Category: movie

The Adjustment Bureau is two hours of lovely fun laced with just enough suspense and paranoia and Matt Damon looking both earnest and tasty, which is then completely ruined by the last three minutes of ridiculous feel-good cop out ending.

Seriously. If you’re going to make a movie out of a fucking Philip K. Dick story, DON’T GIVE IT A FUCKING HAPPY ENDING.

If you do go see the movie – and I actually recommend that you do, since it’s mostly very good – I recommend just walking out of the theater when the two people are kissing on the roof. (Being intentionally vague since it could be spoilery.) Just pretend the movie ends there, and you won’t get that moment of enraging let-down that comes with the credits rolling.

Also, and this is a SPOILER:

Anyone else that has seen the movie – do you find it a bit odd that the only non-white character in the entire film is the “renegade” angel? There’s the bit where Matt Damon says something like, “You seem different from the others,” to him, and it’s hard not to snort considering that everyone else from the Bureau is a Middle-Aged or Old White Dude.

/SPOILER

Day was a lot of fun, and something I desperately needed after the hellish, stressful, and morale destroying week I’ve had. It’s been one of those weeks where I spent a lot of time asking myself why the hell I’m in grad school. Though I did manage to finally beat the cold that’s been hanging on to me for two weeks, after I decided I was exhausted and just didn’t give a shit any more and then went home and slept for nearly ten hours. So yes, kids, sleep is still important, even when you’re a (sort of) grown up.

Today Mike and I saw Kat and Aki and Mina, ate food, watched a movie, talked a bunch. Much relaxation had by all, I think. Normally Mina wants Mike to read to her, but it was my turn today I guess. I spent quite a bit of the day stretched out on the floor next to her, reading her little picture books and adding occasional sarcastic commentary.

Most amusing part of the day: Showed up in the morning while Mina was watching Sesame Street. Bert was singing a song about how he couldn’t find Ernie in their bedroom. I suggested, “He’s probably in the closet.”

Home from England, safe and sound. I’ve been fed (thanks to my parents) and have also taken a shower so I no longer smell like the inside of a plane. So really, I’m feeling refreshed and human again, but incredibly tired. I knew we’d gotten back into the US of A when, upon entering the immigration area, there was a TSA agent wandering around and telling everyone that we had to keep our cell phones off because it was illegal to have them on. For no apparent reason. Oh capricious and ridiculous airport security, I haven’t missed you at all.

I spent most of the flight back watching movies. One of them was Agora, which is a movie about the fall of Alexandria to the Christians and the death of Hypatia. So, I expected it to be a very depressing movie, because we all know what happens to Hypatia.**

What I didn’t expect was how angry the movie made me feel. Not angry at the movie, but just angry, the emotion building up from helpless frustration.

One image the movie kept coming back to was the library of Alexandria, after it had been ransacked by the Christians. The movie showed it as basically being destroyed inside, the scrolls torn up or gone entirely because they’d been burned, and animals were then penned inside it. The willful, gleeful disregard and hatred of knowledge made me angry, even if it was just a movie, even if it was an event that happened over a thousand years ago.

Then I think about our modern day situation, say, with John Shimkus on the Energy and Environment subcommittee, claiming that global climate change can’t be true because of something the Bible says. And I feel exactly the same sort of building, helpless frustration, because I don’t think we’ve really changed at all since Hypatia was flayed and dragged through the streets of Alexandria.

It’s a good movie. Watch it. Be prepared to cry at the end. And to feel angry, so angry, every time you see the destroyed library, every time someone makes an argument based completely on illogic and blind belief that simply can’t be refuted because no one would listen.

** – Just in case you don’t know, let’s just say that the Christians didn’t give her chocolates and an award for being female, outspoken, and interested in science.

Toward the end of this movie, there’s an odd scene that takes place in the passenger area of the Expendables’ ass-kicking cargo plane of doom, where the token black guy (Terry Crews) shows off his weapons to one of his fellow mercenaries. His final weapon is an extremely shiny straight razor with a handle made of transparent, neon-yellow plastic. The sight of that weapon literally made me say, “What the fuck?”

This is pretty much a metaphor for the entire movie experience.

I really wanted to like this movie. I really did. It had the hallmarks of the ridiculous but fun action flick. Kind of like The Scorpion King, a movie that I like in a sort of shame-filled way.

There was a good amount of fake, spraying blood. There was a gun that, at the beginning of the movie, literally tore someone in half and left the legs comically standing alone for a moment while the torso splattered against a wall. There were a dizzying array of knives (most of them wielded by Jason Statham’s character) which were apparently made with steel with such a strong anti-reality resonance that bone simply ceased to exist as soon as it contacted the blade.

But. But.

I don’t ask for a lot of plot out of my action movies. But I do like what little plot there is to be, I don’t know, coherent.

