"Avatar" Wins Again...ugh.

Auteur James Cameron's magnum opus Avatar continues to break records by winning the weekend box office race for the sixth consecutive week. The film, the most expensive movie ever made to date, has grossed well over one billion dollars worldwide, eclipsing the previous top grosser, Cameron's other little movie called Titanic.

The question is, why? I found nothing particularly ground-breaking about the movie, not to mention the fact that it was an hour too long and not all that entertaining or that original. See Dances With Wolves, Last of the Mohicans, and read any of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom books.

The answer is, that Cameron is able to gauge the audience's likes and dislikes and tap into what exactly they want to see. He accomplished that with Titanic and to a greater degree, Terminator 2: Judgment Day. The Terminator was a good movie in and of itself (and also not that original, see author Harlan Ellison's Outer Limits episodes, "Soldier" and "Demon with a Glass Hand"), but Cameron built upon that idea very skillfully by turning the killing machine that is the Terminator and making him a good guy, thus capitalizing on everybody's favorite action hero Arnold Schwarzenegger. A brilliant move that paid off.

Why did Titanic succeed so greatly? Teenage girls, mostly. They kept going back, week after week, to see Leonardo DiCaprio fall in love and die. It was that simple.

So, why did Avatar top that? Because science fiction is popular again. Because geek culture is in (as evidenced by the resurgence of comic book-based movies). Because much of the movie going public today hasn't seen Dances With Wolves, Last of the Mohicans, or read anything written by Burroughs? God, I hope not, but there's probably a lot of truth in that, too.

Cameron knew he could never make a sequel to Titanic or any sort of follow-up to that film. So, he created his own new world or universe to play in, as unoriginal as it may be, and will reap the benefits pretty much forever. A smart man? Definitely. A good filmmaker? Certainly. An innovator? Perhaps (although Avatar's "groundbreaking" special effects were already achieved in 1999's Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace).

I wish I had a definite answer to why Avatar has become the phenomenon it has become. Unfortunately, I don't. I just wish the movie had been better.