*** ½
By Bob Clark
Late in Richard Linklater’s 1990 indie masterpiece Slacker, a couple of laid-back stoners are overheard sharing a conversation concerning the socio-political ramifications of five-decades strong Smurf franchise, with one theory bandied about being that the iconic five-apples high characters, sprung from the mind of Belgian cartoonist Peyo, were intended to help children all over the world prepare for the coming of Krishna, by growing accustomed to the sight of blue-people. Since then, we’ve had plenty of opportunities for people of all ages to wrap their head around the concept of sapphire-skinned creatures— the pious Nightcrawler and nudist Mystique from X-Men, the equally au naturel Dr. Manhattan from Watchmen, the archeological-artifact mule Diva from The Fifth Element, the soft-spoken Abe Sapien from the Hellboy series, and even the live-theater troupe Blue Man Group for good measure. Throw in the range of azure-skinned characters in pop-culture, from the inflated figure of Violet Beauregard in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory to the only-take-no-for-an-answer Blue Meanies of Yellow Submarine, and one imagines that particular Austinite must’ve grown rather impatient for Krishna’s impending manifestation onto our particular corner of reality (perhaps he thought better of it after all, and simply decided to stay at the bus-station).
However, there hasn’t yet been a more high-profile example showcasing personages of such bluish hues intruding upon the high canon of mass-media since the premiere of Avatar, James Cameron’s much-hyped labor of love, a decades-in-the-making state-of-the-art opus that stretches the limits of filmmaking technology almost as much as it stretches the patience of audiences. To its credit, it doesn’t take too long for the film to proceed before one grows used to the sight of the Na’vi, the indigenous humanoid-race populating the far-off forrest-moon of Pandora, a breed of tribal aliens with the height of NBA all-stars and complexions as blue as a trust-funder’s blood. But the more important question is this: is it possible, in the nearly three-hour running time the film spans, for filmgoers to take such characters seriously? Well, yes and no. While on purely technical terms the digital work of the Na’vi, rendered by Peter Jackson’s acclaimed Weta production-house and culled from the motion-capture performances of various cast-members, is just about flawless, much of the aesthetic and narrative efforts surrounding them fail to provide much support.
While Cameron’s best cinematic efforts have never been heralded for their originality (unless you count sequels and rip-offs of Richard Heinlen books or Outer Limits episodes) Avatar’s story marks a new high point for cinematic derivativeness. In telling the story of a one-time soldier who finds a new life after being spirited away to an alien world to reign as a conquering warlord, it strikes the same chords as Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars and countless other space-operettas. In portraying a wounded man who finds himself caught in a war between indigenous people and the military-establishment seeking to exploit them, it copies almost beat-for-beat the same exact pattern of the anti-Manifest Destiny melodrama in Kevin Costner’s Dances With Wolves. Finally, in the tracing the archetypal hero’s journey of an outsider amidst transcendental aboriginals who goes native and turns messianic god-king faster than you can say “Muad’dib”, it lifts so heavily from science-fiction classic Dune that Frank Herbert’s estate could conceivably sue for copyright infringement (hey, it worked for Harlan Ellison).
Unlike other pastiche-artists like George Lucas or Quentin Tarantino, filmmakers who can indulge upon reanimating the beloved genres of their youth while at the same time injecting much-needed doses of cinematic wit and imagination to allow them to stand apart on their own terms, Cameron never quite finds a way to pay back his creative-debt by articulating his narrative of noble savages and their environmentalist battle against military might and corporate exploitation in a language that belongs to him. Even Lucas himself was able to better express the same Vietnam-era comeuppance of guerillas tearing down imperialist machinations in a voice of his own (albeit a stuttering, juvenile one) with the primitivist teddy-bear slapstick in Return of the Jedi, treating agents and instruments of the Evil Empire like stumbling Nazi buffoons out of WWII-era Looney Tune propaganda. The closest Cameron ever really gets to authentically personalizing his tale is the degree to which he recycles all the old army-tech clichés prevalent throughout most of his cinema, themselves creative hand-me-downs from greater sci-fi minds than he. Instead of hip-hop collage at its best, we get a kind of cut-and-paste cinema akin to listening to M.C. Hammer or Vanilla Ice—sure, the beats and riffs sampled sound great, but it doesn’t hold a candle to Superfreak or Under Pressure.
