Why Avatar Was Worth It: Tech Investment

This weekend, I did what the advertisements told me to and went to see Avatar in IMAX 3D. Truth be told, it was a bit of a disappointment.

First: the graphics were the most incredible things you have ever seen. See it for them alone. But the plot and characters were dull. The problem isn’t the uncanny valley — the alien Na’vi look real enough — but the roteness of it all. A comment on the AV Club by a self-described James Cameron defender was dead-on: “It’s like he just chucked money at a project called Ferngully, But In Space.”

It was a little puzzling that this, the opus on which Cameron had supposedly been working for over a decade, had the following rough spots:

• Weird, ham-handed moralism about the environment.
• Weird, ham-handed moralism about multiculturalism — particularly problematic because Na’vi culture seems to have been arrived at by lumping together a bunch of exoticized ‘native’ cultures (African, Indian, Native American).
• Too long by about 45 minutes.
• As Cameron told Playboy: “Right from the beginning I said, “[the heroine]’s got to have tits,” even though that makes no sense because her race, the Na’vi, aren’t placental mammals.” (h/t Abe Sauer; link NSFW due to cartoon boobs)
• Also: jokes. There weren’t enough jokes. Terminator was funnier.

But enough ‘tearing down the accomplishments of great men.’ Nobody ever made a statue of a critic, etc.

Avatar is worth seeing for the graphics: 3D is the way to go. But beyond viewer experience, it is a good thing for society that James Cameron made it. Why? Because the film poured so much money into technological innovation, and that innovation will carry over to movies and projects to come.

Avatar has gotten a lot of attention for its outsized budget, which was reportedly close to $500 million. That’s a lot of money — the most money ever spent on one film — but there have been other nine-figure films this year that did not use as much of their largesse for innovation. Box office disappointment Watchmen, which featured a less technically sophisticated blue fella, reportedly cost $130 million; according to LA Weekly, $50 million of that was sunk into marketing.

Transformers: Rise of the Fallen reportedly cost $200 million; even though it was Transformers: Rise of the Fallen, it had its share of VFX and audio innovations. But it pales next to Avatar. As Ars Technica points out, the “small city of geniuses” on Avatar’s credits are testament to the mini-renaissance it launched:

Even the credits of the film are monstrous: after Industrial Light and Magic and Weta Digital were credited for the special effects, the long line of other effects houses that worked on the movie scrolled by. I lost count of how many different companies leveraged how many different forms of technology to get Avatar filmed. If you’re a fan of cinema, no matter how you feel about the trailer, you need to see this movie; it represents the absolute best that technology can give us in film—at least with an unlimited budget and a small city of geniuses working across a decade to bring it to life.

Aside from employing a lot of smart people, Avatar gave rise to advances in performance capture workflow, fusion 3-D (which Cameron had developed earlier for his Titanic followup documentary), and believable CG facial expressions — not an easy task. It’s hard to imagine any force less than James Cameron able to muscle corporate money this big into this sort of tech innovation this quickly in this economy.

And the benefits will spill over past Avatar. Now that the (blue) genie’s out of the bottle, these developments are sure to benefit other filmmakers, and could easily spill over into other fields (video game development jumps most readily to mind). Someday Avatar may look dated — its plot will hardly stand the test of time — but its technological daring ensures its place in film history, if only as a museum-piece.

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5 comments

Kevin Ehsani says:

December 22, 2009 at 7:24 pm

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this was an amazing movie… totally worth the time to make it.

BJL411 says:

December 23, 2009 at 12:18 am

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Pay to see AVATAR and the most dangerous man in the world, Rupert Murdoch, profits off that bought ticket.

ireenawagner says:

December 23, 2009 at 5:13 am

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“Avatar”, if it is as successful as I think it will be, will the meme that will challenge the elitist, the globalist, the criminal cabal conglomerate that is now riding rough-shod over the planet; using false-flag terror as the pretext for the construction of an Orwellian police state, while looting the nation-state of its publicly owned institutions and cultures, while raping the environment for its resources.

Joe Callan says:

December 23, 2009 at 11:19 am

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Fine, fine. The battle scenes were kick ass. They stirred the 12-year-old boy living inside me. Great. So do boobies. I understand it was visually stunning and groundbreaking, and blah, blah, blah…

But really–to spend $500 million on a brilliant visual materpeice but NOT spend $10 grand on some hollywood hack to come up with a better name than the idiotically generic “unobtainium”? That seems pretty stupid to me.

$500 million, and the best you can come up with is the need to “mine unobtainium”? So let me get this straight: you have the ability to “detect” the presence of a valuable material from interstellar range; you have the energy resources it takes not only to TRAVEL all the way to that distant location, but to also build up a significant army; and finally–you’ve got the resources to perfect the technology ON SITE to fuse human/alien DNA…yet you don’t have the resources to just…um…find another source for your magic mineral?

“You’ve got to suspend your disbelief, because…”

No. No I don’t. For a piece of “art” that cost half a billion to make, I would think you’d be able to suss out massive gaps in plot logic on the cheap, and maybe develop some characters with depth. Honestly, how much additional money could it have possibly cost to tweak the plotline to make sense, or to tweak the characters to be…interesting?

All the ludicrously thick praise being dumped on this movie only proves two things: how it looks is all that’s important, and the art of storytelling simply doesn’t matter in cinema anymore.

David Harper says:

December 23, 2009 at 11:19 pm

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Mr. Callan needs to get an education in science fiction before he makes comments on the story. “Unobtanium” was coined in the aerospace industry and has a fairly long history of usage. The intended joke was caught by most people in a simple literal sense and also in an inside way if you are familiar with the term. The real plot device of “unobtainium” is a metaphor for the western world’s thirst and need for oil, as all good science fiction comments on the present with stories in the future. The story was classic science fiction using archetypes and plot devices that have been used by masters of the genre and Cameron pays tribute to these masters in his script.

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