Creating the illusion of depth

In his classic expose of Hollywood process, legendary screenwriter William Goldman famously declared that, when it comes to the movie industry, "Nobody knows anything." Although he's probably right about most film-makers, he should probably add a caveat that says "with the exception of James Cameron."

He may not be the easiest guy to work for - Pol Pot might have been more likely to send his assistant a Hallmark card on Secretary's Day - but time and time again, he's proved that he knows better than everyone else.

People scoffed when he decided to sink over $200 million into a three-hour period film about a stricken ship, especially since everybody already knew the ending. But in the end, he was crowned 'King of the World' on his way to a record Oscar haul, not to mention breaking box office records en route.

Still, those kinds of fortuitous accidents only happen once in a lifetime. Or so we thought. Thirteen years later, he emerged from the technological wilderness with a new film. This one was about giant blue cat people. And it was in 3D, a format which hadn't really seen the light of day since Jason Voorhees first fished a hockey mask out of someone's sports kit.

How we laughed, until he went and beat his own box office record, pulling in just short of $3 billion worldwide. In the process, he gave 3D a much-needed shot of credibility. No longer the exclusive reserve of films that show cats leaping out of cupboards, 3D was suddenly an immersive way of enhancing the movie-going experience - adding richness and depth to the narrative, rather than just dangling an eyeball in the viewer's lap.

Take a look at your local multiplex and see how many films are following in Big Jim's considerable wake - it wasn't hyperbole when Cameron claimed to have seen the future of movies through his polarised lenses.

Having single-handedly transformed our movie-going experience, Cameron rightly considers himself the authority on what 3D should and shouldn't be used for. So when Vanity Fair asked him for his opinion on the state of post-Avatar 3D movies, he spoke in characteristically blunt terms.

He told the glossy magazine "I tend almost never to throw other films under the bus, but Piranha 3D is exactly an example of what we should not be doing in 3D. Because it just cheapens the medium and reminds you of the bad 3D horror films from the '70s and '80s, like Friday The 13th 3D. When movies got to the bottom of the barrel of their creativity... they did a 3-D version to get the last few drops of blood out of the turnip."

Of course, the true irony here is that Cameron's own career began with the Piranha franchise, having directed the god-awful sequel 'The Spawning'. At the time, producers didn't recognise his under-budgeted genius, and fired him from the low-rent cash-in. As a result, Cameron has expunged Piranha from his own CV, in much the same way that my own resume makes no mention of the fact that I spent 12 months applying aerosol garlic butter to the stuffed crusts in Watford's branch of Pizza Hut.

Piranha 3D's producer Neil Canton was understandably disgusted by Cameron's holier-than-thou attitude, and issued a press release through Dimension Films taking the Oscar-winner to task for his 'mean-spirited' arrogance. Canton goes to great lengths (eight paragraphs in fact) to defend his opus, inferring that the world is a better place for having a five-minute naked underwater ballet performed by Kelly Brook and porn star Riley Steele. And, to be honest, it would be churlish to disagree.

Unfortunately, Canton's rebuttal misses the point of Cameron's original critique - he's not denigrating the film itself, merely its tacky deployment of 3D gimmickry to get bums on (and leaping out of) seats. As a result, his haughty defensiveness around the "originality and the vision of the filmmaker" neglects to address the real contradiction at the heart of Cameron's viewpoint.

Whether you're an auteur or a schlock-merchant, 3D technology is just another widget in the toolbox. Another way of drawing in an audience with the promise of an augmented experience. You can use it to create exotic, other-worldy foliage, or treat your audience to a severed cock floating in mid-air. Ultimately, it's an opportunity to drive up ticket prices and increase your chances of turning a profit. Remember, it's commerce, not art, that really counts.

Cameron's blue period

Well, James Cameron finally delivered his gigantic blue baby, and it looks as though he'll get to keep the roof over his head. With a budget of around $300 million, everyone knew that Avatar was a big gamble - Cameron has even deferred his own profit participation options until the investors have recouped their contributions. But with the news that Avatar has claimed its second consecutive week as box office champion, with only a 2.6% drop (compared with the industry average of 40-50%), it's clear that Cameron knows what his fans want.

If you haven't seen it already I do recommend you seek out the biggest screen you can find and immerse yourself in a truly incredible 3D experience. The world of Pandora springs to vivid life, even though at times there's so much neon on display you'd think the characters were stuck inside an Essex nightclub.

As for the story (which I've dubbed Last of the Bluehicans since Dances With Smurfs was already taken), well, it does what all good science fiction should do, taking contemporary issues and exploring them in a fantastical way. More specifically Avatar addresses the conflict between technologically advanced invaders and primitive indigenous people.