However, that’s not to say there isn’t an upside to the formulaic nature of the plot. After all, with a movie as long as this one it helps to be able to read its story-beats well enough to anticipate ahead of time a largely disposable montage like the one midway in the film, more worth taking advantage of as a bathroom break than actually watching. More importantly, the connect-the-dots conventions do help to keep the story just familiar enough for the narrative to unfold, at its best moments, in almost purely pictorial means. With nearly every element of the plot illustrated in some concrete way by visualizing them onscreen, Cameron has created the most expressive film of his career and a movie that at times almost reaches the same standard of unspoken cinematic language rarely tapped into since the days of the silent-period. When relying strictly upon the series of images the director and his team of special-effects wizards concocts, Avatar comes close to realizing the potential of its promise of heralding a new era of movies as the most singularly impressive cinematic achievement of the decade. Unfortunately, for every bull’s-eye that Cameron hits squarely in its mark with William Tell precision, he winds up shooting himself in the foot with far more poor aesthetic and narrative choices than can be too easily dismissed. While the choreography of his action and the mis-en-scene of its portrayal both lack nothing in ambition or clarity, the visualization of his world’s plentiful flora and fauna is at times a wee bit too outlandish to be fully taken seriously, no matter how detailed and convincing the graphical-rendering is.
Some of the blame can be leveled at the dimensions his floating-mountains and spiral-shaped flowers assume, giving Avatar the look of a space-opera set on a world designed by Dr. Seuss. Mostly, however, it is due to the somewhat wide palate that Cameron uses to portray the planet’s various bioluminescent properties, which serve to illustrate the overly-literal Gaia life-energies. Whenever night falls on Pandora, the forests and its inhabitant all bloom into a garish range of hues that suggest the work of a paint-by-numbers landscape completed by a child with an overactive imagination and nothing but neon-colored crayons. It’s particularly hard to swallow the way the Na’vi themselves begin to sparkle like the heartthrob vampires from the Twilight series, making it look as though Pandora’s equivalent to Mother Earth had taken the advice of a teenage Avon girl and given them all a month’s supply of glitter-makeup. While there’s some amount of scientific credence to the idea that the wildlife of a moon that spends half its time nestled in the prolonged night of a gigantic planet’s orbital shadow would naturally develop glow-in-the-dark properties as a kind of evolutionary imperative (not unlike all those deep undersea creatures that Cameron has spent the better part of his post-Titanic time following in awe-and-yawn inducing documentaries), is it really worth the amount to which it distracts the audience and detracts from the believability of the proceedings?
More troubling, however, are the ways in which his lazy storytelling threatens to undermine the whole enterprise of his filmmaking by relying upon all sorts of stereotypes regarding indigenous populations that would’ve been outdated by the time Johnny Weismuller first let out his Tarzan yell. Cameron treats his native Na’vi tribesmen with the same kind of restrained reverence with which Malick filmed The New World, a perspective that works as objective when dealing with historical figures but cannot be anything other than subjective in the case of imaginary ones. The Na’vi way of life is taken for granted as one that is morally superior to humanity’s, and never quite earned or justified in ways that avoid sounding like Green-movement propaganda. Part of this is due to the ways in which Pandora’s environment seems tailor-made for humanoid life in a way that has no plausible precedent on Earth. Yes, the USB-ponytails are clever, furthering the film’s “plug in, turn on, drop out” motif, but what is to be made of the Hometree’s naturally grown hammock-cocoons? What exactly is the biological imperative for the evolution of a sleeping-bag plant? While Cameron’s literalization of the biological symbiosis between all life on his little blue-green moon can sometimes prove itself scientifically impressive and genuinely touching, it also at times becomes hard to swallow how it turns the Na’vi lifestyle into one that less resembles the hardwon lives of indigenous tribes doing their best in unwelcome climates, and more the fanciful permanent-vacation of bamboo-houses and cocoanut-inventions from Ken Annakin’s Swiss Family Robinson or Gilligan’s Island.
Furthermore, Cameron indulges in countless African and Native American clichés when attempting to evoke their codes of fraternal kinship with hunted animals, honor between warriors and overly sentimental mating-rituals. It’s times like these that the wholly derivative nature of the film comes back to haunt the project, with scenes cribbed from Roland Joffe’s The Mission, Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto (there’s another movie with blue people) and Michael Mann’s Last of the Mohicans—even Wes Studi is present (though barely recognizable through his CGI makeover) as the Na’vi chief, to reinforce the connection, speaking wholly in an invented, subtitled language whose inflections are just familiar enough to be mistaken by lay audiences for an authentic Native American vernacular. While Cameron most likely means no harm in presenting his alien natives in the most positive light possible, without giving his characters real opportunities to earn respect and admiration for their culture without recycling real-world indigenous conventions, he winds up draining them of any real significance. Furthermore, thanks to an overly literalized set of spiritual symbolism via the biological neural network existing between all the life-forms on Pandora, he creates a culture based on a religious system that is almost wholly contradictory to the very idea of religious faith itself, as it is based not on abstract belief but scientific observation.
