Prospect recommends: Avatar

Most of the innovators in cinema, the people who do fresh things with the medium, are artists like Lars von Trier, Claire Denis or Terence Davies. But sometimes it’s the movie world’s big pharma, not its avant garde, that comes up with new ideas. And you don’t get much bigger film-pharma than Titanic director James Cameron, Rupert Murdoch’s Fox studio, and George Lucas’s Industrial Light & Magic effects company. On 17th December, they release their state-of-the-medium bid to change the look of cinema.

I haven’t seen Avatar, and I try to ignore the Hollywood studio loudspeaker but, in 1991, Canadian Cameron’s combination of hubris, techie and visual thinking produced Terminator 2’s liquid metal effect, which freed big budget 90s cinema from realism. High-end Hollywood is promising that Avatar’s digital 3D effects will change cinema the way the coming of sound did in 1928. Nonsense. But we’re likely to see innovation nevertheless.

Also, the idea of the avatar—the second self, the proxy existence—is the digital age’s biggest gift to dramaturgy. The word is Sanskrit, but William Gibson started using the concept of the digital self in the 1980s and, since then, it has spread through the culture. Will Cameron’s film think inventively about digital reincarnation? I’ll be in the front row to find out.

Avatar is on general release from 17th December