Avatar Ascendant

It has no stars. It’s not a sequel. It isn’t the screen version of a best-selling novel, a comic-book franchise or the Bible. It’s got a lot of battle scenes, so women certainly wouldn’t want to go see it. It’s also the most tree-hugging movie ever, with a defiantly leftish agenda — at the climax, we’re meant to cheer when American soldiers get killed. And what does the title mean, anyway?

Avatar, in other words, has none of the selling points that are supposed to guarantee hit status for a big-budget movie. Yet James Cameron’s enviro-epic, with no famous name attached to it but its writer-director’s, is not just a blockbuster; it’s king of the world. Since premiering on Dec. 18, it has proceeded to shatter most existing box-office records at home and abroad. It has been No. 1 every week, swatting away ambitious newcomers like so many mosquitoes. And like the best ambassador for Hollywood, it has earned most of its revenue — nearly 70% — in foreign markets.

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On a grander scale, Avatar has achieved what many industry savants thought impossible. It has passed the $1.843 billion worldwide gross of the previous all-time smash: Cameron’s own Titanic, from 1997. Barring an instant apocalypse, Avatar will have passed Titanic‘s $600.8 million domestic take by the end of January. Since the new movie’s gross is declining only 10% to 15% each week — far less than most pictures — there may be no stopping the Avatar avalanche.

Two notes of restraint: First, the movie’s income is swelled by the higher prices charged for the 3-D version and the Imax experience. (These formats account for 80% of the film’s domestic gross; worldwide, Avatar has earned about $125 million in just 262 Imax theaters.) Second, the rate of inflation complicates any comparison of movie hits from one decade to another. In real dollars, none of the superhits of the past decade — not The Dark Knight nor any movie with pirates, hobbits, wizards or spider-men — make the list of the 25 top-grossing domestic films. Titanic is the only picture of the past quarter-century in the top 10. (It’s sixth.) Cameron’s new film would have to take in some $950 million in today’s dollars just to match his last one. Avatar is barely more than a third of the way toward reaching the real-dollar champ, Gone With the Wind.

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Still, it’s done fine, and that’s a tribute to Cameron’s insane ingenuity, the visual magic concocted by his special-effects team and the willingness of the mass audience to give their hearts to something new and pay extra for it.

Recall that Titanic was a colossal gamble back in ’97. With a $200 million budget, it was, some said, the most expensive picture ever made. (In real dollars, that dubious honor would probably go to the Elizabeth Taylor Cleopatra in 1963.) Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet were not yet established stars. The historical event lacked suspense: whatever else happened, that 1912 ocean liner would sink; there would be no Titanic II. Moreover, the scenario Cameron did invent was a love story, and that would scare off the guys.

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But the director took his risk, and it paid off, attracting all sectors of the audience, but especially women. This often-ignored demographic made Titanic the hit of all hits. (Alan Wade, a writer-director, argues that the movie resonated so strongly with women precisely because Jack, the hero, dies; in memory he remains their first, shining, lost love.)

After Titanic, Cameron got financial carte blanche to spend a bundle on another no-star epic. (The film’s distributor, 20th Century Fox, claims that the budget for Avatar was $237 million, less than that of Spider-Man 3 or the last Harry Potter movie.) This time, instead of re-creating a cruise ship, Cameron created a whole new world, using technologies he waited nearly a decade to see come to fruition. The man who built the Titanic became the God of the Old Testament — or at least J.R.R. Tolkien — summoning previously unseen lands from his majestic imagination.

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Avatar‘s mantra is “I see you,” and its final image is of someone’s eyes snapping open. Journeying to the year 2154, moviegoers everywhere have embraced the film — surely the most vivid and persuasive creation of a fantasy world ever seen in moving pictures — as a total sensory, sensuous, sensual experience. The planet Pandora is a wonder world of flora and fauna: a rainforest (where it rarely rains) of gigantic trees and phosphorescent plants, of flying steeds, panther dogs and hammerhead dinosaurs. Audiences are just as beguiled by Pandora’s humanish tribe, the Na’vi — the lean, 10-ft.-tall, blue-striped people with yellow eyes. They are what humans might have been if they had evolved in harmony with, not in opposition to, the Edenic environment that gave them birth.

But Avatar wouldn’t connect so broadly and deeply with audiences if the central relationship of Jake (Sam Worthington), the crippled Marine, and Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), daughter of the Na’vi tribal chief, weren’t plausible and inviting. Like Titanic, this is a love story enveloped by catastrophe. That’s why Hollywood’s anxiety about the movie’s supposedly limited appeal to both sexes was needless. Indeed, Avatar‘s closest kin among current hits may be The Blind Side, the female-skewing sports film. Both tell stories of strong women who find rootless young men and give them a purpose around which they can build their lives.

That also makes Avatar a throwback to ancient movie days, when films about men and women seduced the mass audience. And because it works splendidly as spectacle and love story, Cameron’s picture is worthy of comparison to the great old epics. The world beater is also a heartbreaker, if you just open your eyes.

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