Commentary: The Difficulty Of Storytelling In The Streaming Era
by Frank Martin
There’s no denying how much cinema has changed since its inception. Between visual effects, camera techniques, and all the other ways technology has evolved, the films today are a completely different animal than the movies that were made at the birth of the industry. So much time is spent analyzing techniques, but what’s not as often taken into account is how the writing process factors into the different ways movies can be experienced. The main thing about creating during the early days of cinema was that films could only be watched in theaters, so filmmakers knew exactly how audiences would be experiencing their work. This is certainly not the case today when films specifically made for the theater, such as Avatar: Fire and Ash, can be watched any number of ways.
The film continues the story of the Na’vi, an alien race living on a moon called Pandora. Humans arrive to establish a colony and mine the world’s precious resources. This destroys the unique nature of Pandora, which can establish a neural network between flora, fauna, and the moon itself. What allows humans to be a part of the Na’vi’s culture: they can transfer their consciousness into a grown Na’vi body that can connect to the network.
Starring Sam Worthington and Zoe Saldana, what makes the Avatar franchise so unique is its groundbreaking visual effects that fully utilize state-of-the-art technology to create a very realistic 3D experience. James Cameron developed the setting specifically for the big screen, which allows 3D technology. However, he also had no choice but to reformat the film for a standard viewing experience that comes in the streaming era. Someone could be experiencing the story on a screen as small as a smartphone in short chunks during their commute. This is miles apart from what filmmakers could expect in the beginning, when movies had to be watched all at once in a theater. It must have been nice for filmmakers to have that expectation and constant viewing experience compared to now, when filmmakers truly have no control over how their art is experienced.
Avatar: Fire and Ash is now in theaters.
