So I got in this little debate the other day with a fellow film enthusiast and we were talking about the recent news that 20th Century Fox was in talks with James Cameron for a sequel to the record breaking film, Avatar. This is no real news, seeing as how Cameron said a long time ago that if Avatar was successful, he'd like to make sequels to it, but after seeing the film, do we really want to see a sequel?
I highly enjoyed Avatar. It was refreshing to see a big budget movie based upon original material, which is such a rarity nowadays. Not only that, I thought it was a pretty good film, by no means as groundbreaking as the original Star Wars, but it was still a solid action/adventure. So why do I not want to see a sequel? I mean Star Wars had sequels and for the most part those turned out wonderfully. So what makes Avatar so different from something like Star Wars, or even The Lord of the Rings for that matter? It's simple, the story.
The story of Avatar, of a man in an organically grown alien body joining the indigenous aliens of a distant moon to fight the encroaching humans, was an intriguing premise from the start, a premise that initially when Cameron said he would like to make a trilogy, I thought would be fascinating to see this conflict unfold over the course of three films. Though now upon seeing the film, I don't see anywhere for Cameron to go with this story. He tied up all of the loose ends in Avatar, killed off the bad guy, and had the Nav'i regain control of the planet and sent the humans packing. A good, classic Hollywood ending, but that's just what keeps this film from being able to have a sequel of the caliber of say Star Wars or The Lord of the Rings.
The Lord of the Rings was a continuing adventure, each film ending on a cliffhanger, leading into the next, and while Star Wars wrapped each film's individual stories up at the end, George Lucas still left many things unanswered to return to in later films. In A New Hope, Luke learns he is a Jedi, but his scant training with Obi-Wan just makes him a potential Jedi, not a full-fledged Jedi, so you knew there would be material for sequels there in Luke's training to become a Jedi. Jake Sully in Avatar has been implanted into his Nav'i body at the end of the film, completely ridding himself of his humanity, as I said, good ending, but nothing to go on in terms of a sequel. In A New Hope, we see Darth Vader live to fight another day, in Avatar, all of the bad guys die, no room to go for interconnecting sequels. In A New Hope, even though the Rebels won the battle, the Empire still ruled the galaxy, but in Avatar... Do I need to say anymore?
My biggest fear is that they're simply going to make sequels to Avatar for the sake of making sequels, much like The Pirates of the Caribbean films. There was nowhere to go after the first film, they tied all loose ends up, so in their trying to make sequels they just derogated what was fantastic about the original. Another example of sequels gone bad, The Planet of the Apes, which actually has a lot in common with Avatar the more you think about it. The only good Planet of the Apes film is the original, after that it's just a bunch of horrid sequels that try to make a continuing story when all that needed to happen happened in the first film. I see Avatar being similar. Many of the reports are that in the sequel the Nav'i will go off planet and embark on a space adventure, but seriously, this just sounds like grasping at straws to me. For all I know it could be good, but I'm not feeling it right now.
Here's a good point to consider: look at the sequels to the terminator films. Cameron created those and what could've have been a really serious series of sci-fi robo-doom films has turned into a clusterfuck of competing ideas of what the terminator franchise is all about. The only difference from the terminator films and Avatar sequels would be that cameron was only involved with the first terminator and declined to get involved with subsequent ones. I think if he were to head a series of avatar films they would certainly be under his control so maybe they won't be as muddled.
ReplyDeleteHopefully it wont be. It will make money either good or bad, but money doesn't normally translate to quality (i.e. "Twilight").
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