Avatar Recycled

RealD 3D and Creative Content

My last post was on the 2-party system, and this is on 3D films... a numerically perfect segue. I hope it makes for some interesting reading as you plan your weekend entertainment. (And it is under 2,500 words, as I promised but failed to deliver in my previous post!)

Avatar, the now-classic 2009 sci-fi film by James Cameron, set a new standard for 3D film technology and created an imaginary world that was brilliant and original in its visual conception. It will go down in history as a pathbreaking film for those two reasons. At the same time, the narrative was widely recognized as a version of Dances With Wolves and many similar stories that feature an indigenous people heroically fighting back against technologically superior colonists. More specific borrowings from science fiction sources were noted too, although allegations of plagiarism had to contend with the fact that every obvious ancestor of Avatar had its own ancestry, just as the "originals" of many derivative rock songs can be traced back to even older folk and blues material.

Avatar: The Way of Water, now in theaters, is the first of several sequels Cameron has threatened to unleash, at a cost of $1 billion. If the first Avatar was derivative, this is second-order recycling: the story is almost exactly the same in broad outline and many details. Where it differs it also confuses, as only rapt attention and a notebook would allow most viewers to follow the complex origins of the family at the center of the story and understand their various abilities and motivations. Unless you have familiarized yourself with the characters beforehand, the best way to enjoy it is to ignore the complex logic behind it and just watch as things unfold. In the big picture (and is it ever big, at over 3 hours) the characters' particular raisons d'etre can be dispensed with and the story devolves into a predictable sequence: the natives are once again forced into battle against the colonial machines, and with a little help from their aquatic friends manage to heroically defeat them. "Scenes of peril" and "foul language"... forewarned is forearmed, if not fore-bored.

As for the script, I mean... give me a break. Deep philosophy ("The sea is within you and without you, you are made of the sea...") butts up against dramatic utterances ("I can't believe I'm tied up again!") and cognitive science insights ("Just form a thought and we'll see it" - this while looking at an oversized image of a brain). Tired cliches about friendship and filial love, nefarious efforts to obtain compliance by threatening loved ones, attempts to make emotional hay out of the outsider status of certain people (reflected, in a stroke of genius, by the outsider status of certain... fish) - this is the stuff that hackneyed stories are made of, including those whose surface qualities are pretty stunning.

But are they? Although some people have found the RealD 3D technology used in The Way of Water even more impressive than the original Avatar, others have pointed out that there are no really impressive new landscape features. The IMAX screenings in particular have drawn praise for hyperrealism; at the same time, they apparently make Cameron's choice of using a faster film speed for parts of the film stick out in an unappealing way, like scenes from a soap opera cut into a police drama.

Having seen it in a standard 3D screening I can go either way on the visuals. The seascapes had a generally familiar look, as they are largely based on actual coral and aquatic plants (much of the research was done near Bora Bora); and if you have managed to get to a natural habitat of bioluminescent dinoflagellates (as I did in Puerto Rico several years ago) you may be less impressed by the frequent imaginary creatures with natural backlighting. But few people on earth know the sea as well as Cameron, who set a record for deep sea exploration in the Mariana Trench. The plant life below the waves may be less fantastic than the forests of Pandora in Avatar, but the combination of actual underwater motion capture (the entire crew was trained in freediving, and Kate Winslet apparently set some sort of record, holding her breath for more than 7 minutes underwater while acting) and realistic impressions of natural seascapes makes for a pretty impressive visual experience, especially when combined with the 3D effects.

But what about those 3D effects, after all? Cameron set the wheels in motion, and after Avatar one feature film after another was released in 3D. Unlike Avatar, the vast majority were post-production 3D: standard digital cameras were used to make the film, and the 3D effects were added afterward. (Tim Burton's 2010 film of Alice in Wonderland is a well-known example.) Either way, though, what is the contribution of this technology to movies? For me, just about nothing, other than a slight feeling of nausea after wearing the glasses for half an hour or so.

Since I was interested in this question (I've written a longer piece on 3D cinema which I'm still tweaking) I made it my business to take off the glasses briefly when there was a particularly stunning 3D effect. You can do that with RealD, which is more forgiving of viewer positioning and head movement than the previous technology, and still have part of the image in focus, though other parts are not. What I found is that the mind almost instantly makes the transition from virtual 3D to implied 3D, so that the aesthetic impression of a figure that is popping out of the screen with the glasses on is, of course, further away and flatter without them, but nevertheless clearly an implied 3-dimensional image.

That is part of a critique of 3D cinema made back in 2010 by Roger Ebert, though the point was made in more general terms by Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Judgment: the very process of adjusting the imagined image to the actual one produces the effect of aesthetic pleasure. In attempt to do that for you, 3D film removes or minimizes that effort, and thereby takes away one of the basic mental acts that bonds the viewer to the content of the film.

But how can that be the case? Don't we enjoy the film in 3D at least as much as in normal projection? Perhaps the answer is that although 3D films intermittently feature water spraying out of the screen, a spear flying in your direction or a fish navigating through the air above, for the most part we are really seeing the film projected back onto the screen in spite of its own efforts to get off it. We don't use perceptual features we don't need, and it is only when these pop-out effects appear to be directly entering our personal space do we actually utilize the projective appearance itself. Otherwise, we simply look at the film as if we were looking at a traditionally projected image or a painting, and infer for ourselves what we need to in order to make sense of the spacial alignment of objects in the film.

