JAMES CAMERON: PIRANHA II: THE SPAWNING (1981) / AVATAR (2009)
I can’t even…..there just aren’t…..I mean…….This is just too good. That James Cameron – director of what is universally accepted as the most technologically ambitious film ever made – should have begun his career with not just a pretty dire film, but a sequel to a pretty dire film, feels almost just too good to be true. I’ll try and push past the most obvious temptation to make some kind of joke about weird things that fly and questionable acting basically providing the blueprint for both films, but I am willing to bet that comparing Piranha II’s wonderful 80s amateurishness to the stupefying spectacle that was Avatar is far more fun than anyone had actually making either of those films.
So gorgeous is the forest of Avatar’s Pandora that we almost envy the characters who live there, whereas Piranha II’s grainy appearance and subdued colours manage to make even the Caribbean look faintly unappealing. The performance captured Na’vi in Avatar are lithe, smooth and staggeringly well executed. The piranhas – genetically engineered to be able to fly – look like Gremlins on Red Bull.
But if Piranha II and Avatar could never be paired together on the basis of what is right with them, Cameron has somehow managed to get them to unite on the basis of what is wrong with them. Because despite the 28 year age gap, a lot of what is wrong with Avatar is also what was wrong with Piranha II. We’ve already referenced the non too fluid acting. There is also a faint degree of the ridiculous in both films, that neither seems to want to admit to (‘unobtanium’, Cameron? Really? Unforgivablium).
Essentially, the problems in both movies seem to come down to an issue with categorization – that is, neither film seems quite sure what it is aiming at. In Piranha II, the combination of bad visuals, terrible acting and a dull plot made it difficult to tell whether some of it was meant to be serious, or whether it actually knew it was being funny. It was too uneventful and obvious to be properly frightening, and yet too serious to be a comedy horror. Overall, the whole thing seems to have just generally suffered a rather rigorous visit from the fun police. Even the dog in this household lost interest in the screen while Piranha II was on– and this is an animal that once knocked himself out chasing a red dot on a wall.
As for Avatar, was it pitched as a fantasy? An environmental comment? A science fiction? Without strong leads or a strong script, for a lot of people the simple fact of the complex visuals just wasn’t enough to allow it to be called a great film.
Despite the odd notable outing along the way, such as Aliens and The Abyss, the details of quite how Cameron managed to make this journey from director of one of the least viewed sequels ever to the film that has lined up its third and fourth sequels before the second has even finished shooting will quite possibly always remain one of cinema’s greatest mysteries. But credit where it’s due – if anyone deserves to be congratulated for learning on the job, it’s James Cameron. And say what we may about Avatar’s weaknesses, when the next film arrives it will be exciting to see the spectacle again. In honour of how far Cameron has come, and of the dodgy little critters that made it all possible, fingers crossed the piranhas get a cameo.