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Avatar has recently overtaken Titanic as the highest grossing film of all time, all in something like three or four weeks! For those of us who don't remember the film Titanic (apologies to those who do), it wasn't the best cinema experience or storyline in the world. Nor would I say it had much of a wide appeal (bare with me, I'm trying to draw up some parallels). Dispite this, it still raked in $1.843billion at the box office. To put that into some universal unit, today, it would buy you a private island of 36,000 acres, a one way ticket and 100,000 Mars Bars per day for the next one hundred years. In brief, you would be rather tubby, but probably happy.
The release of Avatar didn't exactly excite me, nor do many films about tall, blue aliens. The only reason I went to see it was because a friend asked me to go and I couldn't think of a good enough reason not to. It wasn't a motivated effort.
As you may have sensed, I have a few issues with the film. The storyline was quite drab. We've seen it all before in other films of a higher quality. For example, Pocahontas (and if you actually look at the story of the two films, there's very little difference). At least Disney give you a few cheesy songs to bite into (we all secretly love them). My second issue is the graphics. The way I see it, either a film has good special effects or it has a good storyline. You seldom see a film with both, just as it's unlikely you'll see a film in the cinema with neither a good story nor good computer graphics (they go straight to dvd). Dispite all the ravings about Avatar being filmed with special cameras and it taking hundreds of years to perfect and so forth, I wasn't impressed. For me, it still felt like I was playing The Smurfs on my old PS2.
So, to draw up my prarallels between Titanic and Avatar, neither had a particularly meaty story to them and I found neither of them all too easy on the eye, either. Yet these two films grossed the highest box office incomes of all the films, ever.
I suppose what I'm trying to say is that the publics' expectations of a film are far more important than the film itself. This must be down to pre-release promotions. Many a time I went to surf the internet on - just some of my favourite sites - for example SkySports. For those who don't use SkySports often, it has nothing to do with cinema. It has nothing to do with blue aliens. In spite of this, I was confronted with one of those annoying adverts that make sound and pop up, covering your web page with graphics completely unrelated to what I intended on looking at (which was how many goals my beloved Liverpool had lost by this week). The advert was for Avatar. This violation of one of my sacred places (many won't understand that sport is something that shouldn't be messed with) annoyed me more than intrigued me, and as a human being, I would always relate the thought of the new film to inconvenience and annoyance. Many people's first impressions of Avatar won't be based on critics' reviews, but of adverts intended on inticing the punter into shelling out to be part of the ultimate experience. Everyone will have gone to watch the film based on a bunch of snippets intedted to lure them in. Although I don't personally remember (i was 9 years old), I'm sure Titanic would have done the same thing to people.
In conclusion, I think what I'm really trying to say on a more general note is that we can't really know if we're watching a good film or not until you leave the theatre and either feel inspired, genuinely inspired, or conned and foolish. The only thing I have to say about this is that it's just a part of the fabric of life. We are unimpressed sometimes, and others we are blown off our feet. What fun would anything be if we knew what was going to come next?
