Who cares about Avatar? No one quite seems to know. James Cameron’s 2009 behemoth, the highest-grossing film in the world until Avengers: Endgame a decade later, has been at the centre of a small cultural fracas in the lead-up to its Covid-delayed sequel. One half of the internet has fervently defended the film against claims by the other that it’s, as actor and podcast host Griffin Newman once coined, only “memorable for being unmemorable”. Where is its mark on the world? Where are the legions of fans strutting around in blue body paint and wiggly cat ears? Where are the imitators? Shouldn’t there have been a million more derivative films about aliens defending themselves from colonisation?
I can answer these questions no better than anyone else. But, sitting down 13 years later to watch Avatar: The Way of Water, after years of Cameron promising his follow-up would make us “s*** [ourselves] with [our] mouth wide open”, I did start to wonder whether we’ve been looking at things from entirely the wrong angle. These films, which are largely identical in tone, don’t feel like acts of love, but of material achievement. They exist more to be respected than to be adored – signposts on the road of cinema history, marking the end of one era and the beginning of another. Avatar redefined the notion of CGI spectacle. Hollywood has spent the years since pumping out extended cinematic universes just to try and match its sense of grandiose importance.
