Richard's Online Journal
Avatar
Fun fact: Every time someone watches Avatar on an iPhone, James Cameron has threatened to kill a kitten. True story!
You know how when you go to a Pixar movie, all the technology is in service of the story? Avatar sounded like it was going to be that, but really, it’s not.
Is it visually impressive? Sure. Technologically advanced? Absolutely. It’s easily the most stunning Mighty Whitey film ever made. But that’s all it is. For all the loving attention paid to making moss glow and the forests ripple authentically, the effects hide a depressingly tame, cliched movie that says absolutely nothing new.
Not for the first time, there’s a certain irony to a film built around the evils of imperialism promptly deploying one of its most tiresomely outdated concepts — the Westerner who stumbles into an ancient native culture and largely takes it over by Just Being Better. In three months, he becomes one of their best warriors, their effective leader, a spiritual powerhouse (even able to recruit their god herself into battle), goes from being a demon in a fake alien suit to a fully-fledged member of the tribe, performs a literally legendary feat of heroism, and of course, hooks up with the Chief’s beautiful daughter. Sigh. Of course he does. He’s American! Human, anyway.
(UPDATE: Re-reading this, I realise I slightly glossed over this one. Avatar is a genuinely amazing movie in terms of technology, and it looks absolutely fantastic. It pushes just about every element of both 3D and CG to its absolute max, and you will be impressed by that, the background details, much of the world design and so on. Likewise, the acting and basic characters are absolute fine. I’m just more of a story guy than an effects guy, so that’s what usually sticks with me when the big explosions and motion tracked 3D are just a memory, and in that, I found Avatar depressingly tired)
The aliens themselves, the Na’Vi, are incredibly disappointing. They’re blue humans, slightly taller, and with a USB cable in their hair, but otherwise, just a completely generic indigenous population to contrast with the Evil Humans. The more the film goes on, the more depressingly non-alien they are, from the fact they kiss, right down to their basic body shapes — sexy alien babes with beads over their oddly mammalian breasts to avoid annoying the censors, muscled warriors with pert CG buttocks… it’s DeviantArt: The Movie. Their spiritual philosophy is entirely stock, with the one genuinely interesting twist involving the nature of the setting going largely underused in favour of more explosions. They could have been anything. They’re not.
You’d think that all the CG would allow for a genuinely alien alien, but really, these guys could have been just as effectively done with a few prosthetics and a gallon of blue paint. I’d actually have preferred that, because no matter how amazing the technology is — and it’s genuinely stunning — there wasn’t a moment these guys were on the screen where I didn’t see them as computer graphics and they didn’t feel like a carefully constructed ‘safe’ alien designed to not scare off a mainsteam audience.
Worse, the hybrid of styles really meant that when main character Jake (sigh, stop calling action heroes Jake, Jack and John already) goes from his live-action body to his Avatar form, it feels more like cutting to a different movie than walking outside, no matter how much CG bridges the gap. Mind you, I’ve seen worse…
Avatar’s failings are annoying, because the endless running time could have allowed for some genuinely interesting social exploration instead of just rehashing the same old imperialist vs. Noble Savage stuff. For instance, there’s a particularly eye-raising scene during the main character’s training where he gets his own flying dragon monster thing to ride on. The chief’s daughter who’s training him explains that this is a bonding process, where he chooses his dragon monster and the dragon monster chooses him. In practice, their definition of choosing is ‘it will try to kill you dead’, leading to a tender scene where our hero forcibly subdues and mind-rapes an intelligent creature into being his bonded servant. At the very least, that deserves a “What the hell?”
But no. The Na’Vi are essentially perfect angellic beings, by law, so none of that happens. If only they had the smarts to realise that dropping rocks into rotors will work better than shooting spaceships with bows and arrows…
(Another, equally unmentioned bit of oddness is that despite the Na’Vi themselves going as naked as their humanoid forms and the movie’s PG rating will allow, the human characters in fake Na’Vi bodies whose specific goal is integration and understanding are inevitably found stumbling around in T-Shirts and shorts, which is just silly. Never mind the misplaced coyness over their blue naughty bits, where the hell are they buying these Na’Vi sized outfits? It’s just something we’re not meant to ask, I suppose, like why the ruthless humans with their space ships have never heard of orbital bombardment, or exactly how much the Na’Vi know about what Avatars actually are…)
Spot the villain, win a prize!
As for the 3D glasses, frankly you can keep them. Yes, they add depth to the scenes, and the 3D is the best yet, but I’d rather have non-shimmering graphics and eyeballs that don’t hurt like hell after the three hours or so in the cinema. You really won’t miss out on that much if you only see it in 2D, and you’ll probably find it a much more comfortable experience. Still, you may as well go the whole hog and don the glasses, if only to be sure you’ve seen it as intended. It’s not a great movie in itself, and it does very little of interest with its story, but at least it’s damn pretty.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go buy some Optrex.
