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And this is impossible to discuss without giving away plot points.
CXVI: Avatar (James Cameron, 2009)
It's been a long time since Titanic, a long film, and now we have a film just shy of three hours. This raises the question which recurred for most of the film's duration - did he have to do that? We have a clumsily established back story for Jake (Sam Worthington), although his Australianess is not explained. It should have been his brother on this mission, not him, so we have a reason for him to not be brilliant, although he gets the hang of the plot pretty quickly.
There's this planet, see, and we've studied in for years, called it Pandora. That can only turn out well - at least they didn't pick Nemesis or Icarus or Twiglet, at least there's hope. We have been studying them, but they are a tad suspicious of us, for some strange reason (us being Americans, and mostly white Americans on the whole), so we've had to evolve genetically modified aliens that we inhabit by remote controls, called Avatars, like in a computer game. Meanwhile we've discovered this kind of rare mineral on the planet, which is a blue verssion of cavorite, which I'll call MacGuffium, because you won't believe the name Cameron came up with. Now Sigourney Weaver - working again for The Company, the silly moo, that can't end well - and Sam Worthington and a third guy who tends to get ignored and runs out of plot have six months to persuade the community to move before the mining engineers move in. And before you can say, ah western capitalism's rape of the wealth of indigenous people, the grunt's gone native and fallen in love with thesmurfs Volk. This really pisses off the general who appears to have been cloned from the novel Starship Troopers.
The grunt's training takes up a lot of screen time, with semi failed encounters with every Roger Dean picture you ever saw, and about a third of the Paper Tiger back catalogue. There's dealing with pissed off herbivores, nasty rhino things, bloody dragons, falling from a great height by bouncing off leaves. This then has to turn out to be useful - ah, let's see him fall from a great height, need a dragon, deal with the rhinos, send in the herbivores. That exosuit from Aliens is going to have to be called upon at some point, and why is Sigourney smoking all the time? Don't ask me why there are floating rocks and mountains - it looks cool and that's enough ETA: I guess they are made of MacGuffium. Awfully convenient it blocks out radio signals. And while I'm at it - given all the high technology, why are we still using bullets, napalm, daisy cutters and, indeed, manual wheel chairs?
Cameron has clearly used WETA expertise in Gollum in motion capture for the aliens, but I can't help but feel it would have been cheaper to do everything as a cartoon, or the live action sections be Earth and animate the alien planet. There are some frankly ropey things - the big space ship at the start - somewhere between Foss and Moss (the smurfs are Goodfellow) - some of the machinery, but the effects improve as the film progress, as if they finally got that 16 bit memory upgrade. It all looks very pretty - and the 3D, well, I shall have to do a post on 3D, but the first half feels like those stereoscopic photos I looked at as a kid through a red plastic toy, and then you sort of forget. It doesn't make it seem more real, and there's relatively little throwing stuff at the camera.
The politics is rather problematic - there's a heavy handed reference to wars on terror, and the opening feels like a Vietnam picture. (There's also a Braveheart scene, only everyone is blue this time.) It's as if it's trying to be all things to all men (and there are four powerful women in this, which is more than last year's comics adaptations put together). Just when you think that the everyone's-connected-even-the-trees hippy treehugging shit, a character remarks it's tree-hugging hippy shit. Whilst you think, oh good, an indigenous people who need a white patriarch to save the day, one of the smurfs steps in and does something tactical. You do root for the Viet Cong, but my, are these noble savages.
I still don't get the avatars, and why they need to be linked to human DNA to be controlled. I wasn't convinced that it was smart that the operators disengage when their characters sleep; and since they clearly then work a night shift, someone must be pushing the black coffee - although Worthington does begin to look a bit raggedy and grows a beard. His wounded veteran back story is heavy handed, and only pays off for a minimal Rear Window-ness.
And surely the Company gives up a little too easily. On the other hand, there may be a trilogy in the works. Oh joy.
In summary, a whole lot better than I expected, but someone with more knowledge of postcolonialism than me should take a look. It's just too damn much, with the motion capture and three d stuff amping it up to hype the hype. Ninety minutes could have been cut, to make a better movie.