By putting the Na’vi on such a high, yet shallow ivory-tower as a culture whose morays are as unattainable for the audience as is the precious metal unobtanium (whose name, when spoken aloud, provides the power-source to the film’s rare commodity of intended laughter), Cameron renders them a people so far removed from the human experience, yet conceived in predictably earthen, third-world roots, that they become near impossible to identify with outside of their sheer physicality, and even that is jeopardized by their stridently alien appearance (remember, they’re goddamn blue). As such, there’s a condescending element in their portrayal that at times feels even worse than the endless supply of brave warriors from Cy Endfield’s Zulu or the childishly innocent/ignorant bushmen of Jamie Uys’ highly inaccurate The Gods Must Be Crazy. Though they and their customs are clearly modeled after real-world indigenous populations, the Na’vi have less in common with any actual earthbound native tribes and more to do with the flawless, immortal Elven race of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, practically perfect in every way to the point of having few definable personality traits or genuine character development other than being the opposite of bad. Though many have hailed Cameron’s film as a marvelous blend of Star Wars space-opera and hard Solaris science-fiction, at the end of the day the kind of overly convenient, panderingly childish logic it maintains makes it resemble more a kind of cloyingly simplistic fairy-tale, only without the ravishing detail of classic Disney productions or the endearing wit of Cocteau’s cinematic poetry.
Mostly it’s the type of bedtime story that keeps children awake while putting parents to sleep. And yet occasionally, Cameron embraces the techno-eroticism latent throughout so much of his work and manages to somersault his way down the slippery slope of the uncanny valley, veering his film away from digital reverie and into the pure pulp of tech wet-dreams. His cinema has always betrayed a hard-on for the cyborg-nexus of military hardware and all-too humanistic software, from the motherly bonds of Ripley and Sarah Conner to the newborn neural-net consciousness of the T-800 2.0. Just as in Aliens and T2, the most persuasive parts of Avatar aren’t just the ones in which Cameron finds inventive ways to make war-machines and the people inside them explode (although they are plentiful), but instead are the more intimate moments of high-adrenaline action, the one-on-one battles between characters that so much time, effort and money has been lavished upon. Plenty of critics have lavished praise on actress Zoe Saldana and the animators of Weta Workshops for their work to bring the warrior-princess Neytiri to life, usually concentrating on the face-time she shares with Sam Worthington’s blank-faced Jake Sully, expressing admiration for the soulful, emotive and sensual aspects of her character and performance. Yet it’s not the chemistry (or lack thereof) that she shares with her lover that seals the credibility of her character, but the spark of genuine animal ferocity she displays when confronted by the ruthless mercenary Quaritch.
As played by Stephen Lang, the scarred and fearless military commander is easily the most dynamic and magnetic character in the film whose body isn’t composed of digitally airbrushed pixels and polygons. Armed with a mechanical battle-suit and a giant bowie knife to face off against the azure amazon, Quaritch’s last stand becomes an ideally iconic mash-up of sci-fi and boy’s adventure themes– the giant fighting robots of anime blended with the mystical safari of Lost. A perverse hybrid of his gutless paparazzi from Manhunter and his heroically earnest portrayal of General Stonewall Jackson from Gods & Generals (the only good thing about that damn movie), Lang’s Quaritch feels like an aggressively masculine take on the various wicked witches from classic Disney movies, as proud, tyrannical and attractive a display of cinematic evil as Sleeping Beauty’s Malificent or 101 Dalmation‘s Cruella DeVille. Also bubbling in that melting-pot of characterizations is a healthy dosage of Patton, complete with his own set of stars-and-stripes to stand in front of in the midst of his soliloquies, rendering him and his mercenary army a villainous force of distinctly American proportions. Though at times it’s frustrating how Cameron effectively reverses the anti-corporate paradigm he more or less repeats from Aliens, transplanting the spirit and conscience of Michael Biehn’s motley crew of space marines and donating it to Giovanni Ribisi’s white-collar criminal, Lang’s performance is almost enough to suck out all the venom of all the nakedly anti-militarist sentiment. If the director has the bad taste to blame the troops, then at least he makes sure to do the same for their general, as well.
