popular? The primary reason is that all of the technical whizbang that pushed production costs to an estimated $230 dollars (per the Internet Movie Database website) does manage to make the filmgoer feel he or she has been taken to another planet and brought up close and personal with another life form—actually numerous life forms—but only one is similar to humanity and yet appears very different in size, facial features, and—most obviously—skin tone. The filmmakers have not scrimped in creating a biodiversity that seems as rich as our own and have made it incredibly beautiful and fascinating. They have also brought a wide array of futuristic machines and weapons into the vivid reality they have created. As noted above, I viewed the film at a screening that did not offer the extra dimension of 3-D, which one can only imagine was intended to further heighten the film’s amazingly rich visuals. Yet as wondrous as those visuals are, few filmgoers would have had the patience to sit through a 162-minute film that just showed all of the biodiversity and all the futuristic military weaponry the filmmakers created without it being connected to a story. 

James Cameron, the scriptwriter, has created a story that is simple and formulaic—not unlike his Titanic. Dismissing it as such would clearly underestimate his talent and his genius for knowing how to strike a chord with audiences and turning that into gold—box office gold. It may seem astonishing that this film has clearly become the film to see during the end of year holiday season. The simple story beneath all of the special effects and visual wizardry is reminiscent of 1950s B-movie “creature features” (that I would watch interspersed with Three Stooges and Charlie Chan movies on a weekday kids’ show hosted by Captain Lloyd here in Maine on Channel 13 during the 1960s) that often placed man’s reckless and irresponsible conduct as the root cause of an impending disaster. A lone scientist (Avatar’s Dr. Grace Augustine played by Sigourney Weaver) was often the cautious voice of wisdom who truly understood the problem that had been created. Yet the scientist’s wisdom needed a courageous man (Jake Sully played by Sam Worthington) of action to make his ideas happen. Often the correct, thoughtful solution advocated by the scientist and the hero was opposed by a high-ranking military officer (Colonel Miles Quaritch played by Stephen Lang) who felt the only solution—though ultimately counterproductive—was to unleash all the firepower in his arsenal against whatever perceived enemy was out there. These are key elements in Avatar’s storyline. 

While the “creature feature” storyline was perfectly adequate to keep kids enthralled and oblivious to their homework assignments, Cameron has grafted on a love story to serve the romantic longings of adolescents and adults. Sam Worthington and Zoe Saldana in their blue Na’vi get-ups are not exactly Titanic’s Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, but they do give the film a focal primal relationship about which the audience can care. Of course, it is probably up to individual sensibilities as to whether one is fully transported by the love between and the obstacles they have to cross as a conflicted human (Worthington) in a genetically engineered Na’vi body and a Na’vi princess who already has a life plan that has been preordained. Neytiri’s (Saldana) destiny to marry her tribe’s would-be future chief Tsu’tey (Laz Alonso) certainly has echoes of Winslet’s Rose, whose noble title had been bartered to a wealthy would-be husband. 

