What if 'Avatar' Had Flopped

A little more than a month ago, some critics thought “Avatar” was going to bomb—quite a lot of them, in fact. I even felt a little sorry for James Cameron, despite his tens of millions of dollars in personal wealth, and despite the fact that his previous films have become cultural icons, if not cinematic ones. Now that the industry’s pessimism has been mostly forgotten, I’d like to take a moment to imagine a different cultural landscape—one in which “Avatar” flopped, and the branch of the media that has cropped up to comment upon, fawn over, and criticize Hollywood had to find something else to discuss between the end of December and the beginning of Oscar season. Here is a quick recap of all the films and film news you could have watched, discussed, and blogged about this month were it not for a certain attention-hogging space opera.

1. “The Last Station” and “Fish Tank”: Awards season wouldn’t be awards season without a few middlebrow, middle-quality art-house pieces that appear and then subsequently vanish from the Kendall Square Cinema over a few weeks in January. A month typically considered a dumping ground for poor movies, foreign and independent films can sometimes be fairly successful when pitted against the otherwise sparse landscape of January cinema. This year, however, hype over “Avatar” has blinded many to alternative movie-going options, which may or may not be a good thing.

For instance, the publicity surrounding “The Last Station,” a film about Leo Tolstoy’s final days and his relationship with his wife Sofya (played by Helen Mirren) strongly evokes that of “The Queen,” the 2006 drama that also stars Mirren and also focuses on a short period in the life of an aging historical figure. I’m betting “The Last Station” will have a similar cinematic life trajectory as “The Queen,” which was nominated for a slew of Academy Awards and is now unfortunately remembered by virtually no one.

“Fish Tank,” written and directed by Andrea Arnold, also fits neatly into a popular indie template—the raw, documentary-like drama that usually features a supremely unfortunate lead character and the hovering threat of some vague social ailment. Arnold’s iteration follows fifteen-year-old Mia, a lonely British girl who develops a close relationship with her stepfather, who then sexually abuses her. Although this genre has often produced forgettable films, the accolades “Fish Tank” has received for its acting and writing suggest that it might be worth checking out before it fades into independent cinema obscurity.

2. The Third Dimension: Critics have shown “Avatar” remarkable lenience because of the perception that it will kickstart the 3-D segment of the film market, which up until now has been remained marginal, despite being populated by lucrative-but-questionable gems such as “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” and “My Bloody Valentine 3-D.” It’s true that Cameron managed to force the design and adoption of certain technologies a few years before they might otherwise have been picked up. However, three-dimensional films are currently the industry’s best hope to recover revenues lost to piracy, and the 3-D successes of “Coraline” and “Up” ensured that 2009 would still have been considered a great year for the technology. Regardless of the success of “Avatar,” 3-D would still be relevant, and the accumulation of minor successes for the medium would have resulted in the same advances in a few years that “Avatar” has facilitated now.

3. Éric Rohmer and Erich W. Segal’59: While critics and bloggers were busy debating the possible racist connotations of “Avatar” verses its technological implications, the death of some influential film figures went relatively unnoticed. One of the seminal directors of the French New Wave, Éric Rohmer, passed away on January 11, leaving behind a large body of films, many of which were organized in series around common problems of morality and relationships. If you share the conviction of Gene Hackman’s character in “Night Moves” that a Rohmer film is “kind of like watching paint dry,” you might do better to pay your respects to Segal, who died on January 17. During his career he taught at Harvard as well as Oxford, Princeton, and Yale; however, his scholarly work on classics and the history of comedy was overshadowed in the popular consciousness by his screenplay for the popular 1970 film about a dramatic Harvard romance, “Love Story.”

4. “The White Ribbon:” Just kidding. With or without “Avatar,” no one really would really care about Michael Haneke’s allegorical drama, although it might well be the best film of the year. Another one to watch for in February is “A Prophet,” Haneke’s equally dreary, equally subtitled competition for critically-anointed, unseen European film of the year.

—Columnist Abigail B. Lind can be reached at alind@fas.harvard.edu