Amidst all the CGI nonsense, Cameron settles the jungle hunt between a man with a blade and a girl with a bow, a set of archetypes so primal it seems practically written into our DNA, even if it doesn’t accomodate for the blue pigment mutation. As a one-on-one match, it’s a far more immediate expression of conflict than all the rag-tag wages of war between dragon-riders and twin-rotor helicopters. Like the lightsaber duels of Star Wars it’s a face to face counterpoint to the mass heroics of war, and all those impersonal actions on the battlefield. Though Lucas and Cameron share a particularly shaky hand at penning dialogue and directing actors, their command of putting the personal into onscreen action and visual filmmaking remains at times unparalleled, with a keen understanding of the dramatic nature of adventure cinema that even award-winning fantasists like Peter Jackson oftentimes lose grasp of. No matter how acclaimed, those Lord of the Rings films suffered from their lack of any real, lasting set of antagonists (Christopher Lee’s Saruman didn’t even receive a proper death scene until the extended-edition DVD), thus becoming a rather repetitive series of one giant battle between small, intrepid bands and giant, monstrously indistinguishable armies after another; something like a zombie movie in which nobody ever dies. Sure, Frodo and Gollum proved all too vulnerable in the grip of the Ring’s temptation– a kind of Wagnerian recasting of Treasure of Sierra Madre with Gomez Adams’ son in the role of John Huston’s father– but after too much time spent amongst the invincible Legolas and Aragorn, there’s little motivation left over to care. Instead of real flesh and blood heroes, all we have are plastic action-figures.
Despite its faults, Avatar proves itself better than that. Instead of giving us nothing but heroes and a vague, disembodied personification of evil to fight against, Cameron props up villains equal to the task of rivaling his protagonists, and thereby providing enough challenge to give the story depth, no matter how derivative, and enough casualties by the end to earn the film’s occasionally grating solemnity. All of his characters have time to bleed, and like the plentiful deaths from the likes of wrestlers-turned-governors in John McTiernan’s own alien jungle war, their sacrifices make all the two-fisted triumphs feel worthwhile in ways that the bloodless victories of Middle-Earth never approach. Many have called Cameron’s epic a new watershed moment for genre filmmaking, a cultural moment equal to what Star Wars was three decades ago. In truth, that’s probably an overstatement, and says much more about the longevity of Lucas’ imagination that it remains the point of comparison for any sci-fi adventure (people said the same thing about The Matrix ten years ago, and will likely say it about something else in another ten years), but it’s to Avatar‘s credit that it comes closer than anything else since to recapturing the same hyperspace spirit of ’77. While it doesn’t scale Himalayan heights or find Krishna himself waiting at the summit, it certainly climbs a worthwhile pinnacle of its own– if not an Everest, then at least a Kilimanjaro.
I am leaving the house now to see Tim Burton’s film, but I will most assuredly be back to comment comprehensively on this piece as AVATAR is one of my favorite films of this year.
I don’t think Avatar is either expansive or original enough to be another Star Wars – that film put all its influences into the blender and came out a mix that had its own distinct flavor. The cohesion of Avatar’s ingredients is still a little shaky.
At any rate, very much enjoyed this piece. Lots of great turns of phrases and, more importantly, really astute observations. The whole seventh paragraph was brilliant, but particularly this observation:
“it also at times becomes hard to swallow how it turns the Na’vi lifestyle into one that less resembles the hardwon lives of indigenous tribes doing their best in unwelcome climates, and more the fanciful permanent-vacation of bamboo-houses and cocoanut-inventions from Ken Annakin’s Swiss Family Robinson or Gilligan’s Island.”
Yet another example of the film having its cake and eat it too.
“I don’t think Avatar is either expansive or original enough to be another Star Wars – that film put all its influences into the blender and came out a mix that had its own distinct flavor.”
Star Wars took its influences and created something greater than the sum of those parts, surpassing those to whom it pays homage.
James Cameron is a top class film-maker but he is not anywhere near the storyteller George Lucas is. The only hope for another experience like Star Wars is Episode VII.
Bob, once again an entertaining and illuminating read.
I have so many problems with Avatar and yet I still thoroughly enjoyed it. It had vast potential only part of which was fulfilled.
The CGI “nonsense” you speak of Bob here is no sillier than any other CGI film, and I need not remind you of the ones I am speaking of. I don’t go to the movies to look for things that might mitigate or compromise my passion. I go to the movies with the hope that my passion will go full-flower.
Yes Stephen Lang plays teh film’s most magnetic character, but I don’t really agree with this:
“More troubling, however, are the ways in which his lazy storytelling threatens to undermine the whole enterprise of his filmmaking by relying upon all sorts of stereotypes regarding indigenous populations that would’ve been outdated by the time Johnny Weismuller first let out his Tarzan yell.”
The storytelling is not lazy at all. What you have here is exactly enough to propose this enrapturing visual tapestry. To find issues here is really to crash the party.
I loved the filmed and that’s that. I will not even attempt to compromise of the most priceless experience I had in the theatre this year. I’ve defended this film against some bloggers –isn’t it funny that one of America’s finest critics, the NY Times’s Manola Dargis loves this film UNRESERVEDLY as well as a number of other prominent personages, but the bloggers have the insecurities–and won’t repeat myself.
The bottom line is that Bob Clark has written another exquisite film thesis at WitD and for that I am grateful.
