A little while ago my nine-year-old son asked me if I had a favourite actor. Around 10 minutes later, just as I was getting onto the Method schools of the 1950s and noticing his transparent regret at having asked in the first place, I turned the question around. Who was his? He thought for a second or two then said: “Tom Cruise and Jackie Chan. Because even though they’re pretending to be someone else, they’re also doing it for real.”

Allow me one more. After I took my son to see the original Avatar during its September re-release, I asked him how it compared to: Top Gun: Maverick, his (and my) favourite film of the year. “Not quite as good,” was the verdict. “The 3D glasses made me feel like I was watching it on my own. But in Top Gun, we were all together.”

I mention these exchanges not to show that my job can be done by a primary schooler (and for the purposes of this week’s newsletter, it essentially just has been). It’s because I found it incredible, and reassuring, that a child of the CGI and streaming eras – born five years into the Marvel supremacy, and fully accustomed to digital splurge – still sees the value in cinema as both a physical art and a collective experience.

He probably won’t be quite old enough for Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer next summer, but it sounds as though there’s one scene in it he’d greatly appreciate. It came to light this week, in an interview in Total Film, that during production Nolan restaged the famous Trinity atomic test – which is to say in some way or another, in front of his beloved IMAX cameras, he recreated a nuclear explosion. 

When it was announced that Nolan’s next feature was about the head of the secret weapons laboratory at the Manhattan Project, many joked that this director known for his love of full-scale practical effects was surely already filling out the workplace risk assessment forms required to detonate an A-bomb on set. Well, the paperwork was evidently signed off. 

“I think recreating the Trinity test without the use of computer graphics was a huge challenge to take on,” he told the magazine, explaining that he had consulted at length with his visual effects supervisor Andrew Jackson, of Mad Max: Fury Road, Dunkirk and Tenet, to work out how the scene could be achieved through purely practical means. The actual Trinity test, carried out on July 16 1945 – almost 78 years to the day before Oppenheimer’s planned release – unleashed the explosive energy of 25 kilotons of TNT, and generated a mushroom cloud that rose to a height of 7.5 miles. So it’s probably not too premature to suggest this is probably going to top The Dark Knight’s truck flip.

It was comforting to read about Nolan blowing enormous holes in the desert while writing this week about Avatar: The Way of Water, a film sorely in need of an atom bomb to gee things up. By all accounts, the shoot for James Cameron’s long-gestating blockbuster sequel was an arduous business: four months of performance capture, much of which took place in underwater tanks, plus a further three months of live-action work in New Zealand. 

But the finished product is so comprehensively drenched in CGI that the real world is all but undetectable in it. It’s thoroughly depressing, with none of the enticing interplay between competing realities – the clunky flesh-and-blood domain of the Earthlings versus the silken digitally generated realm of the Na’vi – that gave the original Avatar its conceptual kick. Instead, as I wrote in my review of The Way of Water, I can’t recall ever having seen a film with less of a connection to recognisable human experience: the thing makes Transformers look like I, Daniel Blake.

A few months after The Way of Water’s forerunner was released in 2009, it became apparent that fans were returning time and again to immerse themselves in its glittering blue-green environs. The escape it provided from the gloomy, recession-stricken present was one of Avatar’s key selling points, and the box-office predictions for the sequel suggest many believe that Covid put us all in much the same mood. Well, perhaps. But isn’t it also possible that having spent the last two years gathering virtually – in video calls, on social media, and so on – what we’re craving now is an intense connection with reality, rather than yet another metaverse retreat?

Cameron and Nolan are beating two very different paths towards the future of cinema here: one terrifyingly expensive, fully encased in CGI and franchise world-building, and another nimbler, more original and comparatively cheaper, where the old business of light hitting sensors 24 times per second still counts. Ideally, there would be space for Hollywood to follow both, but personally – and at least one member of our youngest generation agrees – I know, right now, which one holds more appeal. To rehash Jean Baudrillard (you know, from The Matrix), when everything is a special effect, suddenly nothing is.