The return of technology's biggest romantic

A decade is a lifetime in the digital age, and James Cameron has been away for 12 years. In the period between his previous film, the all-time box-office champion Titanic, and his new colossus, Avatar, the making and distribution of movies has changed so much it is another industry altogether.

In 1997 the World Wide Web was quite new to us, and we had just gotten cellphones and e-mail accounts. There were no blogs yet; we all got our news from the papers and TV — media constrained by space and time, so the flood of information was more manageable. We watched new movies on the big screen, and if you wanted to make an independent feature you lugged a 35mm camera   and hoped to get screened in regular theaters.

There were special effects in the movies, and Cameron showed us how to use them. Many of them he invented himself. There was the water in The Abyss, and the liquid silver cyborg of Terminator 2. In Titanic he broke a huge ship in half.

But that was more than a decade ago, another century and almost another world. Television networks started making shows without scripts; reality shows turned non-professionals into showbiz celebrities. We started going to the cinema less and watching movies on our computers and iPods more. Personal videos can now get millions of viewers on YouTube.

Today we can track the development of a movie project from the time the germ of an idea pops into the screenwriter’s head, through every stage of negotiation and pre-production, to the shoot and the marketing blitz. And the reports are disseminated by bloggers, many of them not even connected to the production. Wanna make a movie? Write a script (sometimes not even that), get a digital video camera, and do it.

Digital indies have taken over, especially in the Philippines; DIY enabled by technology. Pixar started making digital movies not starring humans (though voiced by humans and based on their movements); Gollum’s CGI face expressed an entire range of feelings.

While Cameron was away, third-rate action directors like Michael Bay and McG assaulted our eyes and ears with spectacles that left us oddly disinterested, slightly deaf, and epileptic. They never got the secret of Cameron’s success: at the molten core of any technological display is an emotional bond. It can be melodramatic, it can be cheesy, but it has to hit the audience like a shot in the heart.

Sarah Connor and the soldier from the future, Ellen Ripley and Newt, John Connor and the cyborg, the warring exes of The Abyss, the agent and his unsuspecting wife in True Lies, Rose in first class and Jack in steerage. You cared about these people first. The technology was there not just for its own sake, but to tell the stories of these people in the most spectacular way possible.

Moviemaking technology got huge, but with few exceptions cinema got smaller. The return of James Cameron redresses this situation.

The word “awe” will likely appear in every review of Avatar, so let’s get that out of the way. This is the first big-budget action movie in 3D and it’s Awesome. From the opening shot of the space frigate arriving on the planet Pandora, your eyes are popping out of your head. (This must be why the glasses at the IMAX theaters are so big, to keep our eyeballs from falling out, but please design more comfortable glasses).

It is more than a century in the future, and Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a marine paralyzed from the waist down, arrives in Pandora to participate in a scientific experiment. There is a human colony on the planet, a military-industrial complex engaged in the mining of a very valuable mineral called “unobtainium” (Uh-huh). Suits are often the villains of Cameron’s movies — remember the corporate dweeb in Aliens who insisted that they bring some of the alien eggs back to earth?

There is a team of scientists doing research on the indigenous population, the tribe of blue giants called Na’vi. The team is headed by Sigourney Weaver, and there are few things in the cinema more satisfying than seeing her in ass-kicking mode. Humans cannot breathe the atmosphere of Pandora; the scientists have developed avatars that look like Na’vi but are controlled by human minds.

Jake, imprisoned in his damaged body, is set free in his avatar. The first time he links with his avatar he goes a little nuts, running out of the building to try his new legs. On his first expedition he gets lost, is rescued by the Na’vi princess Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), and adopted by the tribe. Neytiri is tasked to train him in the native ways. She is hostile at first, but you know how these things work out in the movies.

Meanwhile, the corporate rep (Giovanni Ribisi) and the military commander (Stephen Lang) are counting on Jake for intel for their assault on the Na’vi, whose settlement is right on top of the unobtainium deposits. You also know how that will work out, but plot is not the strong point of this movie. Neither is character — the villains are cardboard, right down to their dismissal of the Na’vi as “tree-huggers.”

No, we’re here to see how Cameron executes his vision with the latest technology, a lot of which he developed himself. Experts may have a different opinion, but this moviegoer could not tell what was real and what was digital. In this context, that is high praise.

This seamlessness allows us to pay attention to the romance of Avatar.

The green romance, the notion of a self-regulating, fully interconnected ecosystem, is the subject for another article.

The love story of Jake and Neytiri is engaging enough, but I think the real romance in this movie is between Jake and himself, as expressed by his avatar. You take a protagonist who doesn’t have much to live for, you give him a sense of purpose, and then you let him realize how he can be stronger and more noble than he ever imagined he could be. (As with Terminator, as with Aliens.)

Why don’t the movies do that more often? I don’t mean the small, personal movies, I mean the big spectacles. Oh right, they try, but are drowned out by special effects and the filmmakers’ obsession with coolness.

Cameron’s special effects may be the very definition of “cool,” but when it comes to human emotion he is most uncool. He is sloppy, corny, and melodramatic. But human emotions are sloppy, corny, and melodramatic, and that is why his movies work. It takes a true master of movie technology to grasp this ineluctable fact: Humans are not special effects.

So welcome back, James Cameron, you !@#$%^&*. Don’t ever leave again.