Jeremy’s Tophunder №65: Avatar

7 min readApr 26, 2020

If this list was ranking movies that absolutely blew me away on a first viewing in a theater, Avatar would be №1.

No, I’m serious.

Seeing Avatar in December of 2009, at the Loews Boston Common theater, with my college roommate Dan, is the best movie theater experience I’ve ever had. I’ve never been more impressed, more blown away leaving a movie.

Avatar is the first of three movies on my list that came out between 2009–2011 and were filmed with the Fusion Camera System, James Cameron’s personal creation, which put two HD cameras into a single camera body to film the same image from multiple vantage points, and then blend the two images together to create depth perception.

3D movies ended up getting a really bad rap, mostly thanks to a slew of movies from this same time span looking to cash in on the Avatar craze and just converted their movie to 3D in post-production (despite filming on standard 2D cameras), which ends up looking like trash. Alice in Wonderland, Clash of the Titans, and others really ruined what could have been an amazing and transformative time period in filmmaking. People got sick of 3D movies, because so many movies started doing it so, so poorly, and everyone collectively decided (justifiably) that it wasn’t worth spending the extra $3 per ticket. But movies like Avatar, and two others that we’ll talk about later, were so incredibly worth it, that I’m actually kind of upset that the 3D craze fizzled out as quickly as it did.

Is Avatar a bland story, and basically just a recycling of the same tropes as Dances With Wolves, Pocahontas, and Fern Gully? Yes. I will not argue that very valid criticism at any point in time. Are some parts of the movie noticeably less impressive when viewed in not 3D? Also yes. It’s probably only 75 percent as good as it was in the theaters when viewed on a standard 2D screen.

But holy shit if there aren’t sequences that are better than anything put together in the last decade.

That’s the ultimate legacy of Avatar, if anything. A movie that came out in 2009 is as or more technologically advanced than any action blockbuster that came out in 2020. Considering the speed at which technology proliferates, especially in an industry like filmmaking, where everybody is sharing the cool tech, that’s absolutely astounding.

The flying sequences are some of the best digital effects I’ve ever seen. It’s just grand epic sweep after grand epic sweep through a beautiful backdrop, and every single pixel of every single frame is digitally rendered, but somehow it’s photo-real.

I spent almost three hours watching Avatar earlier this week, and then I spent almost two hours watching a behind-the-scenes/making-of video about the level of detail that they went to in order to get everything right. Here are some highlights:

“Production” on “Avatar” “started” in 2005. I put all three words in quotes, because it’s really pretty murky. James Cameron had the idea for Avatar as far back as the mid-90s, but put off the idea because the technology needed to achieve his vision didn’t exist yet. When they started to explore it deeper in the mid-2000s, they still weren’t sure they could pull it off. What they did was hire two different teams — one team of visual effects experts to explore the technological side, and one team of artists to start to develop the look and feel of Pandora. The problem was, because they didn’t even really have a proof of concept ready on the tech side, it’s not like a movie studio was going to green-light the project. I have to assume James Cameron was just paying for everything out of his own pocket for maybe even an entire year.
All of the “costumes” that the Na’vi wear were actually hand-made, and then given to the visual effects team in order to replicate them digitally. Everything needed to be the right weight, with the right material, so that it would look real when rendered on the screen.
All of the Na’vi actors went through “movement training,” which included gymnastics, dance lessons, and a whole list of other random stuff in order to differentiate the way the Na’vi move through their environment. If they’re an alien race, they shouldn’t walk like humans, right? So they re-taught all of the actors a new way to walk and move.
With most of the scenes being filmed via motion-capture, James Cameron didn’t want his actors to just come into a dull gray room and be forced to imagine they were in the rainforest. So for rehearsals, they flew the cast to Hawaii and had them trek into the jungle (in costume) and rehearsed the scenes that way.
Cameron and his team built a “virtual camera” during filming. It was essentially a monitor that was connected to all of the motion-capture cameras in the studio, and whatever direction Cameron pointed the virtual camera in, he would be able to see an in-real-time rendering of the digital world and the digital characters, as opposed to just a gray room and people wearing motion-capture suits. Prior to Avatar, the fastest turnaround between filming motion capture and seeing anything close to a finished product was multiple days.
For most of the aerial sequences, the filmmakers built wire models, attached motion-capture points to them and then “flew” them around the motion capture stage by hand, the same way that a six-year-old would run around their backyard with a toy plane. That served as the basis for all of the aerial flight path animation.

Avatar is an absolute technical marvel, the most sophisticated and fascinating visual experience I’ve ever had at the movies. That being said, there are obviously a few problems with the story.

First of all, everything about Giovanni Ribisi’s character seems a bit extra. It’s really hard for me to believe that it’s 2154 and someone who is clearly intelligent enough to have the job that he has is still incapable of realizing that another humanoid species might have a way of interacting with their surroundings that’s different than what humans experience or perceive. He spends the entire movie talking like he’s an American colonist in 1675 talking about Native Americans. And yes, I’m sure that’s the point. But I just can’t get over how absolutely obtuse he is. It just doesn’t feel natural to me.

Would it have been too hard to establish some kind of backstory wherein one of his loved ones was killed by the Na’vi when humans first arrived on Pandora? Give him some kind of vengeance streak? Or maybe he has an under-the-table deal with where he gets some huge bonus if he delivers a certain amount of unobtanium, so while he understands the Na’vi situation, he’s conflicted because the money he stands to earn is mind-blowing? Like, I don’t have a problem with having a character like him, who clearly is supposed to care more about turning a profit than environmental concerns, but I feel like there are a lot of ways his motivations could have been explored that would have pushed his character in a more interesting and satisfying direction than “these savages need to find a new tree to live in.”

Also, unobtanium? That’s the best name we could come up with for this absurdly valuable mineral? That just feels a bit lazy, doesn’t it?

The acting is also pretty hit-or-miss. Zoe Saldana is fantastic, Sam Worthington is pretty good, for the most part, and Stephen Lang (as Colonel Quaritch) is very, very believable as the head of security. On the other hand, Sigourney Weaver is medium at best, and I can’t tell if Ribisi was bad or it was just a bad role. Considering I like him in just about everything else, I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt, but I thought Weaver was a problem in a lot of scenes.

There are a whopping four sequels to Avatar in the works, with Avatar 2 set for release in 2021. I’m incredibly interested to see what happens with those, because the world that they built with Pandora just seems so rich, with so much potential. They’re obviously going to be visually stunning, and that’s certainly what I’m most excited to see, with Avatar 2 expected to feature motion-capture scenes underwater. I’m also interested to see if now that we’ve already been introduced to the world and to the characters, Cameron will start to tell more complex stories. He’s obviously capable of doing so — he wrote the first two Terminator movies, as well as Aliens.

Either way, Avatar made due with a rudimentary plotline, because even if it was rather unoriginal, it was still engaging. That, combined with the dazzling visual effects, made it the best movie theater experience I’ve ever had. It’s not quite the same on a much smaller 2D screen, but it’s still good enough to land at №65 on my list.

(For a refresher on the project, I introduced it in a Facebook Post on Day 1)

Here’s our progress on the list so far:

2. A Few Good Men

4. Dazed and Confused

6. The Fugitive

7. The Dark Knight

9. Saving Private Ryan

11. The Big Short

13. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

15. Skyfall

17. Ocean’s 11

18. Air Force One