mondojohnson

James Cameron‘s Avatar has joined the tiny handful of films that evoked in me a unique and thrilling sense of wonder; the sensation that I was seeing something exciting and beautiful for the first time. My earliest memory of such an experience was at the age of four, when Dorothy’s gray, dirtblown Kansas unexpectedly transformed into the technicolor landscape of Munchkinland in The Wizard of Oz. The next was Star Wars — its groundbreaking vision of a sci-fi universe saved the space opera from the cheesy B-movie graveyard it had been languishing in. And an honorable mention must go to Cameron’s other great CG achievement, Terminator 2, which had the audience literally “ooo-ing” and “aww-ing” with its previously unseen digital magic.

You can believe the hype about Avatar. It does indeed represent the next stage in evolution for digital artistry and 3D cinema, and I believe it has breathed new life into the movie exhibition industry — this is a film that simply cannot be viewed in a home theatre or PC, no matter how tricked out it is. You must be semi-reclined in a state-of-the-art, 3D auditorium with pumping, zillion-channel audio. I cannot emphasize this enough: the TV promos, even in the biggest, best 1080p do not even hint at the texture and pulse of the film. The planet Pandora is a new, immersive Eden that you will never forget.

Most other reviews I have read so far would shift gears at this point, to make the snotty observation that the story isn’t on par with the dazzling visuals. I strenuously dissent from this point of view: James Cameron is a passionate, political, and intelligent sci-fi auteur, and he continues this forceful tradition with Avatar. Lest you forget: the man writes screenplays that are awesome popcorn polemics. He is a radical feminist — see Sarah Connor’s “menstrual envy” tirade in T2; or the ass-kicking Ripley and Pvt. Goldstein in Aliens. And the director’s cut of The Abyss explored the strange new territory of post-cold war sci-fi — pretty revolutionary when you consider that fear of the Soviets was the entire underpinning of the whole genre.

Avatar nicely captures the current zeitgeist and its anxieties: the fragility of ecosystems under the boot of military-industrial greed machines. (The corporate dipshit is played to comic perfection by Giovanni Ribisi, in an echo of Paul Reiser‘s turn in Aliens.) Cameron’s writing should also be applauded for its obsessive thoroughness — Pandora’s literary existence is drawn with the same mind-boggling resolution as the CG imagery.

James Cameron has surpassed Spielberg as the master storyteller of the American cineplex blockbuster. “King of the World” indeed — long live the King.