Sam, I think you are holding the line too adamently here. Avatar is not a painting or a photograph, nor even a work of avant-garde cinema, but a narrative film – those are the terms it chooses for itself and the terms it must be judged by. I respect your rapturous response to the movie’s visuals, and sympathize with the point of view that this can be enough to render the film great regardless of any other flaws (even if I don’t share that perspective in this particular case). But that doesn’t mean the story or dialogue are superfluous or beyond criticism – or that Cameron intended them to be irrelevant. The political overtones alone signify that Cameron had serious intentions for his plot, dialogue, or characters. Part of our judgement of the film should entail how well he succeeded in these aims.
As for critics, bloggers, and insecurity, I’d submit that it’s the first group that seems to be constantly looking over their shoulders, hand-wringing and second-guessing their instincts so that they don’t feel “out of touch” and, more concretely, lose their jobs. While that second is no concern of mine, as I’ve moved towards more contemporary reviewer mode I’ve felt this pull myself, so I think it’s a fair point to make. That’s not to say critics in general or Manohla Dargis in particular (whose piece I’ve not read) didn’t genuinely love Avatar – maybe they did, but there are a number of other subconscious/unconscious elements at work here too. Just look at Richard Corliss’ 2008 apologia for blockbusters to see what I mean.
Joel, I can’t deny that you make some excellent points here, and in fact, I’ll admit I ‘take no prisoners’ when I really love something. It’s true that (especially with the obviously intended political underpinnings) Cameron wasn’t tame in what he was trying to say here, and that one can rightfully take some issue with the dialogue and/or narrative.
Still, I have always felt that AVATAR is so successfully in a visual sense that the other shortcomings (at least by me) can be set aside and in fact discarded, as they are really beside the point. But yes, you are 100% right when you suggest to me that others who do not feel that way are correct in taking the film to task for these “shortcomings.” It all comes dowen to this: how strong was the emotional reaction to this film? With me it was an overwhelming and overriding element, hence I tune out to issues that did not affect me one iota in the two viewings I experienced in both 2D and 3D.
There is sometimes a personal quality, especially in the appraisal of a film’s narrative qualities amidst its visual and kinetic flavors. I adore the Prequel Trilogy, for example, not in spite of its variously unusual storyline choices– the tax-evasion blockades, the political filibustering, the outdated star cross’d love story– but in part because of them. Yes, I can acknowledge that not everything is articulated in a way that everybody can get behind– the actors and their dialogue sometimes stiff and melodramatic (kinda like the politicians and teenagers they’re playing)– but at the end of the day, I don’t make excuses for it.
I will say I think it’s odd that many of the same critics who frowned upon the story and dialogue of stuff like the recent “Star Wars” and “Matrix” films (all that philosophical mumbo jumbo, all that earnest romantic handwringing) seem to be looking past many of the same aspects in their appreciation for “Avatar”. Everyone gives lip-service to the director’s tin ear as a screenwriter, of course, but too many also make excuses for him, as well. I put Cameron more or less on the same level as Lucas and the Wachowskis when it comes to the more utilitarian aspects of screenwriting, but the latter two (or three) impress me far more with their originality, imagination and sense of scope and style.
I should probably point out that I only saw “Avatar” in 3D screenings, and that’s something I should’ve mentioned in my review. Without that added aspect of dimensional depth and layered compositions, I don’t think I would’ve enjoyed the film half as much as I did. However, it almost feels as though it’s a subject which requires a whole other essay to tackle– if Cameron did one thing almost completely right, it was figuring out how to shoot and arrange images for stereoscopic cinema. I’m not convinced it’s the first great 3D film, but I will say that it’s the first 3D film that deserves to be called a “film”, and not just a cheap upgrade or Disneyland ride. That’s something, at least.
Bob,
This is in part what I was trying to get at in my point above. Critics today are much kinder towards blockbusters than they were in the past (at least post-early 80s: the groundbreaking blockbusters from Jaws thru Back to the Future were generally, and for good reason, well-received). Are the “big” films that much better? They certainly take themselves more seriously.
But Corliss, for example, went from grousing about mainstream crap in 1990 to celebrating visual effects techs as the true “auteurs” of today’s cinema (which may be correct, but is it a point worth celebrating?). And he’s not the only one. I try not to make bad-faith assumptions but it’s hard to believe that increasing marginalization of critical voices (a feeling of being in the wilderness), alongside confused responses to technological advances (worries about being “out of touch”), plus the accumulated weight of 40+ years of pop-heavy cultural criticism, and finally very real job insecurities have led to critics being far more open to special-effects extravanzas than they were in the past. If before they probably went too far in their criticisms, missing a sense of fun, no they go too far in their praise, missing a sense of perspective.
