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The King James Victory Parade - Avatar: The Way of Water and sequels

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I asked you the question because I wanted to know what you think, so that I could then formulate a response to explain my position in a way that you might better understand. You think I was setting you up for a gotcha, and that's why you ducked out, but I didn't have a preformulated response. For all I know you don't think that the MCU has had much cultural impact, making it a bad jumping off point to continue the conversation.
 
Honestly cultural impact feels very much a "know it when you see it" sort of thing except you totally aren't seeing it. My forum avatar is from a 1997 videogame I played at a friend's house way back when, but I kinda assumed I was the only person on the planet who cared, or well cared enough to make it their avatar on a forum. Well you know until I saw Hollewander on SB do their whole Belser Interrupt routine, which is a direct reference to the same franchise.

I routinely binge a season of a show, check out the forum conversation on it and maybe participate, catalogue some art on tumblr or elsewhere... then go back into hibernation till the next season comes out, often as much as a year or more later. That doesn't mean I stopped being a fan in the interim. Just because a franchise producer or its fanbase isn't active doesn't mean they don't exist, and this pattern might well become even sharper in the age of streaming. Few shows have that "you better catch this weeks episode as it happens before the rest of the country spoils it for you" sort of vibe like GoT... but these days fewer and fewer shows even release on a weekly basis to begin with.
 
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My big knock against Avatar as "culturally influential" is that its themes and ideas didn't penetrate media more broadly. There weren't Avatar imitators, and increased attention to native and ecological issues today arose from political activism that post-dated Avatar and in no way associated itself with the movie. Avatar's CGI was impressive, but its specific style and visual language had few imitators. There is no persistent Avatar fandom that outlasted the film itself.

Avatar is a very awkward film thematically. It strives towards anti-colonialism, but it has the main character appropriate a native body, sleep with a native princess, and rise to lead the native population in place of the native leadership. It's Mighty Whitey played entirely straight. However, the film ends with Jake fully rejecting "humanity" (or western whiteness, or both, depending on how you read the film) by becoming a full-time Na'vi while almost every other human is booted from the planet. That's a pretty absolute anti-colonial conclusion for a piece of mainstream speculative fiction and doesn't lend itself well to developing a large fandom in the West.
 
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firefossil said:
Honestly cultural impact feels very much a "know it when you see it" sort of thing except you totally aren't seeing it.
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Not only that, people merely have a vague feeling about it. AND they each have a DIFFERENT vague feeling about it.

Personally, 'cultural impact' comes down to how much of a piece of medias 'DNA' can be said to have been passed down, in discourse, through derivative works, and through its descendants (sequels and media that is inspired by, responds to, critiques, or otherwise conclusively exists BECAUSE of that prior work.)

In Avatar's case, I'm just not sure what could be called uniquely Avatar that was carried forward in any meaningful way. It's not like Avatar really budged the trajectory of big budget spectacle films, even if it was one of the biggest budgeted. It might be responsible for the current tendency to release major spectacle films in 3D.

I think at least part of it is that prior Cameron movies already occupy the mind share that Avatar seeks to invoke as its own.

Dromon said:
Avatar is a very awkward film thematically. It strives towards anti-colonialism, but it has the main character appropriate a native body, sleep with a native princess, and rise to lead the native population in place of the native leadership. It's Mighty Whitey played entirely straight. However, the film ends with Jake fully rejecting "humanity" (or western whiteness, or both, depending on how you read the film) by becoming a full-time Na'vi while almost every other human is booted from the planet. That's a pretty absolute anti-colonial conclusion for a piece of mainstream speculative fiction and doesn't lend itself well to developing a large fandom in the West.
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Which is funny because Lawrence of Arabia : In Space, has been an evergreen title in science fiction.

I guess because Dune doesn't explicitly make the HFY boners go flacid.

Though either way, I think this is a criticism that mostly only matters to people who spend a lot of time in very specific internet spaces.
 
