Avatar worth the cost? - $300 million isn’t a sign of quality

James Cameron began production on Avatar in the mid-nineties. He worked on an 80-page treatment that would later spawn the box office hit. Over a decade and $300 million later, advertisements are boasting that it’s the “number one film in the world,” but why has it earned that title?

No matter how impressive the visuals, you cannot argue that the storyline is not - it is highly one-dimensional and hugely predictable. Cameron has spent the last ten years essentially producing Dances With Wolves in space.

You could argue that the revenue figures speak for themselves, but when you look at the likes of a director such as Clint Eastwood, Cameron’s efforts seem in vain. In the last ten years, Eastwood has directed films such as Invictus, Gran Torino and Changeling. He has directed and starred in Mystic River and Million Dollar Baby. All these films have either been given Academy awards or nominations. And this is only a portion of his recent work. What really puts Cameron to shame is the combined budget for these masterpieces is in the region of $224 million - less than the budget of Avatar.

I can understand Cameron’s passion for his sci-fi brainchild but as he grappled with the technology needed to make it, Eastwood and others were making phenomenal pictures the old-fashioned way.

Which really makes you begin to wonder why Cameron even pursued this project in the first place. How many other films, very possibly of high quality, have we lost out on because of the time he spent to make this one?