Well Joel, I do think that by and large, the mainstream entertainment of the 90’s was pretty much crap. Sure, I can enjoy shlocky stuff like “Independence Day” or “Men In Black”, but they don’t hold a candle to the modern classics from the 70’s and 80’s. Aside from a few gems from guys like Cameron and Spielberg (“T2” is still the former’s best film, bar none, and “Jurassic Park” is no slouch either), blockbuster filmmaking only really picked up at the dawn of the new millennium when Lucas brought “Star Wars” back to theaters and the Wachowskis revitalized his formula with a new sci-fi lexicon of cyberpunk and anime stylings. “The Phantom Menace” and “The Matrix” were both pretty serious affairs for their audiences (elementary schoolkids and up for one, high-schoolers and up for the other), and have probably done more than any other two movies in the past fifteen years to inspire filmmakers to put more thought into their efforts.
Furthermore, we’ve also seen plenty more non-blockbuster directors begin using the same special-effects tools in articulating their visions– Fincher’s “Fight Club” and “Benjamin Button” would’ve been impossible without the advent of ILM or CGI– and I think that’s also a big part in why critics are looking at this kind of pop-corn fare with more open minds than before. Mainly, however, it’s due to the influence from the films of ’99, both upon those who make and those who write about film.
Fair points, although I’m not sure the 00’s blockbusters are all that much better than the 90’s ones – Jackson’s King Kong would have been slammed 10 years earlier but in ’06 it was greeted with everything from rapture to tepid it-ain’t-so-bad. Personally, I find the post-’99 aesthetic’s increase in braininess does not compensate, by and large, for the decrease in fun and increase in self-seriousness. Like an adolescent who’s twice as smart as he was at ten, but four times as annoying. A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.
I don’t doubt that there are legitimate reasons for the critical rapprochement with the blockbuster aesthetic but it also smacks of desperation to me – the implication is often that there are only two roads to follow, the big-budget high-tech popcorn picture or the limpid indie. Of course all most all great movies of the past fell well between these two poles and it’s a pity to think that option is foreclosed by the contemporary critical mindset.
Granted, there was a lot of amusingly pretentious nonsense in a fair amount of 00’s blockbusters– Jackson’s “King Kong” and two-thirds of his “LOTR” trilogy more or less floundered under the weight of all that self-inflated posturing, like an old Biblical epic with the misguided notion that it was preaching to choirs instead of movie audiences. There have been plenty of sci-fi and fantasy series that have confused “darkness” with “maturity”, thus giving us the self-indulgently violent and sexual escapades of everything from the “Underworld” movies and the like (basically anything with vampires, nowadays). And I’d better just plain not get started on the “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies, and how letting the leash off an A-list actor isn’t always necessarily a good thing…
…however, I would insist that the past decade has seen far more quality mainstream action and adventure movies than we’ve ever had since the 80’s. Mostly it depends on finding directors with the right balance of maturity and excitement, and pairing them with a subject that matches their strengths– Bryan Singer delivered two of the best superhero movies with his “X-Men” couplet, but more or less struck out with the tepid “Superman Returns”. The Bond franchise was pretty much saved from the brink of disaster after Martin Campbell brought the series back to the classier, more cynical roots of Ian Fleming’s stories in “Casino Royale”. And while I agree with many that Nolan’s latter-day “Batman” reboot has been overblown to a certain degree, even I can’t deny that “The Dark Knight” was a sensation.
Besides, it’s not as though the “fun” has evaporated quite as much as you seem to imply with all the self-important showboating. Jon Favreau and Robert Downey Jr. appeared to have emptied their minds just enough to turn “Iron Man” into a breezy bit of only occasionally ironic fun. Sam Raimi’s “Spider-Man” movies did a decent job of blending heartfelt character-driven soap opera with web-slinging action (well, the second one did, anyway). And even guys like Lucas, Spielberg and the Wachowskis managed to inject a great deal of uncomplicated action and adventure into their thought-provocateur escapism. Consider this– the same directors who wrote all those endless dialogues between Neo and Agent Smith would later go on to make “Speed Racer”. Even the most serious of thinking-man’s blockbuster filmmakers don’t always take themselves too seriously.
I do share your frustration at the increasing polarization of cinema today– between the high-minded blockbuster and the three-hanky indie, there isn’t always as much nuance as we might like in contemporary theaters. I think one of the main problems, however, isn’t in the increasing amount of intellectual weight that goes into mainstream entertainment today, but the increasingly lax artistic standards that their craftsmanship is held up to in the name of creative liberty. I have to admit that I’m pretty much sick of the “Bourne” effect in modern-day action entertainment– I don’t mind if you want to indulge in documentary-style shaky cam every once in a while, but if you do it too often it’s just difficult to tell what’s going on. It’s especially unnerving to see it in big effects-filled entertainment, where the onscreen elements become so fragmented they practically resemble an abstract painting (seriously, I couldn’t follow half the fights in “Transformers” without needing to rest my eyes every couple of seconds). It’s all part of a movement that prefers audiences to FEEL the action onscreen, rather than UNDERSTAND it, so whenever a director of mainstream fare would rather go after the bulk of our gray matter instead of isolating our fight-or-flight instinct, I’m game.