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Triggerhappy said:
Which is funny because Lawrence of Arabia : In Space, has been an evergreen title in science fiction.

I guess because Dune doesn't explicitly make the HFY boners go flacid.

Though either way, I think this is a criticism that mostly only matters to people who spend a lot of time in very specific internet spaces.
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Eh, Dune has a lot more awareness about the tropes that it's using, and basically the few books after the first are spent brutally deconstructing the idea of the 'white messiah'. Not to mention that the Fremen feel like they have a lot more agency and just stuff going on in general than the Na'vi do, even despite the amount of screentime they have in comparison.
 
Ford Prefect said:
No need to worry about that, I'm a lifelong atheist. But I am curious, and it may be illuminating: do you think that the MCU has cultural impact?
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Hard to say if the MCU has lasting impact because Disney will never stop making marvel movies, so the MCU is ever fresh
Dromon said:
My big knock against Avatar as "culturally influential" is that its themes and ideas didn't penetrate media more broadly. There weren't Avatar imitators, and increased attention to native and ecological issues today arose from political activism that post-dated Avatar and in no way associated itself with the movie. Avatar's CGI was impressive, but its specific style and visual language had few imitators. There is no persistent Avatar fandom that outlasted the film itself.

Avatar is a very awkward film thematically. It strives towards anti-colonialism, but it has the main character appropriate a native body, sleep with a native princess, and rise to lead the native population in place of the native leadership. It's Mighty Whitey played entirely straight. However, the film ends with Jake fully rejecting "humanity" (or western whiteness, or both, depending on how you read the film) by becoming a full-time Na'vi while almost every other human is booted from the planet. That's a pretty absolute anti-colonial conclusion for a piece of mainstream speculative fiction and doesn't lend itself well to developing a large fandom in the West.
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That's because Avatar is built on imitating others. There isn't a lot of film language to take from avatar that isn't really really obviously from something else.

It also indulges hard in the great white savior trope, which is more then a little uncomfortable to directly engage with.
 
tankdrop24 said:
Eh, Dune has a lot more awareness about the tropes that it's using, and basically the few books after the first are spent brutally deconstructing the idea of the 'white messiah'. Not to mention that the Fremen feel like they have a lot more agency and just stuff going on in general than the Na'vi do, even despite the amount of screentime they have in comparison.
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Dune itself it pretty explicit about warning against Saviors. What with Paul turning the Fremen, mystical desert pragmatists, into a warrior fanatic death cult to achieve his revenge. And the whole mechanism by which he can do this, the Missionary Protectiva, being a nasty bit of social engineering invented by the Bene Gesserit.
 
Debates about Avatar's impact, or lack there of, on pop culture kind've miss the point of what Cameron was aiming for, and also ignore the fact that Avatar was insanely impactful and an absolute game changer in the world of filmmaking. First, yes Avatar is a big genre blockbuster and so we expect it to be franchised to hell and back with an EU (and are thus mystified when no EU appears), the film was never really meant to be a Star Wars-esque franchise starter (though I'm sure the suits hoped it would be).

Instead, Avatar is James Cameron using his blank check status to push digital filmmaking and motion capture technology to their absolute limits. The film is, by design, a pretty familiar story with pretty familiar trappings (environmentalism, Vietnam imagery, colonization of the Americas, etc.) so it doesn't have to waste time bringing you up to speed on the world building bullshit. The focus is on Pandora, not as a setting, but as a set piece - to but it simply, Avatar is a $200 million tech demo. It's Cameron showing what the technology can really do with time and effort, applied to a clear vision.

