What writers can learn from Avatar

I saw Avatar over the week­end, and loved it. I’m nat­u­rally inclined to like James Cameron movies. I think he’s one of the best sto­ry­tellers work­ing today. Not the most inno­v­a­tive writer, but the best sto­ry­teller. It’s an impor­tant distinction.

A lot of talk around this movie cen­ters around the spe­cial effects, espe­cially in 3D. Yes, they’re amaz­ing. Yes, the 3D is used sub­tly, almost never throw­ing things “at” the audi­ence, and pro­vides an addi­tional solid­ity to the CGI that you’ve never seen before. You feel like like you’re there, on the moon Pan­dora with the char­ac­ters. And as Chuck Wendig points out, the 3D and CGI com­pen­sate for each other’s weak­nesses, mak­ing every­thing seem just, well, real.

But that’s not what I’m here to talk about today.

A lot of the reviews and even snide com­ments on Twit­ter about the film men­tion is that the story isn’t any­thing new. They mis­un­der­stand some­thing fun­da­men­tal about sto­ry­telling and assume that this means Cameron is just “mail­ing it in,” using new visual effects to dress up a tired story that we’ve all seen before.

They don’t under­stand that the very best sto­ries, by def­i­n­i­tion, are sto­ries we’ve all seen before. That the very rea­son why cer­tain sto­ries have been told over and over and over for thou­sands of years is that they work. They res­onate with us, down to an uncon­scious level. Was the plot of Avatar pre­dictable? Sure. It’s basi­cally “Dances With Smurfs.” But think for a sec­ond. How many times have you seen a story about a bro­ken sol­dier who finds first com­pan­ion­ship, then pur­pose, in the com­pany of his enemy? Dances With Wolves? Poc­a­hon­tas? Enemy Mine? How far back can you go?

If you really think about it, thou­sands of years. This story is one of the time­less tales you’ve heard before and will hear again. It comes from myth. Just like “com­ing of age”, or “the hero’s jour­ney” or “pride goeth before a fall”, or any of the other fun­da­men­tal struc­tures hard­wired into our pri­mate brains. The story of Avatar was told around cook­ing fires in cen­tral Europe 10,000 years ago. The details change, but the story is eternal.

And that’s why the movie works. Because while the CGi gives you a sense of awe and won­der, and helps in the sus­pen­sion of dis­be­lief, it’s the story, and the char­ac­ters of Jake, Neytiri, Gail and the rest that make you care. I was welling up sev­eral times dur­ing the film, a dif­fi­cult thing when wear­ing essen­tially two pairs of Ray-​Bans, and it wasn’t because of the CGI. It’s because I was caught up in the story, totally engaged and root­ing for the characters.

Don’t mis­take the sim­ple for the infe­rior. All too often the best sto­ries are those we know by heart.