The CGI “nonsense” I’m referring to isn’t simply pertaining to the fact that most of the film is dreamt up on a computer, but simply the sheer silliness of what that CGI is used to create onscreen. The digital landscapes of the “Star Wars” prequels, the “Matrix” trilogy, or even fuckin’ “Tron” all had loads of imagination and style, but they also had very carefully calibrated aesthetic guidelines orchestrating the choices of colors, the shapes of man-made and natural structures, the overall worlds their heroes inhabited.
I don’t see quite the same kind of levelheadedness in Cameron’s bio-dome– all the luminescant day-glo colors seemed rather garish and frankly sort of ugly to me. It reminded me less of an outer-space tropical paradise, and more of the Village, its Victorian Mod flavor driving Number Six almost more than anything else to escape. I wanted to escape Pandora myself, after a while, and could only settle in when Cameron started missing the candycolored forest for the rare down-to-earth trees. Then, at least, the movie is rooted in something I can believe in, no matter how overdesigned it is.
Be seeing you.
Well, this entire response here, though very well observed and written as always comes down to TASTE, as for me the ‘luminescent day-glo’ work magnificently within the film’s narrative fabric, and I had no problem myself envisioning the intended otherworldly paradise. I also am grateful that the film did not maintain any rigid ‘carefully aesthetic guidelines’ as it was more resonantly earthier here.
Agreed, Sam. It all comes down to personal taste, and it’s really impossible to argue one way or the other there without acknowledging it. Trying to convince me that “Avatar” is a good-looking film is sorta like insisting that Eliza Dushku is a beautiful woman. Far be it from me to call anyone a liar, but I just don’t buy it.
I understand the issues of taste and of how difficult it is to set aside some issues to usually go to the center of any film, (and I commend Bob Clark on an exceptional review) but I went back to Sam’s December review of the film at Wonders in the Dark and found this:
*****The lengthy stretches of the movie that are sensory and wordless are as rapturous (very much in tone poem mode) as anything every seen on the screen, and this kind of visual cinema, where narrative is more of a hinderance than a benefit, is Avatar’s most extraordinary quality and it’s true selling point. *****
I would have to say that this is the issue that will determine who will rally behind the film, and who will dismiss it. A good number of movie goers want their movies with a strong plot, especially with futuristic thrillers, where that is basically the appeal. But there’s no denying that the ‘tone poem mode’ you speak of doesn’t have to be restricted to realistic situation like in ‘The Thin Red Line.’ Artistic expression comes in all forms.
I have seen the film and support this position.
Peter, I’ve no problem with non-narrative films – far from it – but Avatar is a narrative film and I have a problem with leaving its story out of the judgement. I’d submit that the “message” of the film not much less central to the discussion and controversy surrounding it than the visual spectacle, and should be taken into consideration.
Movie Man, what you are saying there makes a lot of sense. It’s funny, but there are other films I have taken issue with the compromised narrative, but for some reason, not this one. I don’t think I have a good explanation, and I know Sam has felt this way too, or least close to it.
I think one consideration is whether or not a movie’s narrative functions as a means or an end– is a director using the tools of filmmaking to make us care about their story, or using narrative to create an emotional continuity for their cinematic craft? Arguably the most successful are those that find an effective balance between the two, but at the same time there has to be a priority for one or the other. Even films with a strong, memorable and even beloved story might more or less be using it primarily as an excuse for staging impressive visuals, set-pieces and dramatics, just in the same way that classic painters kept repeating the same old Greek myths and Oriental odalisques for the excuse to put the naked body on display.
It reminds me of how Godard said all you need for a movie is a girl and a gun– doesn’t that more or less demonstrate how shallow the narrative necessities for cinematic impact can be, in the right hands?
“all you need for a movie is a girl and a gun” Ah, I love that evergreen – it provided me with a whole non sequitur post last month, and I drop another reference to it in my review tomorrow. Such a great quote, particularly as it comes from Godard…
My only question is this: IS IT POSSIBLE FOR A FILM TO COME ALONG AND JUST SWEEP BOB OFF HIS FEET???? I’ve seen this film and, perhaps I’m better at it than others, upon totally blanking out my mind minutes before it began, just let the film do the work. Its one thing to pick apart a film and look for deep meaning, its influences and sociological and political messages. However, and I truly believe this, AVATAR is meant only as TWO THINGS: a statement about how our greed is killing the planet earth and a pure ESCAPIST entertainment. Frankly, I think Bob, as great as his writing is, is unable to just let go and allow a film to wash over him. Time and afain he goes after every film the mass likes. What’s next? RATATOUILLE? Sometimes it really is about ENTERTAINMENT.
