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After Titanic, Cameron got financial carte blanche to spend a bundle on another no-star epic. (The film's distributor, 20th Century Fox, claims that the budget for Avatar was $237 million, less than that of Spider-Man 3 or the last Harry Potter movie.) This time, instead of re-creating a cruise ship, Cameron created a whole new world, using technologies he waited nearly a decade to see come to fruition. The man who built the Titanic became the God of the Old Testament - or at least J.R.R. Tolkien - summoning previously unseen lands from his majestic imagination...
Avatar's mantra is "I see you," and its final image is of someone's eyes snapping open. Journeying to the year 2154, moviegoers everywhere have embraced the film - surely the most vivid and persuasive creation of a fantasy world ever seen in moving pictures - as a total sensory, sensuous, sensual experience. The planet Pandora is a wonder world of flora and fauna: a rainforest (where it rarely rains) of gigantic trees and phosphorescent plants, of flying steeds, panther dogs and hammerhead dinosaurs. Audiences are just as beguiled by Pandora's humanish tribe, the Na'vi - the lean...
...plausible and inviting. Like Titanic, this is a love story enveloped by catastrophe. That's why Hollywood's anxiety about the movie's supposedly limited appeal to both sexes was needless. Indeed, Avatar's closest kin among current hits may be The Blind Side, the female-skewing sports film. Both tell stories of strong women who find rootless young men and give them a purpose around which they can build their lives...
...three decades since Gibson first cruised the postapocalyptic outback as Mad Max, he's forged a wayward career as one of Hollywood's top moneymakers. He fronted a couple of burly action-film franchises (three splendid Mad Max movies; four shoddy, popular Lethal Weapons). Ten of his films earned more than $100 million from 1989 to 2002, back when that was real money. His Scots epic Braveheart won him Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director. That was just Gibson's second film as director; his third, The Passion of the Christ, in 2004, was the all-time top-grossing...
Passion also made Gibson something of a pariah in Hollywood for what was perceived as the film's blame-the-Jews sentiment. Gibson denied the charge. Two years later, he was stopped for drunk driving; his arrest report states that "Gibson yelled out, 'The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world.' Gibson then asked, 'Are you a Jew?'" The officer was Jewish...