The menu that day offered strange-but-recognizable delicacies: “steamed pods” (beef bao buns), “teylu” (hot dogs wrapped in dough) and “ber’ri” (blueberry cream-cheese mousse). I ordered the crispy fried tofu bowl, which arrived topped with bright orange, fruit-flavored boba. Pandoran appeared to be a fusion cuisine: local ingredients mixed with the traditional lunch fare of Midtown. After lunch, I went outside for a drink at Pongu Pongu. On tap was a Pandoran craft beer called Mo’ara High Country Ale. I ordered the Night Blossom, a nonalcoholic slushie, presumably conceived as Pandora’s answer to Butterbeer at the Wizarding World of “Harry Potter” — a soft drink so delicious and successful it sold one million units in six months, substantially offsetting the cost of the park. Night Blossom tasted the way your teeth feel after eating a Jolly Rancher. Suffice to say, it would not be paying for Pandora. As I took three sips and threw it in the trash, I struggled to picture a Na’vi onscreen sucking one down under the Tree of Souls.
After lunch, I downloaded an app and scheduled reservations for both rides. Conventional wisdom about Avatar’s cultural irrelevance notwithstanding, the park was swamped, and the first available time slot was hours away. I wandered into Windtraders gift shop, curious to see which elements from the preindustrial world of “Avatar” might lend themselves to merchandising. In one corner, I found T-shirts that said “Pandora” in the type style of a national park, riffing on the tourists-playing-tourists conceit. In another corner hung a wall of light-up “woodsprites,” the omniscient seeds from the Tree of Souls, which play a pivotal role in the film. Bioluminescence — in the form of light-up toys, black-light Christmas ornaments and glow-in-the-dark sweatshirts — was a key feature of “Avatar” merch. This choice made sense, in the way that light evokes the 3-D spectacle that real dimensionality cannot. Still, it was hardly a light saber.
Leaving the gift shop, I strolled back through the mountains, dreading the hours I still had to kill until my scheduled ride reservations. I walked around in desperate search of a Na’vi. I studied a replica of the mech suit worn by the movie’s forgettable villain. Eventually, I just got in line. Waiting, by that point, seemed more entertaining than spending the rest of my evening in the park. As it turns out, a 3-D simulacrum of a 3-D movie kind of cancels itself out. Divorced from the dazzle of visual effects, I could see the aesthetic universe of “Avatar” for what it was: a glorified World Market sale section. The Na’vi alone were just a tiki-bar mishmash of traits that white people perceive as foreign: dreadlocks, beadwork, body mods, loincloths, feathers, cowrie shells. Compared with that of Hogwarts or Tatooine, the logic of their world seemed to lack imagination: What were the odds that, galaxies away, a society not only had two genders, but those genders were “male” and “female” — and the females were stacked?
Six weeks later, on Sept. 23, Disney rereleased “Avatar” into theaters, in an ostensible effort to revive the intellectual property and prime the viewing public for “The Way of Water.” I went to see it with a group of 20 friends. In two rows of recliners, as the previews played, we took turns leaning over and asking, “Are we supposed to wear the 3-D glasses for this part?” The action did not leap from the screen so much as stumble forward in a seasick kind of way. I worried that I would not make it three hours, but from the first moment Jake Sully appeared, my skepticism slipped away, replaced with sudden, overwhelming understanding of why people once lost their minds for “Avatar.”
Here is probably a good place to disclose that when I first started working on this article, I had never seen “Avatar.” The film came out my senior year of high school, when I was still committed to the thought that nothing popular could ever be good. (I have spent my life revising and re-revising this position.) My plan was to see it for the first time in 3-D, as it was intended to be seen, but all my attempts to make this happen led nowhere. I ended up watching “Avatar” for the first time on a laptop screen in my hotel room in Orlando. Everything I had heard seemed accurate — the plot was rote; the dialogue, forgettable. The experience was so unremarkable it left me questioning my own humanity: Was the movie’s success a global mass delusion or was I lacking in some fundamental trait that would let me even understand why it was loved?
Watching in 3-D was a different experience. As Jake and Neytiri darted through the forest, the special effects brought me into their world. The action did not just come forward as one frame, but instead wove me into the movement onscreen, the tendrils of plants and falling drops of water each reaching out from a different point in space. The Na’vi bodies appeared to have mass. It was hard to discern what was real or C.G.I., which led me to wonder, “Why even distinguish?” This, in turn, produced a twisted surge of delight at the prospect of man’s becoming God.
The history of recorded images might be described as an incremental quest to master the building blocks of consciousness — first sight, then motion, then sound, then color. With “Avatar,” Cameron revealed that human ingenuity could marshal even more: physics, light, dimensionality; the ineffable sense of an object being real; the life force that makes a thing feel alive. As Sully soared through the floating mountain range, I thought of those apocryphal Victorians, ducking as a train appeared to rush out from the screen. I thought of all the geegaws and novelties and illusions of the latter part of the last millennium: the magic lantern show, electric lights, the Ferris wheel, color television and Pong. I didn’t know that I could still be dazzled.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nytimes.com
