In 2009, James Cameron returned to the front of the stage more than ten years later Titanic with a new promise of cinematic revolution: Avatar, a film with a pharaonic budget of almost 400 million dollars, produced almost entirely in computer-generated images. Cameron’s long-term project, Avatar was perhaps already guaranteed, even before its release, to become the biggest cinematic success of all time.
In December 2009, spectators from all over the world landed on Pandora, the fictional planet at the center of the plot ofAvatar, the seventh feature film by James Cameron. Expected as the cinematic event of the late 2000s, Avatar remains to this day the highest-grossing film in the history of cinema – at least without taking into account inflation, Gone with the wind (1939) remaining the film with the highest number of admissions – with nearly three billion dollars at the worldwide box office.
The film, closely followed by Avengers: Endgame (2019) of russo brothersshould nevertheless retain its crown for some time, since James Cameron’s film is regarding to be released in cinemas on September 21, in a remastered 4K and HDR version, just in time for the long-awaited release ofAvatar: The Way of the Water in december. More than ten years following the release of the first film, this sequel should once once more shake up the box office and promises to push back, once once more, the limits of cinema, or at least of its spectacular counterpart. But will this second installment – the first of four additional ones already planned, the third opus having already been shot and the fourth being now on track – manage to reproduce the success both disproportionate and predictable of the first? Avatar ?
The greatest showman
Avatar probably wouldn’t have been so successful, both critically and with audiences, if it hadn’t been for James Cameron. After making his debut in the world of special effects, James Cameron signed his first commissioned feature film in 1981, Piranha 2. But his first coup came in 1984 with Terminator, which marks his thunderous entry into science fiction cinema and confirms in passing the rank of world star ofArnold Schwarzenegger.
Cameron then connects the masterpieces of SF, likeAliens: The Return (1986) then Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) which, in addition to being a veritable recital of storytelling and staging, reached a new level in its time in the field of visual effects, notably with the formidable T1000 embodied by Robert Patrick, a liquid metal cyborg made using progress of morphing and synthetic images.
A revolutionary result (awarded at the Oscars) born from the frenzied perfectionism of Cameron, who had already started to lean, from his previous film, Abyss (1989), on visual effects and filming – then trying – in an aquatic environment. After a new action movie with Schwarzy (True Lies, and remake de The Total! of Claude Zidi), Cameron then got down to a project of unprecedented magnitude: the aptly named Titanic which, despite its extraordinary budget for the time, won 11 Oscars and became, for a time, the biggest success in the history of cinema – including in France, where the film peaked at more than 21 million admissions (it will also be released in February 2023 for its 25e anniversary). The mere name of James Cameron was then enough to propel any film to the top of the box office. The success ofAvatar was already almost assured.
A technological revolution
James Cameron therefore waited almost 20 years to be able to realize Avatar, a crazy project born in the 1990s but which had to patiently wait for the improvement of technology in the field of visual effects to be able to be brought into shape. A bet made, almost entirely, in computer-generated images.
Cameron has repeatedly confessed thatAvatar would not have been possible without the dazzling progress of CGI (computer generated effects) – and more particularly motion and performance capture – in the 2000s, led by the visual effects studio created by Peter JacksonWeta Digital, whose titanic work on the trilogy of Lord of the Rings made a lasting impression. The stunning rendering of photo-realistic characters such as Gollum or Davy Jones in Pirates of the Caribbean finally convinced Cameron to take action in 2006, then shelved his plan to adapt the manga Gunmm – who would return years later to Robert Rodriguez with Alita: Battle Angel (produced and written by Cameron).
The American filmmaker, then associated with Weta Digital, aims to make a film entirely in 3D and goes so far as to develop his own camera system for the needs of the feature film. He also set up “The Volume”, a gigantic set designed exclusively for performance capture, a technology that has been constantly perfected ever since, from The Planet of the Apes last Avengers. The film’s budget was colossal: nearly 400 million dollars, including marketing, a record for the time. The soundtrack is signed by maestro James Horner (who died in a plane crash in 2015), who had already composed that of Titanic. Cameron intends, more or less, to give life to an autonomous world, with its own mythology, its cosmogony, its customs, envisaged through a cinematographic odyssey mixing major themes such as ecology, colonization, the relationship of man to nature.
On some scale, Avatar operates a decisive paradigmatic change in the Hollywood landscape by opening the way to an entirely digital imagination.
Movie theaters must massively equip themselves with digital projectors to be able to respond to the magnitude of the predicted phenomenon; Avatar then sounded the advent of digital projections and the gradual abandonment of film in the early 2010s. After the release d’Avatar, 3D becomes almost systematically for blockbusters, but the commercial argument – films being generally converted to 3D once in post-production, with the exception of certain films thought from the outset (and rightly so) for 3D, like Gravity d’Alfonso Cuaron or Hugo Cabret of Martin Scorsese – will rarely match Cameron’s visual approach and heightened sense of space. The revolution started by Avatar is thus both technological and industrial.
Avatar and its consequences, a lot of promises
The fact remains that 3D, far from having become the announced phenomenon, has not been able to keep its promises and has gradually been neglected by spectators as well as by cinema operators. 3D having been widely tested over the past ten years, will James Cameron manage to convince industry professionals and spectators to trust this technology once more and thus repeat the same feat as the first Avatar, which started with the advantage of presenting a resolutely innovative dimension ?
Avatar: the way of water, passed under the leadership of Disney since the takeover of Fox and which takes place ten years following the events of the first film, presented a new challenge to the director of Titanic : to once once more shoot a film in performance capture, but essentially underwater and all in high frame rate (can take some sequences from 48 to 120 frames per second, instead of the usual 24 frames per second). 2D, 3D, 4K, HFR, IMAX, etc. : Rarely has a film been offered in so many different formats. Sacred challenge in sight for the circuits of rooms.
The filmmaker, decidedly obsessed with the seabed – in 2012, Cameron went solo to explore the Mariana Trench aboard the mini submarine Deepsea Challenger – has therefore taken the time to set up a system that matches its ambitions. For the aquatic sequences, Cameron had a huge water tank built, a tank of more than three million liters equipped with a special pump to replicate waves and ocean currents and a layer of marbles to prevent interference from the light with the sensors placed on the actors.
Immersed actors and actresses – children and teenagers included, the main characters Jake and Neytiri now having a family to protect –, scrutinized by dozens of cameras, had to train to hold their breath for long minutes in order to reduce the number of sockets. Kate Winslet, one of the recruits for this second part, would have held breathless for seven minutes, a record for a fiction feature film. Ditto for veteran Sigourney Weaver, with six minutes of apnea.
All we have to do then is hold our breath until the exit ofAvatar: The Way of the Water on December 14 and to treat yourself, until then, to a deep breath with the majestic release ofAvatar scheduled for September 21.
Avatar by James Cameron, 2h42, with Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Michelle Rodriguez, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang, released in cinemas on September 21, 2022.
