The (lack of) cultural impact of Avatar

[mhendo]

@SenorBeef

But the hypocrisy is that people love visually spectacular movies with basic plots all the time. Star Wars is just the super generic Heroes Journey story. As a fairly recent example, Jurrassic World is far dumber than anything in Avatar, but everyone loved that pile of shit, because for whatever reason it didn’t become the popular and cool thing to go out of your way to talk about how dumb it is and how you’re too cool to like it.

People go way out of their way to hold it to standards they won’t hold anything else to. “Oh it’s just like Fern Gully/Pochahontas/Dances with Wolves” - well, if those three movies have identical plots, why aren’t any of them criticized for it? Do you think any of them even invented the basic “outsider sent to exploit natives, outsider goes native himself” story archetype?

I think there’s something to this, but for me, enjoying a film is not necessarily the same as thinking it’s a good movie. I know that there are some people who claim that, if you enjoy a movie, then by definition you must consider it good. I don’t really agree.

I happen to agree with your characterization of Star Wars and Jurassic World, and i tend to think of them in somewhat the same terms as i think of Avatar: fun but not very good movies.

Here’s what i said about Avatar on this board when it first came out:

@mhendo

I enjoyed the hell out of Avatar. It was a fun two-and-a-half hours, and my wife and i actually contemplated shelling out another $16.50 each to see it on IMAX a second time.

I also thought it was an incredibly awful movie. Ham-fisted allegory, embarrassingly bad dialog, caricatures for characters, mediocre acting, and a storyline as banal as laundry day and as predictable as sunrise.

It had everything and nothing. It was a triumph of technology and visuals, and a disaster in every other respect. I think its long-term significance will be simply as a vehicle for introducing audiences to the new technology*; in the future, much better film-makers than James Cameron will combine that technology properly with the other aspects of film-making to produce well-rounded, interesting, and truly great movies.

• And also the oodles of money it made.

And that is also pretty much my answer to the OP’s question in this thread: it has little cultural impact because it just wasn’t very good, and it wasn’t even very new, in terms of what it offered as a movie-going experience.

For me, one of the tests of a big-budget visual blockbuster like Avatar is whether i’m at all interested in sitting down and watching it in my living room, away from the massive screen and the immersive experience of the theater. For Avatar, the answer to that question is definitely “no.” For something like Mad Max: Fury Road, however, the answer is yes.