Cast your mind back to 2009: Barack Obama was inaugurated as the 44th President of the United States in January, Kesha’s Tik Tok topped the charts most of the year, Chrysler went bankrupt in May, the King Of Pop, Michael Jackson, passed away in June. And a little, independent film (ha ha) called ‘Avatar’ hit cinemas on December 18, changing the cinema landscape, namely the modern blockbuster, forever.
The epic adventure famously inspired by Pocahontas is returning to theatres this year to give audiences a nostalgia hit; letting them revisit a film, now in glorious 4k and with impeccable high-dynamic range, that was an absolute world-beater when it arrived in a far different entertainment atmosphere than now (it was pre-Marvel Cinematic Universe, for goodness sake).
But it also serves as an opportunity to introduce people who have never seen it before to the world of the Na’vi – a world both beautiful and terrifying - that stretched the limits of computer generation imagery, simulation, and motion capture technology.
And it’s perfectly timed to get people ready for the sequel, Avatar: The Way of Water, before it hits theatres this December.
Looking at Avatar from afar – having been through (and still going through) global warming, a worldwide pandemic, the potential cusp of World War III - it’s hard to understand, or even remember, the pandemonium it caused.
I saw Avatar three times in cinemas – and I wasn’t the only one. Still to this day, it’s the highest grossing film of all time (thanks to a re-release in China it reclaimed the top spot). It was an absolute phenomenon in every sense of the word, in part thanks to three factors: its story is simple, its visuals were revolutionary, and it encapsulated the essence of cinema; passion, spectacle, and heart.
To see Avatar on the big screen was extraordinary – and now we can do it all over again.
Revisit Avatar, or experience it for the first time, at the Bowen Summergarden Cinema on September 30.
Review by Declan Durrant.