Totals: 116 - [Cinema: 36; DVD: 70; Television: 10]
CXVI: Avatar (James Cameron, 2009)
It's been a long time since Titanic, a long film, and now we have a film just shy of three hours. This raises the question which recurred for most of the film's duration - did he have to do that? We have a clumsily established back story for Jake (Sam Worthington), although his Australianess is not explained. It should have been his brother on this mission, not him, so we have a reason for him to not be brilliant, although he gets the hang of the plot pretty quickly.
There's this planet, see, and we've studied in for years, called it Pandora. That can only turn out well - at least they didn't pick Nemesis or Icarus or Twiglet, at least there's hope. We have been studying them, but they are a tad suspicious of us, for some strange reason (us being Americans, and mostly white Americans on the whole), so we've had to evolve genetically modified aliens that we inhabit by remote controls, called Avatars, like in a computer game. Meanwhile we've discovered this kind of rare mineral on the planet, which is a blue verssion of cavorite, which I'll call MacGuffium, because you won't believe the name Cameron came up with. Now Sigourney Weaver - working again for The Company, the silly moo, that can't end well - and Sam Worthington and a third guy who tends to get ignored and runs out of plot have six months to persuade the community to move before the mining engineers move in. And before you can say, ah western capitalism's rape of the wealth of indigenous people, the grunt's gone native and fallen in love with the
The grunt's training takes up a lot of screen time, with semi failed encounters with every Roger Dean picture you ever saw, and about a third of the Paper Tiger back catalogue. There's dealing with pissed off herbivores, nasty rhino things, bloody dragons, falling from a great height by bouncing off leaves. This then has to turn out to be useful - ah, let's see him fall from a great height, need a dragon, deal with the rhinos, send in the herbivores. That exosuit from Aliens is going to have to be called upon at some point, and why is Sigourney smoking all the time? Don't ask me why there are floating rocks and mountains - it looks cool and that's enough ETA: I guess they are made of MacGuffium. Awfully convenient it blocks out radio signals. And while I'm at it - given all the high technology, why are we still using bullets, napalm, daisy cutters and, indeed, manual wheel chairs?
Cameron has clearly used WETA expertise in Gollum in motion capture for the aliens, but I can't help but feel it would have been cheaper to do everything as a cartoon, or the live action sections be Earth and animate the alien planet. There are some frankly ropey things - the big space ship at the start - somewhere between Foss and Moss (the smurfs are Goodfellow) - some of the machinery, but the effects improve as the film progress, as if they finally got that 16 bit memory upgrade. It all looks very pretty - and the 3D, well, I shall have to do a post on 3D, but the first half feels like those stereoscopic photos I looked at as a kid through a red plastic toy, and then you sort of forget. It doesn't make it seem more real, and there's relatively little throwing stuff at the camera.
The politics is rather problematic - there's a heavy handed reference to wars on terror, and the opening feels like a Vietnam picture. (There's also a Braveheart scene, only everyone is blue this time.) It's as if it's trying to be all things to all men (and there are four powerful women in this, which is more than last year's comics adaptations put together). Just when you think that the everyone's-connected-even-the-trees hippy treehugging shit, a character remarks it's tree-hugging hippy shit. Whilst you think, oh good, an indigenous people who need a white patriarch to save the day, one of the smurfs steps in and does something tactical. You do root for the Viet Cong, but my, are these noble savages.
I still don't get the avatars, and why they need to be linked to human DNA to be controlled. I wasn't convinced that it was smart that the operators disengage when their characters sleep; and since they clearly then work a night shift, someone must be pushing the black coffee - although Worthington does begin to look a bit raggedy and grows a beard. His wounded veteran back story is heavy handed, and only pays off for a minimal Rear Window-ness.
And surely the Company gives up a little too easily. On the other hand, there may be a trilogy in the works. Oh joy.
In summary, a whole lot better than I expected, but someone with more knowledge of postcolonialism than me should take a look. It's just too damn much, with the motion capture and three d stuff amping it up to hype the hype. Ninety minutes could have been cut, to make a better movie.
Totals: 116 - [Cinema: 36; DVD: 70; Television: 10]
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