AA huge poster for the film “Avatar – The Way of Water” hangs in the Berlin Zoopalast. It shows one of these flying creatures, looking like a mixture of dragonfly, dolphin and dragon, on which a warrior rides, with the posture of an ancient Roman gladiator on a chariot. The poster states that the film hits theaters on December 14, adding: “Best in 3-D.”
“Best?” Isn’t 3-D the pinnacle of the cinema experience anyway? Why does this need to be specifically emphasized, with defensive wording that opens up the possibility of watching the 2D version as well? After the first “Avatar” in 2009, didn’t everyone who knew something about the subject predict that in a few years there would only be films in 3D?
A brief reminder of the film that gave the audience the great promise of a bright future. Directors have recently tried to create new cinematic universes at great expense. James Cameron only needed one shot in the original “Avatar”: the viewer flew over countless treetops towards the planet Pandora, which seemed familiar and yet alien to him – a paradise that was 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 Chauvet Grotto in southern France, which is otherwise closed, with his 3D equipment and staged the two-dimensional Stone Age paintings as a three-dimensional primal 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 made full use of the art form. Jean-Luc Godard’s penultimate film “Adieu au langage” used 3D technology to unite contradictions: the 3D glasses superimpose two (almost) identical images; Godard, however, superimposed different images – at the same time. Even a movie like “Jackass 3-D”, otherwise sucks, staged its nasty things in the most disgusting way possible.
Bailey Bass als Tsireya
Quelle: Courtesy of 20th Century Studios
There were 15 cinema months between “Avatar” and “Pina”, and even in this good first year one had begun to doubt the savior. Tim Burton’s “Alice in Wonderland”, part three of the “Chronicles of Narnia”, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows”: All advertised on posters with the 3-D promise – and were still a sham, later on the computer in 3 -D converted movies that looked a bit cheap. 3-D was getting a bad rap for itself.
Cameron watched this for a year or two and then started warning. In an interview he pulled off the leather: “Most studios first shoot in 2D and think they can somehow bring in the 3D effect later in the editing. But this is not a technical process that can be delegated to computer nerds. It’s a creative one that requires a director. For many studio bosses, 3-D is above all an opportunity to squeeze even more money out of the well-known with little effort. They just don’t get it.”
They just didn’t get it. The public, however, understood all the better that they were supposed to pay a surcharge of several euros and did not receive any real equivalent. This was easy to prove: if a cinema offered both the 3D and 2D versions of a film, which 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. Just two years after “Avatar”, the majority of audiences in “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides” chose the 2D version for the first time in a blockbuster.
A list from 2019 (the last normal year before the pandemic) shows that the studios had already largely buried the 3D art form back then: out of 35 “three-dimensional” films, three were still “real” and 32 were merely converted. 3D TV – does anyone remember that hype from ten years ago? – only flourished for a short time before device manufacturers dropped this feature and switched to higher resolutions. There is no mention of 3-D on any streaming service either. “We screwed it up,” said Dreamworks boss Jeffrey Katzenberg with belated insight at the end of the 3-D decade.
Scene from the new “Avatar”
Quelle: Courtesy of 20th Century Studios
Now it shouldn’t be overlooked that many people don’t like to put glasses on their noses when they don’t have to, and that some people get dizzy about it. Basically, the glasses also contradict the theory of the cinema as a cave experience, where you can be put into a daydream-like state; anything that draws attention to the necessary technology detracts from the experience. James Cameron once announced “glasses-free 3D” for the new “Avatar,” but that may be a few years away.
The basic story Cameron penned for part one, in its anti-capitalist morality, could have been penned by Michael Moore and Greenpeace. A large corporation wants to exploit raw materials on the native Na’vi populated planet Pandora and uses every conceivable means in its greed for profit; when persuasion and money do not 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 Na’vi teenager (!) named Kiri, which is easily possible thanks to motion capture technology – which covers human bodies with a new surface. Stephen Lang’s villain Quaritch – also deceased in the first part – may return. His spirit was uploaded into an avatar, one of the artificially conceived Na’vi-human hybrids. Quaritch continues to work for the exploitative corporation, this time stretching its claws 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 premiere guests to say nothing about the content until next Tuesday.
Sam Worthington rides
Quelle: Courtesy of 20th Century Studios
In 2010, Avatar became the highest-grossing film of all time, grossing $2.789 billion. The numbers after the comma were important because nine years later, Avengers: Endgame took in 2.797 billion and dethroned Avatar.
That didn’t let Cameron rest, he brought his old film back to cinemas this year as a kind of prelude to the new one and is now at the top again with 2.810 billion. It’s a brand Avatar – The Way of Water is unlikely to achieve in the post-pandemic viewer doldrums, and perhaps the stuff that once fueled the 3-D hype is now its swan song too. That won’t stop cinema from attempting to win back its audience with new technological sophistication. Virtual Reality and Higher Frame Rate are in the starting blocks.