When I first saw trailers for James Cameron’s Avatar, I was worried. Big blue CGI aliens? It didn’t sound promising. But then yesterday, I saw Avatar on a big screen, in 3D, and it blew me away. I loved every minute of it.

Yes, the plot’s predictable – a conflicted and otherworldly outsider joins the tribe, falls in love with the chief’s daughter, beats the tribe’s most skilled warrior, and leads the tribe to salvation – but so what? It’s an archetypal plot, one that our ancestors have probably been recycling since the dawn of campfire storytelling. It’s the hero’s journey. It’s a basic story of primate tribe dynamics, and it runs through our myths, from the Greek legend of Prometheus, through early sci-fi, to films such as Dances With Wolves, and Pocahontas. To complain about its unoriginality is to miss the point, as Cameron isn’t crafting something entirely new: instead, he’s reinterpreting the myth for our times, incorporating contemporary elements such as “shock and awe” bombing and commercial environmental exploitation.

But forget the plot: every frame of the picture looks magnificent, down to the smallest detail. I could sit and watch it all day. The human characters use holographic computer interfaces that made my fingers itch with the desire to try them; the forests, bioluminescent animals and floating mountains look spectacular – somehow startlingly alien and disconcertingly familiar at the same time – and the military harware looks… plausible. The soldiers fly around in machines we can imagine seeing in our own sky in a couple of decades. And let’s face it: no-one does military hardware like Cameron. Avatar‘s helicopters and power armour are the direct descendants of the drop ships and cargo lifters from his earlier film, Aliens, which in turn owe their parentage to the helicopter gunships and weaponry of the Vietnam war. In fact, Avatar is like Aliens writ large, only this time, the aliens are the goodies, and it’s the humans, with their strip-mining and colonisation, who are the real menace.

Somehow, Cameron has pulled off the trick of making blue CGI humans into sympathetic characters, despite their New Age mysticism, and after a while, you forget you are watching CGI puppets and become involved in their performances. But beyond all this, Avatar‘s legacy may have nothing to do with its gorgeous scenery or environmental/anti-war agenda. Instead, it may be remembered as the film that saved cinema, and science fiction cinema in particular. In an age of declining attendance, it may be the first film in a long time that really does need to be seen on a big screen in order to be fully appreciated. As such, it may create an appetite for films which give the viewer something they’ve never seen before, take the audience someplace exciting and new: someplace they just can’t get to on their TV at home.

In printed science fiction, we call it “sensawunda” – a feeling of encountering something new and strange and thrilling. If cinema can harness that and concentrate on giving its audience something it can’t get anywhere else, it could be onto a winner. Avatar has exposed the wonder of an alien world to a huge swathe of people who wouldn’t normally consider themselves sci-fi fans. If the big studios can take this and carve a niche for “experiential” 3D movies, maybe they can hold on for a few more years, and keep cinemas going until the technology becomes cheaply available in the front rooms of the general public.

As a science fiction writer, the challenge now is to attract Avatar‘s audience into that other immersive medium – the world of printed science fiction.

Tags: Avatar • Cameron • Cinema • James Cameron • movies • Reviews