And Avatar was, like I said, an absolute game changer - modern filmmaking is divided into a pre- and post-Avatar world. Like who gives a shit if you think the story is trite or undercooked, the film pushed filmmaking technology to the absolute bleeding edge. It took motion capture technology, which at the time was essentially just fancy rotoscoping (that pretty much only worked on Andy Serkis) and turned it into a practical tool that's (relatively) simple to use. It took digital filmmaking from the fancy FMV cutscenes of the Star Wars prequels and showed us how you can render shots that are almost indistinguishable from real life, in entirely digital landscapes. When it won the Oscar for Best Cinematography, despite something like 75% of it being "shot" on a computer, you know it's a whole new world. There's no MCU without Avatar, full stop, or at least no MCU that we'd recognize.

You also have to remember that Avatar was intended as a showcase for 3D on top of the insane digital visuals - the film was designed, from the ground up, to make use of 3D to enhance the digital filmmaking to literal new dimension. It's almost certainly part of why it made so much money - the "Holy fuck!" factor was strong. It's just that the industry looked at the box office returns and thought "3D equals $$$$$$$$", not "Hey when someone smart uses it right 3D equals $$$$$$$", not to mention it was also part of Jackson's competing vision of the future filmmaking in HFR. Both 3D and HFR tanked (HFR disastrously so), so a lot of the aforementioned "Holy fuck!" factor doesn't come through at home.

I honestly don't think the film should be seen as an aborted Star Wars, but instead it's best point of comparison is the OG Jurassic Park. That film was a ginormous success, smashing records worldwide and cementing Spielberg's reputation as the king of blockbusters. By combining practical effects with CGI it heralded a new era of filmmaking, and revolutionized the industry in ways we're still dealing with today. It spawned sequels, one of which is one of the highest grossing films ever (outgrossing even the original!) and it also, compared to it's box office success, has made relatively little impact on pop culture. Like aside from maybe "Clever girl", your average person would probably respond with a variation on "Yeah Jurassic Park, cool movie!" and move on when pressed.

There's a handful of comics and a spin off show, but that's about it when it comes to EU. No ones dressing up as Ian Malcom or Alan Grant for Comic Con by the droves, there's no sprawling novel verse that's now bleeding into the mainline series, no multiverse of madness. It's just a few movies that people love and that show off new and creative ways to depict Dinosaurs on screen, and they clean up at the box office pretty much like clockwork. Why aren't we questioning their impact on pop culture?
 
Mak Taru said:
There are a lot of memorable scenes from JP.
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I didn't say it wasn't memorable, but that it didn't spawn the kind of attendant EU that you'd expect from the highest grossing film of all time. Shit, it didn't even spawn a Saturday morning cartoon, despite coming out a time when they were turning fucking everything into Saturday morning cartoons.

Jurassic Park is a well regarded, highly successful film that doesn't have any kind of range of spin-offs, but no one's walking around saying "What's up with Jurassic Park not having any kind of impact on pop culture?"
 
Avatar is only the anthropomorphized versions of Smurfs , as Equestria Girls is a anthropomorphized versions of My Little Pony.

But it didn't assume its allegiance, so it cuts itself from the Smurfs EU, so it's kinda logic than its EU is very small.

And Gargamel is truly bad in this version btw.
 
Arthur Frayn said:
Debates about Avatar's impact, or lack there of, on pop culture kind've miss the point of what Cameron was aiming for, and also ignore the fact that Avatar was insanely impactful and an absolute game changer in the world of filmmaking. First, yes Avatar is a big genre blockbuster and so we expect it to be franchised to hell and back with an EU (and are thus mystified when no EU appears), the film was never really meant to be a Star Wars-esque franchise starter (though I'm sure the suits hoped it would be).

Instead, Avatar is James Cameron using his blank check status to push digital filmmaking and motion capture technology to their absolute limits. The film is, by design, a pretty familiar story with pretty familiar trappings (environmentalism, Vietnam imagery, colonization of the Americas, etc.) so it doesn't have to waste time bringing you up to speed on the world building bullshit. The focus is on Pandora, not as a setting, but as a set piece - to but it simply, Avatar is a $200 million tech demo. It's Cameron showing what the technology can really do with time and effort, applied to a clear vision.