Rather predictably, not everyone's so happy with Cameron's kick-ass comeback. Over on Big Hollywood, the right-wing movie blog for the mentally malnourished, critics are lining up to condemn Big Jim's opus for "being a "big, dull, America-Hating, PC Revenge Fantasy". You see, they don't like the idea of the military being portrayed as aggressors (an argument so ironic it makes my head hurt). Likewise, they think it's propaganda to question the ethics of genocidal imperialism.

And don't even get them started on the environmental concerns, as conservative hate-bucket Ann Coulter once said: "God gave us the earth. We have dominion over the plants, the animals, the trees. God said, 'Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It's yours.'"

Cameron has never denied the fact that Avatar is a parable, claiming "what this film ultimately does is hold a mirror to our own blighted history, where we have a culturally advanced civilization supplanting more “primitive” civilizations... And this country we’re in now was taken from its indigenous owners. And it’s kind of owning up to our own human history."

That's not how they see it over at Big Hollywood though. Taking it in turns to miss more points than a blind tennis player, these professional movie critics make inane comments like "Why couldn’t Cameron have left his agenda at home and crafted a non-political story in which Americans could be heroes..." I guess Carl Kozlowski missed the point that it's an injured US marine who heroically leads the Na'vi into battle. Or maybe he just didn't like the idea that the lead was played by an Australian.

Ultimately though, it's fascinating that all of these rhetoric-spouting imbeciles see the film as anti-American. They're seeing all the worst elements of human nature - greed, violence, aggression - and thinking "Yep, that represents me." More worringly, they're proud of the fact. But then, it's clear that Cameron was never going to win over someone who believes "Cameron’s... tribe is boringly perfect and insufferably noble … I wanted to wipe them out."

The funny thing is, I don't remember the same arguments erupting 26 years ago when another visionary science fiction film-maker told a similar story. Even though die-hard Star Wars fans hated the Ewoks, no-one looked at Return of the Jedi and said "Why does everyone insist on seeing the Empire as the bad guys?" I guess that's progress for you.

Seeing is believing

Spare a thought for one-time global monarch James Cameron, who's probably nursing a sore head this weekend. Having stayed out of the limelight for the last 12 years, since Titanic swept the boards at the Oscars, he's gearing up to reveal his long-awaited follow-up to the big boat movie, and expectations for Avatar couldn't be higher.

As part of the pre-release campaign, he and Twentieth Century Fox decided to declare August 21 'Avatar Day'. Building on the buzz from this year's Comic-Con, where preview footage was revealed to a breathlessly salivating press, the plan was to share an advanced preview with Joe Public to create advocacy and drive word-of-mouth.

So the publicity campaign went into overdrive, a two-minute teaser was launched and the public was invited to attend an exclusive presentation of 15 minutes of the movie that promises to redefine the very concept of film-making (Cameron is no stranger to hyperbole). Pre-fans (what else can you call someone who's a supporter of something that doesn't yet exist?) simply had to register with the website for free tickets so that they could attend one of these special screenings.

It's a great idea in theory, giving audiences a chance to see just what James Cameron's been talking about with a high-def, 3D presentation of his photo-real CGI characters and their other-worldly environments, rather than squinting at a heavily pixelated and compressed YouTube snippet.

Unfortunately, the concept seems to have fallen at the first hurdle. In the US, the ticket allocation server crashed due to 'over-subscription', with some conspiracy theorists even suggesting that Fox did this deliberately to sustain the perception of massive interest. But irrespective of any ticketing issues, the bigger problem seems to be that audience numbers were decidedly underwhelming. The question many bloggers are asking this weekend - if Cameron can't sell out a free screening, what hope does the movie have of recouping its rumoured $200 million budget?

Those who did attend the 3-D Imax screenings have responded with a shrug of their collective shoulders - sure the film looks great, but it won't change your life. The bigger problem seems to be the fact that, by selecting six or seven unconnected scenes to screen in their entirety, these exclusive previews felt more like a DVD presentation of deleted footage. Audiences that were supposed to be spending the weekend raving to their friends about Cameron's blue period are instead attempting to fill in the gaps between the out-of-context footage, to try and guess what the hell is going on.

The real mistake made by Fox was its attempt to 'manufacture buzz'. The kind of audience advocacy they were looking for can't be willed into life through a heavy-handed marketing campaign. It has to find its own way, starting small and growing virally. Fox tried to go too big too soon, in the process alienating the hard-core fanatics and confusing the masses. Fox needs to stop trying so hard and should just trust in its A-list director.

When Titanic originally opened in 1997, it did so with an unspectacular $28 million (considered a major flop). But it went on to find its audience thanks to uncontrived word-of-mouth recommendation, and spent a record-breaking 15 weeks in the top spot. If the studio believes in the film, it just needs to be patient - the film will find ultimately find the audience it deserves. After all, given that Avatar has been 14 years in the making, what's a few more months? In the meantime, here's the trailer if you haven't already seen it.