Although Avatar's box office record remains undefeated, the film's reputation has taken a bit of a hit in recent years. 3D and CGI visuals that were on the cutting edge of technical innovation in 2009 now show their age, and, free from the collective hype that audiences felt at the time of release, some have reappraised the film as being a straightforward case of style over substance. As audiences around the world prepare to return to the alien moon of Pandora in James Cameron's upcoming sequel, Avatar: The Way of Water, it's worth looking back at the original movie to explore the ways in which style and substance intersect to create depth.
One would probably be hard-pressed to find someone who hasn't seen Avatar, but for those who need a refresher, look no further. In the year 2154, paraplegic marine Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) takes the place of his late scientist twin brother and joins an expedition to Pandora where he is given control of a manufactured alien body of one of the moon's native inhabitants, the Na'vi. Tasked with infiltrating a Na'vi community in order to convince them to give up Pandora's valuable natural resource, unobtanium, Jake soon finds himself in love with Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña), a local, and the Na'vi's way of life, turning against the human invaders and the ruthless colonel who leads them.
The general story structure, in which an outsider with questionable motives changes his ways after being welcomed into an alien (to him) community, isn't exactly a novel one. This same premise is also at the core of movies like Pocahontas, Dances With Wolves, and The Last Samurai, all of which, it must be mentioned, have frequently been accused of featuring the problematic white saviour complex. That aside, Avatar differentiates itself in several key regards, the biggest and most obvious being its world-building. While the three earlier examples all take place on Earth and draw from documented human history, Avatar, like most other fantasy/ science-fiction movies, has more heavy lifting to do to establish the world of its story.
It's All About Pandora
This world-building requires more than just coming up with a unique look for the film's 10-foot-tall blue aliens, but also building an entire ecosystem around them. The visual language of Pandora and all its flora and fauna is in itself an impressive feat, but there's a beating heart underneath it all. For Cameron, the key to bringing Pandora to life, in many ways, is the Na'vi's holistic worldview and spirituality. This spirituality is centred around the deity Eywa, the collective consciousness of Pandora, in a sense, who maintains the moon's ecological equilibrium.
Eywa and the Na'vi's holistic worldview speak to some of Avatar's core themes regarding environmentalism and the film's clear colonial metaphors. The image of Neytiri, a member of an indigenous community, attempting to stop a giant bulldozer from destroying a stretch of sacred trees is hardly subtle symbolism, but it is effective. These themes of environmentalism, of course, don't actually work at all unless the movie can create an environment so visually stunning and so immersive that audiences immediately understand why Pandora must be protected at all costs.
It's this intersection of theme and visual design that makes Avatar‘s style and substance so interdependent. Cameron, a self-described climate activist, explained in a recent GQ interview that an executive at 20th Century Fox told him early on in the film's development to lose the “tree-hugging hippie bullshit” from the story. Cameron responded by explaining that those qualities are why he wanted to make the movie in the first place. For Cameron, then, Avatar is just as much about environmental conservation as it is about redefining what's possible with 3D and CGI technology.
Characters, as the old screenwriting adage goes, carry theme, and Neytiri is very much the heart and soul of Avatar. Jake, as the audience's entry point into the world, is admittedly a bit of a blank slate, but Saldaña's performance as Neytiri is undeniably powerful. Among the many innovations that allowed Avatar to come to life are advancements made in the area of performance capture technology, allowing actors' performances to be more effectively translated onto their CGI counterparts. This technology helps Saldaña to sell the Na'vi and their spirituality and gives real power to Neytiri's emotional moments of love, betrayal, and devastation. Bringing Neytiri to life helps to bring the Na'vi to life and bringing the Na'vi to life helps to bring Pandora to life. Bringing Pandora to life is key to Avatar's thematic subtext and, really, the whole movie.
The Avatar Blues
Generally speaking, movies that lack depth tend to come and go with little fanfare. Ignoring recent claims that Avatar had no real cultural impact (it did), a specific phenomenon after the film's release shows just how powerful the film's intersection of style and substance could be. For close to a year after Avatar's release, news stories circulated regarding the intense feelings of depression that some viewers felt after leaving the movie theatre and going back to their ordinary lives.
Referred to colloquially as Post-Avatar Depression Syndrome, among other names, some viewers took to Internet message boards to share that they were feeling depressed at the fact that they will never experience the beauty of Pandora. Others expressed disgust at humankind's mistreatment of Earth's environment or a more general disengagement from reality. While these reactions are obviously on the more extreme end of the spectrum, they do speak to Cameron's ability to create a fully-realized, immersive world.
It's easy to imagine that Avatar's success was due to some fluke, a collective feeling of excitement and hype during a drastically different era for movies and the theatrical experience. The box office success of Avatar's recent theatrical re-release, however, suggests there is lasting interest in Cameron's creation. The re-release's remastered visuals are a definite improvement over the original, but hardly the technological leap felt back in 2009, and yet audience engagement remains. That's not to mention the generally positive response to Avatar: The Way of Water's trailers and the sequel's impressive box office projections. While flashy visuals can draw audiences in, they're usually not enough to maintain interest or take up viewers' mental real estate.
An Intersection Of Style & Substance
Avatar's story and themes, in their most basic forms, are relatively simple. Simple stories on their own can still be impactful, but, when combined with exhaustive and immersive world-building, Avatar becomes something more. Perhaps “style over substance” criticisms are levied at Avatar because it's an easy target. After all, the movie has so much damn style (which was at the centre of most marketing) that one would be forgiven for thinking that there's little else on offer. Upon reflection, though, Avatar is perhaps the most notable recent example of a movie's style and substance being so utterly and harmoniously intertwined that the entire film is elevated as a result.
Admittedly, defending the most successful movie of all time may seem like an empty and unnecessary exercise, but as the cinematic landscape changes, it feels more important than ever to understand what resonates with modern moviegoers and why. There are many valid criticisms to throw Avatar's way but writing it off as a pretty but soulless endeavour would be to write off a level of blockbuster filmmaking craft the likes of which audiences rarely see these days. It remains to be seen how Avatar: The Way of Water will fare with audiences but, in light of Earth's own environmental crises, a global pandemic, and a variety of increasing personal hardships, returning to Pandora is sure to be an appealing prospect for many.