This struck me with particular intensity when I saw Baz Luhrmann's 3D version of The Great Gatsby (2013): so much of the 3D projection seemed completely pointless, ordinary scenes that had no particular reason to jump into the audience. The rest was pretty gratuitous, reflecting Luhrmann's campy, overdone style rather than aesthetic necessity: rooms full of flowers, closets full of shirts and confetti falling on patios, presented with a hyperrealism that almost shouted that the 3D was for him, not for you.

I went to the 3D version of Avatar: The Way of Water mainly because of curiosity about what Cameron was up to after ushering in the latest 3D era. The effects did about as much for me as Disney's A Bug's Life, a standard of their Animal Kingdom 3D theater, which is to say, an occasional "wow, cool". But I don't go to the movies to be wowed with cool effects, though that is mainly what you get these days from films with a lot of CGI content. Impossibly unreal battle scenes keep films like The Way of Water afloat, supported by CGI effects that go way beyond a few silver fish swimming in your direction. (We had already seen 3D flying fish in Ang Lee's Life of Pi anyway.) 3D has taken the damage done by excessive use of CGI and added another platform for cinematic sensationalism. This is to cinema what the the tabloids are to news, i.e., fine for mindless entertainment, but not to be taken very seriously. And don't even mention the word "art".

But the most serious question about the entire Avatar series is not its aesthetics but its social implications. It is pretty obvious that Cameron is interested in the importance of preserving the forest and the sea, and the role of indigenous peoples as managers of nature (which was explicitly recognized by the recent COP15 biodiversity conference). And it is clear that what confronts them is a civilization with very advanced technology, and one which is willing to use it for the purpose of dominating less developed peoples and assaulting the natural world. But Cameron is perhaps the single greatest modern driver of the use of technology in the film industry, and is willing to spend startling sums of money in the service of his vision. Is there a contradiction here?

In my opinion, there is. I understand that technology is inert, and how it is used is a matter of ethical judgment as well as practical necessity. But there is something grotesque about the headlong pursuit of technological change or bigger budgets in film when there is no clear evidence that these are having a salutary effect. It has arguably been the opposite: instead of films of deep social and psychological content, films which push boundaries in art, films which constitute an essential part of the social conversation, we have blockbuster superhero franchises, action films with ever more action in which little or no action really takes place, horror and science fiction that explore less innovative themes and depend more on a roomful of software specialists than on a director's ingenuity.

Many of the most interesting films I've seen since Avatar came out have foregone the use of 3D and CGI almost completely: foreign films, independent films, art house cinema. Moreover, there is not a single 3D or CGI film that I would trade for any of my 100 favorite films before 2000; I'm not sure there is a single one that would ever get on a list of the 500 best films I've seen. Earlier technical innovations, from color and sound to deep focus lenses and Steadi-cams, all seem to contribute to the meaning and depth of film as an art, while modern digital technology seems to be stuck in a self-destructive arms race. Even the early James Bond films, in which technical innovation and special effects also played a significant role, seem much more packed with drama and originality than the entire crop of modern CGI and 3D films. Bond's Aston-Martin or jetpacks, even Oz's "horse of another color" or Chaplin's collapsing ice cliffs in The Gold Rush, are more interesting on a human and artistic scale than the vastly overdone final battle scene in Avatar: The Way of Water.

So from this point of view, yes there is a contradiction: Cameron has pushed forward technology at great cost, but the technology is not doing cinema any more good than it is doing on Pandora. Rather, it is playing to the lowest level of entertainment, the desire to be pumped full of adrenalin or seduced with fancy visual effects.

And even if Disney, which now owns 20th Century Fox, is not going to take the money and send it to the Ukraine or to Syrian refugees (they claim to have made $150+ in donations to "underrepresented communities" in 2021), that doesn't make it any less obscene to spend $250 million on a single movie. Rocky cost $1 million (in 1976, comparable to over $5 million today) and not only won an Oscar for Best Picture but led to one of the highest-grossing franchises ever. Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction (1994) cost $8.5 million, won the Palme d'Or at Cannes and is frequently ranked as one of the greatest films ever made. Barry Jenkins' Moonlight cost $4 million in 2017 and won Best Picture. Noted directors like Wes Anderson are making films for 1/10th the cost of The Way of Water, which is also what this year's highly praised film Everything Everywhere All At Once cost (and it doesn't lack for special effects). Making a great film does not have to cost that much money.

It's narcissistic as well: 10 or 20 films could have been made for the cost of a second Avatar film. When Cameron hoovers up $1 billion for four Avatar films it sends a message to less famous directors, and to the industry as a whole, that blockbuster franchises are going to get the lion's share of support, and are expected to eat your lunch at the box office. It takes a courageous and fairly well-funded company, like the A24 group that released Everything Everywhere, to take risks in an environment like this.

Audiences need to be cultivated, they do not acquire tastes or expectations independently of what is available to them. What is cultivated by technological blockbusters like this is a distaste for films that tell a meaningful story well, because they lack the wow factor that ordinary filmgoers come to expect from directors like Cameron and Christopher Nolan. The Hollywood studio system once produced films like Citizen Kane and Sunset Boulevard. Today it churns out mostly superhero nonsense and fantasy action films. The improvements in 3D are like better steroids, pumping up audiences without the need for original ideas or meaningful content. So I fail to see how Cameron's technological excess is anything more than expensive indulgence of puerile tastes. Dances With Wolves gave us a political message similar to that of Avatar, and it didn't need RealD 3D to do it.