Avatar

When the first ads for Avatar came out, promising that the movie would "revolutionize" film, it was the duty of all thinking people to snort derisively. What hubris! But now it is indeed clear that James Cameron is redefining the relationship between film and film audience. Traditionally, film has been a narrative medium, analogous to literature or theater, and designed to engage its audience with a compelling plot and fully realized characters. The interaction between film and filmgoer is, above all, an intellectual one, and a film's capacity to enthrall an audience rests primarily in its ability to generate satisfying plot and character dynamics. The rise of the blockbuster has seen a number of filmmakers (cough!MichaelBay!cough!) who've tried turn film into pure mindless spectacle, but they've all failed. Explosions and gunshots, no matter how grandiose, and no matter how large a screen they're projected on, are always experienced at enough of a remove to prevent the audience from being fully transported by them. Until now. Avatar's fully immersive CGI universe points towards a radically new conception of cinema, one that engages the audience on a purely visceral level. It's a type of cinema where inventive plots and textured characters are, at best, vestigial, and at worst dire distractions from the sensory overload on display. Cameron's 3D wizardry and operatic scale are designed to bypass the intellect and stimulate the reactive senses. The sort of films that will follow in Avatar's path will be so distinctly different from something like, say, Up in the Air, that they won't even be considered the same art form. James Cameron is pioneering an entirely new genre: cinema as theme park ride.

The only problem is that Cameron doesn't seem to know that he's doing this. The stock characters and the plot pilfered straight from Dances With Wolves would be forgivable if Cameron viewed them as regrettable elements that are necessary to build his overwhelming audio/visual universe. Instead, he seems to take the white guilt narrative and heavy-handed politico-historical allegory seriously. And so the movie spends lots and lots of time on the kind of tooth-grindingly patronizing business (a white man discovering that the 'primitive' race is noble and pure, but not quite smart enough to defend themselves without the leadership of a White Messiah) that would give Kevin Costner and Steven Seagal mindboners. It's a painfully earnest and obvious scenario played out by hand-me-down characters from other, better James Cameron films.

But just when you're ready to hunt down James Cameron and kick him in his well-intentioned but privilege-addled nuts...a giant rhinoceros-looking thing charges through a richly detailed jungle and right into your grill, a giant mecha-mercenary crashes through a river and the air in front of you fills with mist, pterodactylesque creatures plunges through the sky and you get a momentary headrush of vertigo. In those moments, Avatar isn't just another muddle-headed exercise in empty spectacle. It's an experience and one unlike anything you've ever had in a movie theater before. It's a full-sense emergence in an exquisitely detailed, fully realized 360 degree alien landscape. And then it's Dancing with Space Smurfs again.

The contrast between the lukewarm cliches of the narrative and the full-tilt techno-gasm of the imagery may cause brain leakage, but it's a byproduct of the protean nature of Cameron's unwitting paradigm shift. Avatar is an intermediate species, like one of those prehistoric fish with wrist bones. In the future, this sort of technology will go towards making hour-long non-narrative films that immerse the audience in exotic and intense environments without bothering with the drudgery and distraction of plot and characters. They'll probably have their own theater, right next to the Food-Pill dispensary and the jet pack repair shop. For now, we must endure the outdated demands of conventional cinematic structure if we want our revolutionary technological innovations.

Of course, whether it's a good idea to turn a movie into a rollercoaster is a whole other question. It might be wise to remember that there's probably a reason that the Iron Wolf only lasts two minutes.