Reaction Shots - Avatar: The Ultimate Forgotbuster

Plus the Noah Berlatsky Award for Terrible Take

Sep 28, 2022

There is an old column called Forgotbusters written by Nathan Rabin, which was one of my regular reads when it once ran at an old film magazine called The Dissolve. The premise is that for a lot of movies that come in and out, some of them made a ton of money, but barely left the cultural footprint. Avatar seems to be one of them, and if not, it is the ultimate forgotbuster. As we await the follow-up to Avatar, The Way of the Water let’s not forget that James Cameron’s reinterpretation of Pochahontas, but with blue aliens, was a phenomenon. I say this because many of its detractors are screaming about its irrelevance. Can you name ten characters from that movie? Identify a line of dialogue that you liked. If it’s so original, why did it borrow from Dances of Wolves? This kind of gotcha would be something I would hear from debate bros on Twitch because it believes that these specific aspects merely define a big-picture experience. The experience of watching Avatar is based on how you felt; it’s the grandiosity of its special effects, impacted by the burning passion of James Cameron that he would commit to four more sequels.

How big of a phenomenon was it? To refresh your memory, when it first came out, it set two box office precedents: being the first film to gross more than $2 billion dollars (without adjusting for inflation), and then coming back to take the title from Avengers Endgame by re-releasing the movie in Chinese theatres. It inspired many pop culture references in sketches and even a Weird Al Yankovic song, like every current movie release, would do. During awards season, Avatar was up against The Hurt Locker, not just because it was the big movie versus the little movie, but because Cameron’s ex-wife was Kathryn Bigelow, who went on to become the first female to win Best Director for that film.

But its biggest (and perhaps) brief influence was the trend of tentpole films relying on 3D. This resulted in the kind of movies that Avatar’s naysayers say are as forgettable as its parent. Studios chose to take the wrong lesson from James Cameron’s use of 3D; a $3 surcharge for something that was added in post-production at the last minute. It became an annoying part of going to the movies at the time. There have been re-releases retrofitted for 3D, some of which tend to be necessary. However, that is not to say that 3D should be dismissed easily. Like any technique, 3D is a tool designed to be used and misused. Some schlock came out looking poor like The Last Airbender and Clash of the Titans. But there have been magnificent films, like Martin Scorsese’s Hugo and Gravity, which won Alfonso Cuaron his Best Director Oscar.

But more importantly, if the box office earnings of Avatar tell us something about the moviegoing public (it grossed $30 million in its re-release weekend more than Don’t Worry Darling’s $19.1 million domestic openings), it’s that the vision of James Cameron cannot be underestimated. You can say that about any other film, whether it’s a tentpole strongly tied to pre-existing IP or a theatre-exclusive, headed by a notable director or actor with so much freedom to do whatever he wanted. Avatar’s critics may be people who are blue checks writing for pop culture people, but who else can bring normies who barely watch movies at all than James Cameron? I was in high school when Avatar first came out, starting out as a movie buff. Avatar wasn’t a favourite of mine, but it was certainly a favourite to some people who talked about watching it twice. When I asked a classmate who is your favourite director, James Cameron is often the first person in mind.

No matter what John Oliver tells you, that cultural footprint Avatar had was there, albeit for a brief and potentially glorious moment. Avatar was the ultimate forgotbuster, responsible by a man whose unbridled ego has often been met with laughs, but every time that happens, Cameron is the one asking “who’s laughing and talking now?” And that is hard to forget.

You Must Watch This: The Tree, the Mayor and the Mediatheque (1993)

I’ve been binging Eric Rohmer lately, and from what I’ve watched, he’s the director you watch after being in your Jean Luc Godard phase. That is, if your younger self yearns to be edgy and creative, Rohmer is stoic, moral and more importantly, mature as you become older. Rohmer had a home run of fantastic films that touches on human nature in a droll, non-judgemental and hilarious manner. But The Tree, the Mayor and the Mediatheque might be his most charged effort.

Rohmer’s politics have often been contentious because sometimes, his films rest on modern mores and usually take a rather moralistic or ambivalent view that’s hard to categorize. Read one way, The Tree, the Mayor and the Mediatheque definitely leans into the former and it focuses on a socialist mayor trying to build an arts centre but is faced with vocal opposition, mainly by a hostile media, a teacher and his daughter. If you’re conservative, this film is in every way politically satisfying. Left with an ambivalent view, and it is something that Rohmer often does best, as I previously mentioned, but it is far complex beyond a surface-level viewing. And while it has some short backs with the trajectory of its plot, it remains one of the best films about ideology. I recommend it to anyone who lists The Righteous Mind as one of their favourite books.