Transformers: Revenge Of The Zzzz
…only without the deep storyline. Want to know which robot is fighting and why? Sorry! Motion blur! Explosions! Smoke! Dust! Chaos! Impossible! Megan Fox running around without her bra on? Full-frame slow-mo that shit! Later, MORE EXPLOSIONS!
Cinematic abortion. Worst movie of the year. I have never been so bored watching stuff go boom. I don’t even see how it can be a toy advert, since most of the time it’s impossible to tell what the hell is happening behind the special effects. If Pixar’s technology is all about science in the service of the story, Bay is the exact opposite. I don’t care how technically advanced the effects are if I feel nothing — absolutely nothing — for anything that they produce. Original Transformers may have been impossible, but at least they were memorable. These masses of whirling cogs? These are not the Transformers I grew up loving. Remember those? They were cool.
(The villain gets some serious chutzpah points though. You need some guts to have even your own minions refer to you as, effectively, “The Loser”, not to mention try to persuade the universe that ‘Only a Prime can defeat me’ without any actual evidence of that. So, a railgun shot would just bounce right off, right? Sure. Nice try.)
On the plus side, the Pick and Mix was splendid. And the toilets were sparkling.
Goddamn it, I wish they’d hurry up and release Up over here…
Dumbest Zombie Survivor Ever
People in horror movies do stupid things, but I think House of the Dead 2 has to win a prize for this one. The story so far: You’re trapped in a rubbish sequel to an even worse movie. You’re a trained zombie-killing commando scientist from an organisation that exists specifically to kill zombies. Their blood is so infectious, even a humble mosquito can zombify you if it recently fed on one. If anyone on your team even scratches themselves in a funny way, everyone is instructed to spin round and blast their head off, just in case they go all ‘brains brains’ or start posting YouTube comments.
And then, in a three-on-one situation in which all three are human and armed to the teeth, with enough distance from the newly zombified target to wheel in a Sherman tank… you do this. Zombiedom’s too good for you.
And this isn’t even the dumbest part of the movie…
The Beast With A Billion Plotlines
On the one hand, it’s great to have new Futurama. On the other, more angsty, ungrateful hand, I can’t help but think it would be even better to have new, old Futurama. These new movie/episode hybrids are… I don’t know. They look like Futurama, they sound like Futurama, but they don’t smell right. They don’t taste right. When you slide your tongue into their tight, moist, welcoming crevices, there’s a bitter aftertaste where once there was strawberries. You understand, right?
“People of Earth! Has anyone seen my pants?”
The main problem I have with both Bender’s Big Score and Beast With A Billion Backs is that regular Futurama was such beautifully written TV. It was one of those shows you watched to see how to write good comedy. The stories were strong, the ideas often brilliant, and it absolutely nailed the character beats that make it more than just a half hour of giggling and insanely obscure geek jokes about Quantum Leap. There was a tenderness to it, and a sense of heart that Simpsons lost well over a decade ago, and the likes of Seth McFarlane and Family Guy can’t even touch. I still well up at the ending of Luck of the Fryish, and I refuse to watch Jurassic Bark ever again.
By comparison, Beast is… Robot Chicken.
No, really. There’s so many plotlines in this thing, all snapping around with whiplash speed, that there’s no time for anything to breathe. The pacing is shot to hell by the need to be both a movie and a series of episodes, and some just plain insane twists. After about eight years of the show’s core romance being Fry and Leela, it’s insane to bring in a new girl, Coleen, just to give Fry someone to spend most of the plot moping about. After locking Bender out of the main storyline early on, his role for the next hour becomes little more than Operation: Give Bender Some Screen Time.
The whole thing manages to be manic at the same time as insanely drawn out. Instead of a plot, it’s a canvas for the writers to throw a million funny ideas at in the knowledge that some will stick. That’d be fine for some shows, but this is Futurama. Futurama should be a beautiful, many-tentacled thing. It should be wonderful…
Fry discovers the secret truth of love: There’s someone for everyone. Else.
It’s not that the movies are lazy, or even that they’re no good. They’ve got their moments. There’s some great visual gags, and some really nice touches, and I can’t hate anything that puts Fry, Bender and co back on my screen.They’re just not… not my Futurama. They’re something else. Diet Futurama, with extra sugar thrown in to try and compensate. Futurama: The Next Generation, written by Brannon Braga. Futur–
You’re right, I went too far there. I apologise.
Still, I can’t help but be slightly depressed. I wanted Futurama back, but the only chance of that happening is for these hybrids to do well. But if they do, the odds that we’ll see more of the originals instead of more of the hybrids are… Ah, crap.
Doo doo. Doo doo do doo doo. Boop-a-doop-doop doop do-doop doop doop bong…