And Avatar was, like I said, an absolute game changer - modern filmmaking is divided into a pre- and post-Avatar world. Like who gives a shit if you think the story is trite or undercooked, the film pushed filmmaking technology to the absolute bleeding edge. It took motion capture technology, which at the time was essentially just fancy rotoscoping (that pretty much only worked on Andy Serkis) and turned it into a practical tool that's (relatively) simple to use. It took digital filmmaking from the fancy FMV cutscenes of the Star Wars prequels and showed us how you can render shots that are almost indistinguishable from real life, in entirely digital landscapes. When it won the Oscar for Best Cinematography, despite something like 75% of it being "shot" on a computer, you know it's a whole new world. There's no MCU without Avatar, full stop, or at least no MCU that we'd recognize.

You also have to remember that Avatar was intended as a showcase for 3D on top of the insane digital visuals - the film was designed, from the ground up, to make use of 3D to enhance the digital filmmaking to literal new dimension. It's almost certainly part of why it made so much money - the "Holy fuck!" factor was strong. It's just that the industry looked at the box office returns and thought "3D equals $$$$$$$$", not "Hey when someone smart uses it right 3D equals $$$$$$$", not to mention it was also part of Jackson's competing vision of the future filmmaking in HFR. Both 3D and HFR tanked (HFR disastrously so), so a lot of the aforementioned "Holy fuck!" factor doesn't come through at home.

I honestly don't think the film should be seen as an aborted Star Wars, but instead it's best point of comparison is the OG Jurassic Park. That film was a ginormous success, smashing records worldwide and cementing Spielberg's reputation as the king of blockbusters. By combining practical effects with CGI it heralded a new era of filmmaking, and revolutionized the industry in ways we're still dealing with today. It spawned sequels, one of which is one of the highest grossing films ever (outgrossing even the original!) and it also, compared to it's box office success, has made relatively little impact on pop culture. Like aside from maybe "Clever girl", your average person would probably respond with a variation on "Yeah Jurassic Park, cool movie!" and move on when pressed.

There's a handful of comics and a spin off show, but that's about it when it comes to EU. No ones dressing up as Ian Malcom or Alan Grant for Comic Con by the droves, there's no sprawling novel verse that's now bleeding into the mainline series, no multiverse of madness. It's just a few movies that people love and that show off new and creative ways to depict Dinosaurs on screen, and they clean up at the box office pretty much like clockwork. Why aren't we questioning their impact on pop culture?
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Arthur Frayn said:
I didn't say it wasn't memorable, but that it didn't spawn the kind of attendant EU that you'd expect from the highest grossing film of all time. Shit, it didn't even spawn a Saturday morning cartoon, despite coming out a time when they were turning fucking everything into Saturday morning cartoons.

Jurassic Park is a well regarded, highly successful film that doesn't have any kind of range of spin-offs, but no one's walking around saying "What's up with Jurassic Park not having any kind of impact on pop culture?"
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Because the original LITERALLY redefined how pop culture and media thought of and depicted dinosaurs compared to how people used to think of them as lumbering offish things for decades since their discovery. People still remember the Velociraptors and homage them.

You might as well say that about The Godfather despite it codifying the popular image of the Mafia Don with Vito Corleone. Avatar has none of that.
 
I'm frankly not invested enough to fully dip in here, but it seems like people are talking about the impact/memory/etc of Avatar as two semi-distinct blobs and then arguing as if there is but the one blob.

Personally, the plot of Avatar, the story? Had zero impact on me save for not liking the white savior vibes, I don't know anyone IRL who remembers as much as this thread seems to, I haven't seen any movies doing their own takes on it.