Dennis, read some of my stuff over at The Aspect Ratio if you think I can’t simply “let a film wash over me”. My tastes just don’t match with mass concensus here, is the thing. I will say that even with films I love without (or with few) reservations, I’ll usually end of writing about them in analytical mode, simply because I enjoy intellectualizing the cinematic process. If I like a film, I don’t consider it enough to simply state my preference, but instead to say why. The same goes for films I dislike, or movies like “Avatar”, which I enjoy with reservations.
And, another thing: the choice to use “day-glo” colors and foreign speak that’s slightly African is a nit-pick. I think you really are reading way too far into this film than need be. Its not like CAMERON is a deep film-maker. He’s no Scorsese, Bergman, Keislowski. Shit, he not Spielberg, Anderson or even your beloved LUCAS. I find a prolonged rant like the above review kinda tiresome. So answer this if you will, BOB, DID YOU LIKE THIS FILM????? You gave it *** 1/2 stars out of a POSSIBLE *****. To me, that a pretty GOOD rating. I think you’re looking for perfection and, in this day and age, that’s rarely possible in film. I think the film is fun, moving, and ravishing in its over-all effect. There, I reviewd the film in less than one sentence. My grade: *****
Dennis, shouldn’t the fact that I’m willing to devote this much time and energy to examining and debating the aesthetic and narrative merits of this film be a good thing? Is the only proper response to a film one enjoys to simply wax orgasmic about it?
Yes, Dennis, I enjoyed the film– not nearly as much as you and Sam did, obviously, but enough for me to not only accept it as a piece of mild-mannered entertainment. Instead, I decide to at least try and take it seriously, and apply the same critical scrutiny to it that I would the work of any deep filmmaker. The fact that I’ve been willing to give the film a fairly high rating despite my strenuously expressed misgivings should be a sign of strength on the film’s behalf, and shows it to be a work that can stand its own against careful inspection, instead of falling over at the first sign of anything less than zealous approval.
Did I enjoy the film? Sure, but that’s not really the point, Dennis. At the end of the day, even amidst my skepticism towards it, I can RESPECT the film. And that’s more than I can say about some of the other pieces of entertainment-cinema people praise here…
YOU BASHED UP. That film pretty much received superlatives from critics the world over. Its a film that takes you into a fantasy world and bowls over the audience with its touching irony. THE LOVELY BONES is a FILM adaptation that sets out to enthrall its audience with a different spin on the murder mystery/suspence genre. Why do we have to dig so deep into films that ultimate goal is to entertain? You dug so deep into THE LOVELY BONES that upon finishing your exasperating review I wanted to commit suicide from the painful headache it induced in me. As for UP, I defy you to go against mass numbers of children and adults alike who saw absolutely nothing wrong in giving themselves up completely to the fantasy and touching themes that were beautifully pontificated within it. I’m not saying you don’t have a right to your opinion. It just seems you take great pleasure in ripping a new asshole into films that touch a chord with EVERYONE. Christ, loosen up.
Frankly, I thought I was rather positive towards “Up”, all things considered. No, I didn’t think it was the masterpiece everyone else did (the first thirty minutes was golden, everything else bronze), and I certainly didn’t think it was the equal of Pixar’s best efforts (Bird’s “Ratatouille” and Stanton’s “Wall-E”), but in the end I called it “essential viewing for enthusiasts of quality animation and children of all ages”. Again, don’t take it so personally if I appraise a favorite of yours to be less than perfect.
As for “The Lovely Bones”– believe whatever you want about it personally, but don’t claim that it’s recieved the same unanimous approval. Reviews for that flick were mixed at best, so it’s not as though I’m waging an assault on everything the moviegoing majority holds near and dear.
BOB-let me be clear. Sam and I have the greatest respect for you. I don’t want you to think the above staements were a call by me to discourage your writing. I know I am, as well as Sam, THRILLED that you take the time to send your detailed reviews here to WITD. For me, and I speak for ONLY ME, it seems that you have tendency of dwelling on the things you dislike about a film rather than highlight the things you LIKE about a film. For the better part of you AVATAR piece I kept asking myself if you had anything positive to say about the film. You said you had RESERVATIONS about it, and that’s fine, but after re-reading the review again I find little in it that actually praises the film. I feel the same with your dissection of UP. THE LOVELY BONES we’ll NEVER see eye to eye on so let’s not dig up a buried corpse. I’m one of you biggest supporters here. Please don’t think this is a bash, I just think you could mention as much positive as negative….