I think this is 99% due to the visuals and use of 3D, the way it immersed you in this new world Cameron created. That look was copied so heavily in subsequent movies that it’s easy to forget how novel it was when it came out. This alone drove people to multiple viewings.
And the plot wasn’t terrible. It was formulaic and dragged in a few places, but it was good enough to not detract from the visuals. Now that visuals like that are standard, we notice all the flaws, but they weren’t as apparent back then.
Like others, I think the lack of cultural impact is entirely due to the characters. I rooted for Indy to beat the Nazis, I rooted for Luke and Leia to defeat the Empire. In Avatar, I rooted for the good guys to beat the bad guys, but I didn’t really care about any individual characters. That leaves me with no real ties to this movie over any other good versus evil story.
I also remember the otherkin who considered themselves to be Na’vi, but my impression of otherkin who identify as fictional characters is that they tend to move on to whatever they identify with at the time. Since the fictional characters aren’t real, they aren’t actually identifying with them, but the emotions and feelings they provide to them.
Possibly more importantly, however, is that they weren’t mainstream. They made the news, of course. But that’s because of how strange we saw them. The mainstream didn’t have this cultural attachment to the film. All I ever read about it was how it looked pretty or was a great experience.
And I do think that being primarily identified as spectacle, it didn’t have lasting cultural power. The only way it might have lasted is if it was considered significantly better effects than its predecessors, but I don’t think it really had that. It’s not like 3D movies were new. And the CGI, while better than what came before, was not groundbreakingly better.
As such, it just didn’t stick. Sure, a movie can have value without the “rules of English literature,” but that doesn’t mean that it has staying power. Even the otherkin moved on.
It has always bothered me that Roger Ebert himself rated Avatar as four-star, thanks to the awesome 3-D effects, but gave Aliens only 3½ stars. Why? Because it was too intense!
Cameron was probably hoping for more than “One day a handful of people on a general interest message board will discuss why no one cares about your movie”.
Wasn’t he the guy in Lord of the Rings who kept prancing about in the forest and singing? He didn’t make it into the movie, so it’s no wonder nobody talks about him.
I first saw Jaws in the theater when I lived in Hawaii on Oahu…when I was 8.
We went to the beach every weekend and I loved to boogie board and body surf…I LOVED the ocean. But after that, every small fish, piece of detritus, seaweed, etc that faintly brushed my leg caused a panicky reaction. That, and I always afterwards tried to ensure that I was never “the furthest one out there” in the water.
The worst was the nightmares I had where I’d dream that I was floating on my bed in the middle of the ocean with Jaws stalking me, bumping into my bed, trying to capsize me. I’d wake up in terror and realize I’d had my hand hanging off the side of the bed! What was I thinking?
The point of the OP was that it didn’t seem to have any lasting cultural impact at all, despite having been the highest-grossing film of all time, particularly compared to the other top movies. No one quotes the movie, no one seems to re-watch it, etc.
I hated the movie, but I disagree that it was nothing but a bunch of fluff with no deeper meaning. The story was clearly about something: the evils of a more powerful society exploiting the natural resources of a weaker one to the detriment of the latter. You don’t have to look far to find real historical examples.
My problem with the movie was that it was heavy-handed and cheesy. As I mentioned before, the usually metaphorical ideas of interconnection were ridiculously literal; the bad guys were ridiculously bad; the natives fit the old stereotype of the noble savage; and the special effects were cartoonish.
I think the lack of long-term impact comes from the fact that it isn’t a good movie. People went to see it in huge numbers because of the hype, but once the hype wore off there was little to sustain it.
Sure, but it brought nothing new to the table aside form giant blue elves. Hence all the [Movie] With Giant Blue Elves cracks.
True. I think it’s worth pointing out that it wasn’t an especially bad movie either. If it sucked, people would have been warned off from seeing it. Instead, the plot and characters were adequate for hanging the groundbreaking visuals and new film tech off of but, once separated from the big screen, nothing you’d want to watch twice.
I’ve always suspected that Cameron’s original intention was to have the ‘real-world’ action taking place as a conventional film, and the avatar-view scenes be in immersive 3D (“Put Glasses On Now”), but realized early on that that wouldn’t really work. But the film having that genesis fits into the whole technological-showcasing-driving-the-plot aspect of the movie.
The more powerful society wasn’t exploiting the weaker one. The weaker, less technologically-advanced, society was trying to exploit the more powerful and technological one, and as always happens in a clash of different tech levels, got their butts handed to them.
Sentenced to Prism (Alan Dean Foster, 1985) is another novel with a story not completely unlike that of Avatar, although it is not the level of originality that makes or breaks the cultural impact of a film.