The mechanics of Avatar, the stuff done to make it and the way it comes across on screen? Holy shit guys, gals, and nonbinary pals, Avatar hit like a mack truck. The experience of watching it was very much 'hot damn this is pretty, shame about the plot tho. Hey, do you want to go see it again?' And that has stuck. In films we see a lot of stuff that's using the tools Avatar pioneered or popularized, filming to some extent like Avatar. And people remember it too - yeah, nobody I know IRL remembers anything about the plot (at least as far as conversation has touched on) but every time Avatar did come up it was either because or very rapidly became about 'hot damn that was pretty'. As much as I'm kind of disinterested in the movie right now, it's not remotely surprising to me that a sea of people remember that experience and want to have it again.

Avatar the story has less cultural impact than other Avatars one could name I think. But Avatar the film... yeah, that had an impact. But it seems like people in thread think of only one or treat them as interchangeable, and are getting kind of heated as a result of talking past each other. Just my two cents, I'll go back to lurking and making the occasional theme park joke now.
 
Arthur Frayn said:
Jurassic Park is a well regarded, highly successful film that doesn't have any kind of range of spin-offs, but no one's walking around saying "What's up with Jurassic Park not having any kind of impact on pop culture?"
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It literally spawned a generation of universities adding paleontology courses, including universities that had never had them before, and spawned an enormous resurgence in fascination with dinosaurs among the general public as well as a total rethinking in the public zeitgeist of what Dinosaurs were.

Pre JP - Dinosaurs were slow and lethargic giant iguanas.

Post JP - Dinosaurs were agile and diverse animals that filled every niche in the environment.

Multiple stage shows, traveling animatronic exhibits, dozens of cgi animated documentaries . . . I mean, JP itself may not have been plastered on any of it, but I find it hard to say it didn't have an influence.
 
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Triggerhappy said:
It literally spawned a generation of universities adding paleontology courses, including universities that had never had them before, and spawned an enormous resurgence in fascination with dinosaurs among the general public as well as a total rethinking in the public zeitgeist of what Dinosaurs were.

Pre JP - Dinosaurs were slow and lethargic giant iguanas.

Post JP - Dinosaurs were agile and diverse animals that filled every niche in the environment.

Multiple stage shows, traveling animatronic exhibits, dozens of cgi animated documentaries . . . I mean, JP itself may not have been plastered on any of it, but I find it hard to say it didn't have an influence.
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I mean, Avatar likewise spawned an entirely two new field filmmaking (digital filmmaking and motion capture acting), changing the industry forever, and lead to audiences accepting digital filmmaking as something existing alongside live action, instead of just a fancy cartoon. It also had a few Cirque du Soleil tie-in shows, a few video games, and a whole dang theme park.

The two aren't perfectly identical, but their footprint is roughly similar compared to their box office success.
 
Arthur Frayn said:
I mean, Avatar likewise spawned an entirely two new field filmmaking (digital filmmaking and motion capture acting), changing the industry forever, and lead to audiences accepting digital filmmaking as something existing alongside live action, instead of just a fancy cartoon. It also had a few Cirque du Soleil tie-in shows, a few video games, and a whole dang theme park.

The two aren't perfectly identical, but their footprint is roughly similar compared to their box office success.
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The problem with claiming it 'spawned a new field of filmmaking' is that it would have happened anyway. Avatar wasn't the first or last digital or motion capture film, it was always progressing with the technology.

Unlike Jurassic Park, where there was absolutely no guarantee dinosaurs were suddenly going to become popular.
 
Cloak&Dagger said:
Unlike Jurassic Park, where there was absolutely no guarantee dinosaurs were suddenly going to become popular.
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I don't want to undermine Jurassic Park's legacy here but ... you understand that dinosaurs were already popular, yeah? This wasn't a case of some thing that no one cared about unexpectedly going big. Crichton had non-negotiable terms for the film rights before it was published, and studios were competing to get them.
 
Cloak&Dagger said:
The problem with claiming it 'spawned a new field of filmmaking' is that it would have happened anyway. Avatar wasn't the first or last digital or motion capture film, it was always progressing with the technology.

