My Avatar Explainer

I felt that I sort of owed you dear readers some explanation as to why I believe Avatar is such a good film. I jotted down a few thoughts and hopefully this will explain it. Haters, feel free to move on to the next post.

Hasn’t it been a while since anyone has really understood what that phrase meant, “the magic of cinema?” It has been too long for me.¬† It was 1977 and I was twelve years old. It was probably impossible to be twelve and not know Star Wars was coming. I don’t remember how I first became aware of Star Wars but I do know that it still holds the record for the film I’ve seen the most times in the theater. When I first saw Star Wars I was enthralled with everything about it. I recognized the archetypes immediately — Carrie Fisher was Rosalind Russell and Harrison Ford was Clark Gable. Good and evil plainly defined. The special effects were unlike anything any of us had ever seen on screen before. And yet, that wasn’t really the reason my sister and I kept getting right back in line to see it again. We were there because we liked the story. We liked R2D2 and C390. We liked the drama. We loved the satisfying ending. There wasn’t anything about Star Wars we didn’t like. And to this day the movie’s script still resides in my brain, every word.
I began my movie life as we moved from town to town, all over California as my mother sought new real estate to “fix up and sell.” My sister and I moved too soon to make any friends where we were. A few months down, we were on to the next town. What we had was a television. It didn’t take us long to figure out that the good stuff on TV wasn’t soap operas and game shows but black and white movies. We watched them all. Our friends became Fred Astaire, Rita Hayworth, Jimmy Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, Frank Sinatra, Gene Kelly, Peter Fonda – the list is endless. It wasn’t long before we, at 8 and 9 years old, were dressing up like Fred and Ginger and begging for a ride down to a movie house in the valley that still played those old movies. It was our whole world. We knew, somehow, that movies were better then. And this, mind you, was in the ’70s, arguably the best Oscar decade on record. But we were kids and the good movies were not within our grasp yet.

Of course as I became an adult and grew to love movies and recognize great directors my tastes changed. Woody Allen became someone whose work I most responded to – and thus, looking back on 1977’s Oscar year it never occurred to me that Star Wars should have beat Annie Hall. Star Wars was a cinema revolution but so was Annie Hall.¬† No film has had more of an impact on the future of filmmaking, arguably, from that year than Annie Hall. Woody Allen changed the way people wrote movies. It was a romantic comedy that changed the way people talked to each other. To this day, romantic comedies take their lead from that film and it routinely makes the top of anyone’s list of the greatest films of all time. As much as I was devoted to Star Wars as a kid, I became more devoted to Annie Hall as an adult. Like Star Wars, Annie Hall is a film I know backwards and forwards, line by line.

Last night I saw Avatar for the second time. It has been three decades since I lined up to repeatedly watch a film. It has three decades since I had that exhilarating feeling of the absolutely new. Watching Avatar again I was trying to find the flaws I kept hearing about. Yeah, some of the lines of dialogue were corny and obvious. But since I already knew they were coming, and since I already knew the plot hovered closely to Dances with Wolves, those details were taken off the table. I sunk into the love story. I looked more closely at the meticulous details of the natural world of Pandora. I never felt cheated. I always felt like I was right there with Jake. He was my avatar, bringing me back into the alternate world and I never wanted to pulled back out, just like he didn’t.¬† Every scene in the film is majestic and enthralling.

Perhaps that is why the ending of Avatar comes too soon. The second viewing for me was not in a theater you’d expect to respond to the movie. I have never been to that theater and heard it go so quiet – Cameron had this audience in the palm of his hand. They were stunned by what they were experiencing. It wasn’t just that the effects are so mind-blowing; it was that the story was holding them all the way through until the end where they clapped. It is the magic of cinema plain and simple. It isn’t going to change the world and it isn’t going to forever alter one’s identity. It isn’t even going to send home the message that one must “get busy living or get busy dying,” as many of the films do this year. But it is the work of a genius.

At the same time, it doesn’t take away from the other films that are equally good for different reasons. The thing that makes Avatar different is that movies like this simply don’t get made but for every once in several decades. Those who were bored or uninterested, or who felt that the story was weak and the movie bad — I get it, I do. I just know, though, that we have different reasons for going to the movies. I’d forgotten what it felt like to see a movie that I never wanted to end. I’d forgotten that there was a time when being in that dark theater, drifting off to another world, was far preferable to life outside and that pulling away from it almost hurts. I’d forgotten it was possible to experience something that sensational.

Most of the time movies take from me more than give back. They take my time and they take my money. Most of the time, I feel like I was tricked into watching such a terrible, mediocre, dumbed down story – especially movies aimed at kids. Because they’re afraid to do anything risky the stores are designed to appeal across the board. Thus, they are generic and forgettable. Even many of the films that are really pretty good require effort on my part. I don’t mind it because, in my ways, movies are my life. But it is extremely rare to go in and see a movie, start to finish, that gives back way more than it takes. I felt nourished, satisfied, entertained after walking out of Avatar. The only thing about it I don’t understand is why everyone doesn’t feel the same way.

Now I will stop posting about Avatar else I lose every last reader on this site.