James Cameron reinvents cinema

But even as a pioneer of performance capture technology, photorealistic VFX animation and digital stereoscopy – in short, all the tools that make up today’s franchise-driven entertainment cinema – he is still subject to the laws of the market.

Cameron can use his power to resist the use of artificial intelligence during filming or in the creative writing process; in this respect he is a kind of one-man union. But the deal that Disney and OpenAI announced last week goes against all the principles that tech freak and cinema believer Cameron has always defended. Disney has owned the studio 21st Century Fox since 2019, which in turn owns the rights to the “Avatar” films.

After the billion-dollar deal between the software company and the entertainment group, which will allow OpenAI users to legally use characters from the Disney portfolio for their own short films, the idea that the characters Jake Sully, Neytiri or Kiri will at some point develop a life of their own outside of the cinematic device “Avatar” created by Cameron is no longer entirely unreasonable.

For a director who had new Imax technology developed specifically for the visually groundbreaking “Avatar: Way of Water” to achieve maximum immersion, this news just before the release of “Avatar: Fire and Ash” had to seem like a bad joke.

The three “Avatar” films cost over a billion dollars

“Avatar: Fire and Ash”, which Cameron had already completed with its predecessor “Avatar: Way of Water”, could remain one of the last films of its kind in the current cinema landscape. According to industry experts, both films cost a total of between 800 and 900 million dollars, and Cameron had almost a free hand financially with his mammoth project.

There aren’t many directors left who enjoy such freedom in Hollywood. However, Cameron’s vision of cinema is also proving to be increasingly incompatible with the requirements of streaming platforms, which are more interested in content and less in (expensive) aesthetic positions.

“Avatar: Fire and Ash” is the antithesis of this streaming paradigm. Cameron had already proven himself in 2009 with the first film in the now completed trilogy, primarily as a creator of fantasy worlds rather than outstanding stories. The logical progression to “Avatar: Fire and Ash” would actually not be a fourth or fifth film – which Cameron has already announced (albeit with new characters) – but rather a virtual reality installation that invites you to explore. The planet Pandora is the focal point of the “Avatar” films, which have been expanded to include another ecosphere with each chapter.

After the underwater world of the Metkayina, which “Way ou Water” introduced spectacularly, another Na’vi people appears in “Fire and Ash” with the Mangkwan, whose habitat was transformed into an ash landscape by a volcanic eruption. The Mangkwan, led by the warlike Varang (Oona Chaplin), have broken with the Na’vi’s belief in nature and blame the almighty Eywa, the ecological consciousness of the planet Pandora, for the destruction of their “Tree of Life”.

They first appear during an attack on a caravan of the Tlalim clan, which is supposed to bring the human boy Spider (Jack Champion), adopted by Omaticaya leader Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and his family, out of the reach of his father, Colonel Quaritch (Stephen Lang), who was killed in the first film.

With this magnificent air battle – the Tlalim merchant people transport their goods with the help of balloon-like jellyfish creatures, the Mangkwan attack with banshees, the flying dragons native to Pandora – Cameron once again underlines his mastery as an action director early in the film. Despite all the technology at his disposal, he still sees his story as anchored in physical reality; The unity of time and space never dissolves, even in the most confusing battle.

It gets a bit long-winded, not only because of the length of almost 200 minutes, whenever Cameron tries to get to the supposedly narrative core of his film. In interviews, he recently compared “Avatar: Fire and Ash” to the mafia epic “The Godfather”: He sees his trilogy as a “family saga.”

Between family conflicts and spiritual edification

The question of how the children relate to their parents and find their own paths and what constitutes a family is even more complicated after the death of the eldest son Neteyam in “Way of Water”. Middle son Lo’ak (Britain Dalton) struggles for the respect of his authoritarian father – once a soldier, always a soldier – while adopted son Spider is perceived as a threat because he could lure the RDA soldiers around Quaritch onto their trail. And Kiri, again played by a digitally rejuvenated Sigourney Weaver, still has to grow into her role as an intermediary between the Na’vi and Eywa – and thus the entire ecological system of Pandora.

In “Avatar: Fire and Ash” there is a very relatable emotional dimension, the coming-of-age story of the children, and a spiritual dimension, the exploration of the planet Pandora, which Cameron again spends a lot of time on. The action set pieces give these two central narratives, which repeatedly thwart each other, an additional imbalance.

Because Quaritch has made a pact with Varang, who the Spanish actress Oona Chaplin plays with an archaic malevolence. He promises her the “fire” from the colonizers’ arsenals, with which she can turn all of Pandora into an ash desert. In return, she should help him find his son – and kill the traitor Jake Sully.

The alliances in “Fire and Ash” are more complicated than in the first two films: this time there are good and evil Na’vi (which Cameron also breaks with the racist stereotype of the “noble savages”), Jake and Quaritch even have to briefly enter into an alliance of convenience in order to save Spider.

Ultimately, the changing lines of conflict cannot hide the fact that many of the storylines from “Way of Water” are repeated in a slightly different form in the sequel “Fire and Ash”. The simple basic plot doesn’t allow for many variations; Cameron stretches the story a bit too much at nine hours.

Especially since the emotional lubricant, the parent-child conflicts, primarily serves to delve even deeper into the world of the planet Pandora. Here Cameron proves once again that as a special effects filmmaker he has mastered the natural elements; a “King of the World,” which he proclaimed himself to be after his Oscar triumph with “Titanic,” with a God complex. In “Fire and Ash” he combines land and air, water and fire; At the grand finale, even Eywa takes sides with the Omaticaya and the Metkayina against the renegade “ash people”.

However, it could be that James Cameron will remain a solitary figure as a pioneer of moving images. 16 years ago he set out to reinvent the cinema. But as long as the production costs of films like “Avatar: Fire and Ash” are in the mid-three-digit million range, he will remain one of the few directors who can finance such projects.

In interviews, he himself says that he is already working on significantly reducing the costs of SFX animations with the help of artificial intelligence. After all, it would be a more sensible use of AI than mere fan fiction from the Marvel/Star Wars continuum, as the Disney/OpenAI cooperation suggests.

However, the familiar aesthetic of “Avatar: Fire and Ash” no longer has much to do with cinema as we know it. The higher frame rate that Cameron achieves with his newly developed cameras does not create an increased sense of reality so much as it creates a greater distance to the characters. The actors’ facial expressions may seem realistic. But James Cameron’s future of cinema is looking more than ever like a virtual reality simulation.