Unlike Jurassic Park, where there was absolutely no guarantee dinosaurs were suddenly going to become popular.
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Lol "It doesn't matter that it did the thing, the thing would have happened anyway" is a meaningless statement, what kind of point is that? Obviously someone, somewhere, eventually would have pushed digital technology forward, but Avatar is the film that did and is thus significant. Like you can say this about any film - who gives a shit about Star Wars, eventually someone would have figured out how to shoot mashed up WW2 model kits against a blue screen and make them look cool. Who gives a shit about the Wizard of Oz, eventually someone would have popularized color filmmaking. What a nihilistic attitude towards art, nothing is significant because eventually someone would have figured it out.

And as @Ford Prefect points out the book was already a runaway hit and the rights sparked a bidding war. We came this close to seeing either Warner Bros. and Tim Burton, Columbia and Richard Donner, or 20th Century Fox and Joe Dante make the movie instead of Universal and Spielberg. Dinosaurs had already been popular for literally a hundred+ years before the film came out. While it did change the way dinosaurs looked in the popular consciousness, it didn't suddenly spawn a fandom ex nihilo.

Jesus, my point referencing Jurassic Park was that it was a similar effects driven blockbuster that changed filmmaking but didn't lead to a Star Wars-esque expanded universe (come to think of it, has any non-Star Wars film franchise blown up as big?), but somehow since people liked dinosaurs even more after it came out it proves...I'm wrong? Or something?
 
I think the difference being argued is that Jurassic Park had a major pop culture influence regarding the actual subject of the movie (dinosaurs) as opposed to just the technology used to make the movie.

Avatar didn't cause the ideas of aliens, spaceships, or inhabiting another body to suddenly enter or radically change in the public consciousness. (The former two were already super popular, and if you ask a bunch of people what comes to mind when they think of fictional aliens or spaceships, those from Avatar are probably not going to be anywhere near the first to be mentioned). As for the latter, most people will probably think of things like Freaky Friday first.

JP's portrayal of dinosaurs was iconic and redefined how the public envisioned them.

Avatar didn't do the same for anything it portrayed (aliens, spaceships, sci-fi weapons, mechs, dragons, body hopping, etc.)
 
I find it hard to believe that someone would seriously go "yeah avatar and jurassic park have had the same cultural impact"
 
Well, they have something in common at least. Jurassic Park has added realistic digital dinosaurs in the real world, Avatar has added real humans in a realistic digital world.

The difference is the first one had convinced everyone.
The second one had only convinced people who were not used to digital worlds or people who are happy just with "realistically beautiful". But there is a bunch of people who were already used to digital worlds from videogames and animations. And so, the cultural impact was absent for them because, let's be honest, everything what we can see in Avatar is plain when you compare to all the others digital worlds people can have run through.
And Cameron didn't really compensate this by his way of filming. Maybe because he was focusing too much on the 3D, I don't know. So, there is no moment in the movie which totally nailed something, something which should be iconic. The first flight should be one of this scene for example. And nope. I have a tendency to think that's because Cameron is truly a master of actionsuspense/horror movies, but clearly lacking (or to be fair, way too classical) in others areas. So, Avatar cannot step up when needed and finally, totally convinced everyone. Maybe, it will change in the next movies, we will see.

After, for the revolution part of Avatar in filmmaking industry, I am kinda ambivalent about it. Sure, it has done something. But in the same time...
It didn't do a lot.
There is no new things in Avatar filmmaking. It's more an update of a lot of old-new technologies, all of them well-mixed together.
As far as I know, It doesn't really change the process of filming.
The only thing it has done, is...
Step up technically. Well, that's good, but in the same time, it can be sum up at : "use computers more, and spend a ton of money in it to have beautifuls graphics".
Which is totally the norm since 30 years. So, it seems the most logical outcome than a revolution.
Specially there is only a few movies every year which can walk in the step of Avatar, like the MCU. Because money.

At least, after Jurassic Park, we have a tons of movies with ugly CGI monsters running around.
 
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