Does Avatar ( 2009 ) Stands The Test Of Time?

  Blender Dumbass
December 16, 2024

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I was frankly scared to re-experience the original James Cameron picture Avatar after knowing for certain that it is much worse, technically speaking, in comparison to the second film in the franchise. Yet I was confident that the film at the very least should be good. So I took my worries aside and watched it again. Does it hold up? Well let's talk about it.

There is a lot of lazy film-critics making fun of Avatar for its borrowing of story beats from other films. As far I can tell plot was not on James Cameron's mind when he made this movie. Criticizing unoriginality of the plot would be the same as criticizing Hamlet for borrowing a folk tale, and rewriting it with a new ( at the time ) exuberant style, which was what William Shakespeare did. James Cameron did the same thing with the old white-savior folk tales. Adding a whole another level of challenge of top of it. The plot of Avatar is not the point. The points are all the other stuff. The designs, the technology, the incredible artistry, the every-frame-a-painting approach to cinematography, the sound design. James Cameron was pushing every ounce of technical prowess as he could possibly manage in 2009 out of this movie.

There is an overwhelming sense that the film holds up to the test of time, even though its central piece was a very quickly growing technology that would make the movie look dated very quickly. A lot of film directors avoid CGI because while it might look impressive at the time of the movie's release, few years down the line, with new tech in newer movies, the visuals become boring in comparison. I believe Cameron and the art departments on this movie knew that this was the case and challenged themselves as much as possible to overcome this limitation.

It is funny to think that Avatar was not rendered on a 100% path-tracing renderer. They used Pixar RenderMan which at the time was not a path-tracer, but a very advanced rasteriser, similar to something like EEVEE engine inside of Blender. But with a few things that are ray-tracing based. Like a very solid Ambient Occlusion model and a damn good Global Illumination approximation. Yet watching the movie today I can totally see that the way the shading works looks very rasteriser-like to me.

There was an episode of Visual Effects Artists React where an artist who worked on a movie broke down how they dealt with the limitations of the engine. And one approach was to use a heavy amount of very scientifically based post-production on every shot to bring it from the boring rendered state, to something approaching realism in the final shot. Here is a comparison of one frame, first as it was rendered with RenderMan and then after it was finished with compositing.




As you can see here, the stuff coming out of the renderer is not ugly at all, its just not there yet in terms of looking real. And here is probably the best explanation how, even though the technology was limited, Avatar was able to stand the test of time. They put an incredible amount of artistry into every single shot of the film. Pre-render and post render.

Re-watching the movie now made me realize that every damn shot in the movie is peppered with anything the artists could come up with, to make it the most complex thing imaginable. There is a closeup on Neytiri and it should be boring, yet her little braids slide across her shoulders one by one in a majestic little dance. There is a shot of a conversation between two characters, that could look boring as hell, but a whole scene of alive background elements plays in the same time, filling it all to the brim with motion. The camera at one shot tilts down to see a rocky formation near the sea, and right at that moment a majestically complex water simulation happens just so there will be something going on in the shot. And here I'm not even talking about the stuff that was beautiful to begin with on paper. Like the whole bio-luminescent forest thing.

The movie is also extremely well designed in the editing sense. It seamlessly goes from one aw inspiring thing to another and then to another. At first ( in the extended cut ) we see a very complex version of the future on earth. Which would be cool enough on its own. Then there is a very cool space and landing sequence, designed to mesmerize. Then we have a very emotional scene where the main character links with the avatar for the first time, and can't hold himself from running. It is Forest Gump like emotionality being thrown at you just for a little bit, because James Cameron wants the movie to never stop mesmerizing. And the movie doesn't stop introducing new extremely good looking or extremely entertaining things. And the thing is, it is not like all of them are on the same level. By the time you see the bio-luminescent forest the future on earth becomes a boring uninspired joke in comparison. It evolves with more and more quality on screen. The aw factor grows and grows. Every little new things adds something entirely on a new level compared to the previous thing.

James Cameron is not Steven Spielberg, he doesn't let the camera dance too much. The shots alone are rather simple. There will be a dolly here or a motion in one direction there. But together in a sequence, the effect Cameron gets is as if he went Spielbergian and did a complex dance. His editing is insanely good. And combined with visual complexity that is required to combat the technical limitations of the approach, the effect is truly sublime.

In the final battle for example, so much stuff is going one in the frame, in every shot, it seems like James Cameron to work, takes some ADHD inducing drugs, which make him come up with all the little ideas to fill the shots up. Obviously though, probably a lot of those little quarks were things various animation artists came up with. Like that scene where Jake is jumping off a cliff to escape a huge animal, and he needs to remove his back pack where his hand gets stuck and because of that he falls in a more unpredictable way. It's a very tiny animation detail, but it adds so much. And the movie is full of those details in absolutely every shot.

Even as a kid in 2009 I noticed that every shot is something special. And I think this was the idea to begin with. James Cameron just didn't want a single shot to be boring to look at. He wanted every frame to be a gorgeous painting.

Happy Hacking!!!

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