I saw Avatar: Fire and Ash and I have some thoughts on the Avatar franchise. This movie left me wondering if we’ve all been too hard on the Avatar film series. In comparing the Avatar series to some of its contemporary blockbusters I think we can get some context into why people are so hard on these films.
The Fast and Furious movies tend to be visual spectacles where we’re pulling for this found family to pull through these scrapes and save the world again. Doesn’t that also sound like the Avatar films too? However, it has been my experience that people tend to be much more complimentary when discussing the Fast & Furious films rather than the Avatar films. Why IST that?
People complain about the lack of stakes and consequences in the Marvel Cinematic Universe where every hero is equipped with convenient plot armor which really deflates the stakes; the trailers for Avengers: Doomsday are really driving that point home by showcasing the returns of characters who had complete their stories with meaningful deaths undoing those consequences. Every single Avatar movie has a body count with both protagonists and antagonists passing away in what the story is attempting to convince are meaningful deaths (something is undermining the pathos of these characters deaths but, I’m getting ahead of myself). I’ll admit there have been characters reincarnated in the Avatar films but each time the character is brought back they have been shunted into new forms and undergone a physical and at times spiritual metamorphosis which clearly is trying create stakes and consequences.
So what is my theory about why the Avatar movies tend to be so profitable and yet seem to have a benign cultural impact? I think there are a couple of factors contributing to that. Firstly, I think that despite the attempts to create consequences and get us fully invested into the blue furry Na’vi that it is only natural for us to feel a sense of distance from these non-human magical forest characters. I think that the fact that the bad guys in the Avatar films tend to be humans compound this. The films try to compensate for this by reducing many of the human antagonists down to one-dimensional ne’er-do-wells that are consumed by their greed but if anything this serves to create another obstacle for the audience to overcome in their efforts to suspend their disbelief. The villains are intended to be a bit of a scold for the audience as James Cameron is using these industrialists’ wanton destruction and general disregard for Pandora to drive home a plea for us to try and work together to take care of Earth. Lastly, I think when everything is CGI and designed to be so alien and wondrous in comparison to our world it creates yet another barrier to us as the audience in our effort to suspend our disbelief. The sum of all of these little barriers create a film where despite how breathtaking and beautiful so many of the shots in the movie are we as an audience are never really able to suspend our disbelief. Like you always know your watching a movie when your watching an Avatar movie. In my opinion that is why they lack the cultural impact of other billion dollar franchises.