The assorted voting members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences must be feeling pretty remorseful at the moment. Thanks to their collective decision that The Hurt Locker is better than Avatar, James Cameron has chosen to take his revenge by unleashing hell on the world.
That's assuming that your definition of hell involves the theatrical release of an extended version of Avatar later this year, obviously. And if it doesn't, it should. I can understand Cameron's decision to give Titanic a 3D makeover – since I was a teenager I've longed to see a man's head bounce off the propeller of a sinking ocean-liner in all three glorious dimensions – but not Avatar. There are a million reasons why James Cameron should rethink his decision to drag Avatar out for another go around the cinemas; here are just some of them.
1) It looks like it's motivated by the wrong reasons. Cameron's official rationale for the Avatar re-release is that "It's kind of gotten stomped out [of cinemas since the release] of Alice in Wonderland" - a sign that James Cameron is either determined to keep wringing pennies out of the film until everybody becomes completely sick of it, or that he's uncomfortable with the notion of other people making popular films. Either way, it seems a little distasteful.
2) Nobody knew what film James Cameron would direct after Avatar. There was talk that it'd be a Battle Angel Atila adaptation, or maybe Cameron's pet Hiroshima project – but, no, it's going to be Avatar 2. And that won't be released until James Cameron has written his Avatar novel. And maybe given the go-ahead to a Saturday morning Avatar cartoon. And an Avatar Earth Day special. In short, it looks like we're already going to be lumbered with Avatar until every creature from every single moon of Polyphemus has been given its own three-act narrative, so the last thing anybody needs is to see the first one again.
3) It doesn't need to be extended. Really, it doesn't. Sitting through the original version of Avatar was gruelling enough – by the time the tree fell down I was too busy concentrating on how uncomfortable the 3D glasses were to realise that I'd long since lost all feeling in my legs - so an extended version promises to be torture. And surely James Cameron got all of his messages across the first time round. It's hard to see how he could make them any more thumpingly unsubtle, anyway – unless this new version features a scene in which a man wearing a placard reading "Government" attacks a box of eggs labelled "The ecosystem" with a hammer, obviously. And, yes, we still haven't seen the fabled sex scene yet. But would you really want to risk DVT just so that you can watch a couple of blue Thundercats mash their hair-tendrils into each other two-thirds of the way through an overwrought environmental allegory? Hopefully not.
4) Perhaps more than anything, James Cameron should be wary of re-releasing Avatar so close to next year's Oscars. What if Ben Stiller decides to smear himself in blue paint and goon around like a sad clown for the second year running? Witnessing a grim spectacle like that once was bad enough; twice would be little short of a tragedy.
