James Cameron’s New Avatar Movie: 3-D’s Last Big Appearance?

AA huge poster of the movie “Avatar – The Way of Water” hangs in Berlin’s Zoopalast. It shows one of these flying creatures, resembling a mixture of dragonfly, dolphin and dragon, on which a warrior rides, with the posture of an ancient Roman gladiator in a chariot. The poster states that the film will be released in theaters on December 14, adding: “The best in 3-D.”

“The best?” Isn’t 3-D the pinnacle of cinematic experience anyway? Why is it necessary to emphasize it specifically, with a defensive wording that opens up the possibility of looking at the 2D version as well? After the first “Avatar” in 2009, didn’t everyone who knew anything about the subject predict that in a few years there would be only 3D movies?

A brief recollection of the film that gave the audience the great promise of a bright future. Filmmakers have recently been looking to create new cinematic universes at great expense. James Cameron only needed one shot in the original “Avatar”: the viewer flew over countless treetops to the planet Pandora, which seemed familiar yet foreign to him – a paradise that has been discovered and destroyed.

It was a beginning that promised so much. And there were other pioneering acts: Wim Wenders expanded the promise with his 3D ballet documentary ‘Pina’, created depth where there was none before and told stories seriously instead of simulating movement. Werner Herzog was allowed to enter the otherwise closed Chauvet cave in southern France with his 3D equipment and staged the two-dimensional Stone Age paintings like a three-dimensional primordial cinema in “The Cave of Forgotten Dreams” . Alfonso Cuarón’s “Gravity” was the first to transform space into a plastic form, and in Martin Scorsese’s “Hugo Cabret” a great director took full advantage of this art form. Jean-Luc Godard’s penultimate film “Adieu au langage” used 3D technology to unite contradictions: 3D glasses superimpose two (almost) identical images; Godard, on the other hand, superimposed several images – simultaneously. Even a movie like “Jackass 3-D,” otherwise sucks, plays its bad stuff in the most disgusting way possible.

15 months of cinema have passed between “Avatar” and “Pina”, and even in this good first year we had begun to doubt the savior. “Alice in Wonderland” by Tim Burton, the third part of the “Chronicles of Narnia”, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows”: all advertised on posters with the promise of 3-D – and they were still a farce, then on the computer in 3 😀 Converted movies that looked a bit cheap. 3-D was getting a bad rap for itself.

Cameron watched it for a year or two and then it started warning. In an interview he pulled his skin: “Most studios shoot in 2D first and think they can somehow bring the 3D effect later in editing. But this is not a technical process that can be delegated to computer nerds. It is a creative film that requires a director. For many studio bosses, 3-D is above all an opportunity to squeeze even more money out of the known with little effort. They just don’t get it.”

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They just didn’t get it. The public, however, understood better that they would have to pay a premium of several euros and received no real equivalent. It was easy to prove: if a theater offered both 3D and 2D versions of a film, which one did viewers prefer? “Avatar – Aufbruch nach Pandora” achieved 81 percent of its sales in Germany 13 years ago with the three-dimensional version, “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” six years ago only 38 percent. Only two years after “Avatar”, most of the audience of “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides” chose the 2D version in a blockbuster for the first time.

A list from 2019 (the last normal year before the pandemic) shows that studios had already largely buried the 3D art form: out of 35 “three-dimensional” films, three were still “real” and 32 had simply been converted . 3D TV: Anyone remember that hype a decade ago? – only flourished for a short time before device makers abandoned this feature and moved to higher resolutions. There’s not even a mention of 3-D on any streaming service. “We screwed it up,” Dreamworks boss Jeffrey Katzenberg said with belated insight at the end of the 3-D decade.

Now it shouldn’t be overlooked that many people don’t like putting glasses on their nose when it’s not necessary, and that some people get dizzy because of it. Crucially, the glasses also contradict the theory of cinema as a cave experience, where one can be put into a state of daydreaming; anything that draws attention to the technology needed detracts from the experience. James Cameron once announced “glasses-free 3D” for the new “Avatar,” but that could be in a few years.

The basic story that Cameron wrote for the first part, in its anti-capitalist morality, could have been written by Michael Moore and Greenpeace. A large corporation wants to exploit raw materials on the planet Pandora populated by the native Na’vi and uses every means imaginable in its greed for profit; when persuasion and money don’t help, he resorts to violence. A scientist, played by Sigourney Weaver, pays for her naivety with her life.

That didn’t stop James Cameron from reprising Weaver in the sequel. The 73-year-old plays a teenage Na’vi (!) named Kiri, which is easily possible thanks to motion capture technology, which covers human bodies with a new surface. Quaritch, the villain of Stephen Lang, who also died in the first part, could return. His spirit was uploaded into an avatar, one of the artificially conceived Na’vi-human hybrids. Quaritch continues to work for the exploitation corporation, this time reaching out for a second Na’vi tribe on the seabed. The underwater world is likely to be the main attraction of the second part, which premiered in London on Wednesday and forced all guests of the premiere to say nothing about the content until next Tuesday.

In 2010, Avatar became the highest-grossing film of all time, grossing $2.789 billion. The numbers after the decimal point mattered because nine years later, Avengers: Endgame grossed 2.797 billion and dethroned Avatar.

This gave Cameron no respite, who brought his old film back to theaters this year as a sort of prelude to his new one and is now back at the top with 2.810 billion. Avatar – The Way of Water is unlikely to hit the mark in post-pandemic viewership doldrums, and perhaps the things that once fueled the 3-D hype are now also its swan song. This will not prevent cinema from trying to win back its audience with new technological sophistications. VR and higher frame rates are in the starting blocks.