I Will Never Understand the Appeal of the Avatar Movies
I walked out of the My Big Fat Greek Wedding press screening a lifetime ago and turned to several of my fellow critics and confidently inquired, “Who on earth would want to see a big-screen sitcom with no stars and no conflict?”
It turns out that a lot of folks wanted to see a movie with no stars and no conflict. My Big Fat Greek Wedding was, for a time, the most successful independent movie in American film history.
My Big Fat Greek Wedding wasn’t just a surprise blockbuster: it was a pop culture phenomenon that led to screenwriter/star Nia Vardalos receiving one of the least merited Best Screenplay Oscar nominations of all time.
If you’re keeping score, Nia Vardalos has more Academy Award nominations than Groundhog Day, one of the few perfect American movies.
Seven years later, I marched out of Avatar and confidently announced that I had just seen what was destined to go down as the biggest flop in film history.
"Who on earth would want to see a 300 million dollar remake of Billy Jack with big blue space aliens instead of Native Americans?”I inquired out loud.
It turns out that lots of people wanted to see a 3-D, science-fiction take on Tom Laughlin’s iconic, influential yet half-forgotten brainchild. If box office numbers are to be believed, more people wanted to see that garbage than any other movie in the history of the universe.
Even Mank.
I was very, very wrong about Avatar’s future. I thought it would be the biggest flop of all time. Instead, it was the biggest hit of all time.
I will be the first to concede that Avatar is a technical marvel that marked a major evolutionary step in the development of 3-D. For me, Avatar’s greatest contribution to pop culture and film lies in sparking a 3-D fad that lasted a few years and resulted in garbage like the big-screen adaptation of Yogi Bear getting the 3-D treatment.
Avatar wasn’t the biggest box-office smash ever, although that in itself would be pretty impressive. In deference to the film’s popularity and cultural ubiquty, Avatar was nominated for nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director. It took home three Oscars, including one for cinematography.
If you’re keeping track, Avatar scored nine more Academy Award nominations than Groundhog Day, which did not receive a single nomination, but one fewer Oscar nomination than Mank.
Avatar was such a global phenomenon that stories proliferated of super-fans falling into deep depressions and pondering suicide because they could never inhabit Cameron’s fantasy world on account of it being fictional.
This led to articles with headlines like, "Avatar Driving Us to Suicide, Says Fans.” That's not good. Movies should transport us to fantastical worlds beyond our imagination, but not to the point where they drive us to suicide.
I know how these Avatar super-fans feel. I fell into a deep depression after seeing Nothing But Trouble and realizing that I would never be able to visit Valkenvania and experience the film’s wonders for myself.
I was brought back from the abyss by the love of my family and the support of readers, which matters more to me than even Nothing But Trouble.
Avatar was so impossibly successful that sequels were inevitable. James Cameron assembled a writer’s room to help him map out the future of his lucrative franchise. You’d expect a sequel to follow in a few years, given the tremendous public demand for a follow-up to the top-grossing movie of all time, but thirteen years passed between 2009's Avatar and its 2023 sequel, Avatar: The Way of Water.
In that time, something strange seemed to happen: the most successful film of all time, a pop-culture phenomenon, record-setting smash that was nominated for a fuck-ton of Oscars, seemed to be forgotten.
Forgotten might be too strong a word. It would be more accurate to say that it was at least half-forgotten. At the very least, the film did not leave as massive a cultural footprint as its box-office and hype would suggest.
I covered Avatar in my Forgotbusters column at The Dissolve. It was a column dedicated to movies that were among the top twenty-five highest-grossing films the year of their release, but that failed to endure culturally.
Avatar wasn't just one of the twenty-five most popular movies of 2009: it was the most popular movie of all time. Yet when I posted my piece, it got WAY fewer apoplectic defenders than Space Jam, which was very successful but not on the same level as Avatar.
In 2023 Avatar’s sequel finally came out. I was not arrogant enough to predict that it would fail. That would be stupid. I couldnt' have been more wrong about Avatar’s popular appeal.
I didn’t understand Avatar’s appeal. Then again, I have weird tastes. I think Freddy Got Fingered is an avant-garde masterpiece. I am in the minority in that respect.
I also wouldn’t be arrogant enough to judge people for enjoying a film whose popularity I find bewildering. Taste is inherently subjective, and many people must have loved Avatar for reasons I cannot fathom.
Avatar: The Way of Water was nearly as successful as its predecessor. It grossed over two billion dollars and, like the original, was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture.
I’m tempted to write that you cannot pay me enough to suffer through Avatar: The Way of Water, except that I have a column called Control, Nathan Rabin 4.0, where you can choose a movie that I must watch and then write about for between seventy-five and one hundred dollars. The only film I’ve nixed for Control, Nathan Rabin 4.0, is Matt Walsh’s What Is a Woman. Life is too damn short to spend ninety minutes looking at that face and listening to that voice.
I agree politically with Cameron. I appreciate that he spent hundreds of millions of dollars to make an anti-imperialist allegory. I just wish it weren’t so clumsy and artless in its storytelling and social commentary.
Despite the immense popularity of the Avatar films, they remain strangely invisible in some crucial ways.
For example, I go to every comic book, science fiction and pop culture convention in the Atlanta area with my ten year old son Declan, who is a massive pop culture geek who loves cosplay and Star Wars.
Declan is curious and excited about everything. He’s never asked me about Avatar, nor displayed any interest in it.
In that time, I do not recall ever seeing anyone dressed as a character from Avatar. I mentioned that I was writing a blog post on this subject to my Facebook group, Society for the Toleration of Nathan Rabin, and got some solid answers as to why people don’t cosplay as characters from the world of Avatar.
The Na’vi, the alien race at the center of Avatar mythology, are such obvious surrogates for Native Americans and, to a lesser extent, indigenous people everywhere that it would border on cultural appropriation for a white person to dress up like one for a convention.
The Na’vi are also super-fit and wear very little clothing. I don’t think it’s being overly harsh to point out that you don’t see a lot of folks with rippling muscles and twelve-packs at comic book conventions. I imagine that painting yourself blue is also a pain in the ass, in part because people might mistake you for a Native American Smurf.
This blog post has been marinating in my mind for months now. I finally sat down and wrote it all out after watching a trailer for Avatar: Fire and Ash and once again found myself thinking, "Jesus, who on earth would want to see that crap?" Despite knowing that the answer is, “A LOT of people all over the world."
Lots of people love these movies. I'll never understand why.