The paradox of ‘Avatar: The Sense of Water’: the worst enemy to succeed at the box office is its own spectacularity

The news about ‘Avatar: The Sense of Water’ doesn’t just keep coming. It is that they directly pile up: to its not very devastating but decidedly positive box office collections are added the already definitely weaker ones from China and the spectacular ones from Spain, where is breaking records. The sequel to ‘Avatar’ seems to save the day, and although it is an indisputably long run, and we won’t know for a while whether Cameron can claim victory, the film continues to generate headlines.

However, once the dust caused by the premiere and its overwhelming first weekend has settled, the questions are still in the air, and it is not surprising: with Marvel releases, to mention one of the franchises that collect the most, we can practically predict from the first weekend if we are facing a success or a disappointment. But ‘Avatar: The Sense of Water’, given its mammoth budget and monstrous marketing campaign, is still an enigma.

What we can all agree on is that the film has aimed high, so high that its excessive ambition has been publicized -or used as an advertising alibi- as much as the quality of the film itself. We have been sold that the realism, the evocative quality of the images was going to be unprecedented, and we have been implanted with the false memory that “as it happened with the first part, this changes everything” when the truth is that with the first part…didn’t happen.

The first ‘Avatar’ also used the same alibi, but its technical innovation was so ahead of its time that, precisely for that very reason, nothing changed. He invented a new way of presenting cinema in 3D and in high definition, but he was so far ahead of the rest and Cameron’s proposal was so visionary that once his own technical explosion had passed, cinema continued as always. It is true that as Cameron himself tells, when the first film was released there were 6,000 theaters in the world in 3D and now there are 120,000, but 3D is considered an accessory experiencean addition that is not essential at all when it comes to enjoying the film.

Overcome by the spectacular

It is Cameron’s own intention to give up doing anything other than ‘Avatar’ with his career at least for, say, a couple of decades, which is astonishing about the saga, and is corroborated with a sequel that is little more of the same. (even technically!). Because we had not seen a comparable decision taken by any other author -much less by someone in the category of highest-grossing director in the history of cinema- and because ‘Avatar’ seems, after looking at it, a franchise perhaps not so deserving of such a privilege on the part of its creator.

And we keep getting the message of Cameron’s excessive technical ambition and his very premeditated decisions when using HFR (which uses images shot and projected at frame rates greater than 24 per second, in this case 48). For example, Cameron has selected some sequences where he uses them (the underwater ones, the flight ones, the most visually striking shots of the scenes) and others where he doesn’t (the dialogues). The result, as we already commented in our review, is not a technical revolution, but a salad of textures and visual chaos.

And therefore, the technical spectacularity of ‘Avatar’ becomes its worst enemy, firstly because it raises a promise that in the eyes of the viewer does not quite arrive. We all agree: the landscapes of Pandora, the fauna and flora of the planet, the tremendous and extremely long final climax, all of this is well worth the price of admission, but… revolutionary? We still have to reach that adjective.

And second, because that spectacularity that goes before any other consideration makes other issues are neglected, such as emotion, rhythm or genuine creativity beyond frame overflow. Nothing really happens either: the film falls a few steps behind what Cameron promised, but it’s still a potent proposition for the Christmas season and an almost must-see for devotees of the semiotics of art. blockbusters. But it is very possible that each spectator disappointed by the imbalance between form and substance is one more notch that prevents future installments of ‘Avatar’ from reaching the goal they had set.