It should not be overlooked that the futuristic Avatar hits several issues that are extraordinarily timely in the here and now. Impending climate change as a result of how humanity is using natural resources has recently been the focus of a worldwide summit in Copenhagen. Whether one is a committed environmentalist or not, it is becoming much harder to deny a link between how we use resources and outcomes for our environment. The film features humans from Earth eager to rape this other planet’s environment for its natural resource. Cameron ups the ante for this violation by envisioning the Na’vi deity as dwelling within the natural environment that the humans want to destroy to access what they want. The connection all living things have to this deity ultimately will play a crucial role in how the film resolves. The justification for how the humans behave comes directly from our much-maligned Wall Street that has been blamed for the deep worldwide recession we are in. Shareholders want profits from the mining operations on Pandora, and they don’t care how that happens. The use of military force to support commercial interests is certainly not new, but the fact that the United States is involved in two wars in foreign lands does make reflection on why the invaders are there and how they are perceived especially relevant. If one was prone to overlooking the common thread of the use of military power in our current Iraq and Afghanistan involvement and the film’s Pandora adventures, the script cribs the infamous phrase “shock and awe” that described the bombing campaign against Saddam Hussein’s Baghdad to underline and highlight that connection. This is not the first time that greedy corporations have been targeted in Cameron’s films. Titanic clearly pointed a finger at Bruce Ismay, the on-board representative of Titanic’s White Star Line owners, for throwing caution to the wind in a bid to break the speed record for trans-Atlantic crossings. Whatever the moral responsibility the greedy passenger ship owners might have had for the Titanic tragedy, it is not as central to the Titanic’s story as the corporate greed in Avatar articulated by Giovanni Ribisi’s Parker Selfridge nor is it as clear-cut in its knowing culpability for potential tragedy. While we know very little about what Earth may be like in 2154 when Jake Sully finally arrives on Pandora, the expedition from Earth is not a collection of men and women drawn from all the nations of the world. They look like and sound like Americans. By attacking the corporate structure of American business, American corporate disdain for the environment, and the overzealous use of the American military, Cameron has made a very anti-American film that ironically has countless Americans and others lining up around the block to see because the issues it raises are clearly part of the zeitgeist here in America and around the world.         

The script, however, is not without its flaws that many will find interrupt the film’s flow and break the spell that Cameron otherwise has cast on the audience. First of all, James Cameron can’t seem to resist inserting clichés into the film’s dialogue. Trite hoary phrases bespeaking heroic derring-do fall predictably out of character’s mouths. Audiences could easily speak these along with the characters given the encouragement of a little bouncing ball. While film critics and serious cinephiles roll their eyes and bemoan the lack of originality, these phrases offer the audience a dash of humor and a comfortably familiar perspective on redemptive violence and sacrifice. Cameron not so subtly names the planet where his story is set Pandora after the mythic girl with the box of troubles that gets emptied into the world. The natural resource that has brought humans to Pandora and is the source of all the problems is called unobtaineum, which my wife and I found laugh-out-loud funny as an apparent first-draft relic that was never given a proper name or, for that matter, a proper explanation for why it was considered so valuable. Some filmgoers may revel in the supernatural intervention in the film’s climactic battle between the Na’vi and the human invaders. This supernatural intervention makes the parting of the Red Sea in the Old Testament seem rather humdrum. Many others may find Na’vi spirituality overwrought hokum. James Horner’s score is generally adequate, but occasionally it fails to capture the tone the story would seem to warrant. During one sequence in which the invading forces from Earth are headed off to clear the natives from key deposits of unobtaineum, the score uses a quick feathery motif to emphasize the frenetic activity in the mobilization instead of the bombastic militarism that it represents. And—despite the Golden Globe nomination for the closing song “I See You”—the film ends with a very sappy somewhat otherworldly song that certainly didn’t fit my sensibilities for where the film had taken me emotionally. Yet—again tapping the Titanic formula—this clearly is an echo of Celine Dion’s song “My Heart Will Go On” from Titanic and shows how Cameron is adept at finding ways for his film to make money. Kuk Harrell’s song may well be more effective separate from Avatar, but its popularity will have been immeasurably boosted by its inclusion in the film. 

Cameron is clearly a director who recognizes that the goal of the filmmaker is to create films that people want to see. His stories are simple, straightforward, and familiar. He doesn’t try to outfox his audience. He’s like a writer who monitors the grade level of what he writes. He wants to be a filmmaker in the same way that Dan Brown is a novelist. Dan Brown may never be compared favorably by scholars to William Faulkner, but Brown churns out best sellers for the masses, and the average adult reader tends to find Faulkner’s work impenetrable and tedious. What Cameron knows is that if you can take that basic story and bring it vividly to life through extraordinary visuals and solid acting, the film will work for a mass audience. That generates good word-of-mouth and repeat business—lots of it. Some may withhold from him the descriptor “great filmmaker,” but he is undeniably a filmmaker of great mass entertainment.