The Expendables feels less like a film and more like a series of loosely collected scenes that have been arranged randomly. And all of the dialog was drawn, half a line at a time, from a box. I think that some of the scenes were supposed to be character development. Instead, it normally amounted to two characters saying random things to each other for about three minutes, at which point the spraying blood and explosions would mercifully resume.

I wish I could give you a plot summary, but I really can’t. The best I can manage is that Stallone and his group are mercenaries. Except one of them burns out and goes crazy and tries to kill Stallone in the middle of the movie, after miraculously transporting himself to and from the tiny Latin American island hell hole where the Evil General lives. There is a douchey guy in a suit, who I initially guessed must be an American politician; I was close, he was an ex-FBI agent gone evil. There was the crazy general, who spent most of his time oscillating randomly between spanish and nonsensical English. He is sort of the pawn of the douchey suit guy, who wants him to grow drugs, or something, except nothing is getting done because the general’s soldiers keep kidnapping civilians and then not putting them to work in the plantations. There was the evil general’s daughter, who was Stallone’s love interest. There was Charisma Carpenter as Jason Statham’s girlfriend, causing a strange little sideplot where Mr. Statham beats the ever-loving shit out of a bunch of jerks on a basketball court.

The movie culminates in an orgy of gunfire, stabbing, and explosions, where the douchey suit guy shoots the general and then tries to kidnap his daughter for no apparent reason, despite the fact that earlier in the movie he was all for just killing her and having done with it. And I can’t even say the spraying bullets and blood were all that interesting, because on several occasions during the climactic action sequence the focus was jumping between three or four individual fight scenes with no logic or warning.

That’s also how the two major car chase scenes go as well. They actually become boring because it’s impossible to tell where the vehicles are relative to each other, and it’s really just an unnecessary pause in the bloodletting anyway.

The movie is an exercise in wasted potential. Jet Li appears in the film, but spends most of his time getting his ass handed to him by much taller white guys. Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger appear in the movie for a combined total of five minutes and then, no doubt feeling the threat to their careers, never appear again. Mickey Rourke plays a tattoo artist who was presumably once a mercenary himself – he’s quite good at throwing knives – but spends most of his time trying to develop a character that is wholly uninvolved in the plot (such as it is) and has about as much depth and charm as Sarah Palin anyway.

The movie doesn’t so much end as drop in its tracks, exhausted by its own meaningless existence, with Statham making up a “poem” that had me trying to crawl between the couch cushions to escape it.

You will notice that at no point do I name any of the characters. This is because, over the course of the movie, I simply could not be bothered to learn them. The names, like the characters themselves, felt like an afterthought, a formality added to the mix to justify this as a movie rather than one hundred minutes of random people getting shot and stabbed and blown up.

Before it was over, I tried to convince myself that The Expendables was some sort of high-level satire of the action genre. What convinced me this couldn’t be possible was a scene in the middle of the movie where the general’s daughter is waterboarded by the douchey suit guy. That one scene in the midst of the ridiculous mess of a movie was disturbing and strong. And it also made me realize that, to a certain extent, the movie was meant seriously. Which somehow makes it worse.

We don’t ask much of our action movies, but this one fails on all counts. You’re better off watching nearly any other movie that any of these actors have been in. My personal recommendation would be Die Hard. Or, failing that, you’ll still get better quality story and acting from – and it pains me to say this – The Scorpion King.

The quick review: You really, really, really ought to go see this movie.

If Memento was the warm up, Inception was the main event. I really don’t want to go into a lot of detail about the story or the concept. If you want to know either, you can read other reviews and get a reasonable explanation of both. But to be honest, I think it’s best to just go in knowing that there are dreams, and a McGuffin that allows people to share them, and then you can just get knocked on your ass by the rest.

It says a lot about the writing, and how tightly plotted the movie was that afterward, my husband and our friend David were bickering about whether or not a section of screen time that was supposed to be three minutes actually was three minutes long, or if it was longer because it felt longer. When the plot of the movie is so tight that you are left with nothing to pick at but tiny details, it is impressive indeed.

And of course, there was one moment of plotty gut punching powerful and genuine enough that it made every occupant of the theater let out a dismayed exclamation at exactly the same time. Which is quite the accomplishment when you consider the average audience, which has had its brain melted by horrible attempts at 3D this summer.

It’s beautiful, and it’s suspenseful, and I actually cared about each and every one of the characters. Go see it.

And: Soundtrack by Hans Zimmer. Bigger win than Sherlock Holmes on the music front, and I didn’t think that was possible.

Yesterday, I saw the new Clash of the Titans with my best friend while we were waiting for the new battery to be installed in her car. Since it was the 10:30 AM showing, tickets were only $6. The reason I mention this as significant is because I’m incredibly glad I didn’t waste any more of my money on it than that. It’s something of a puzzle to me that Ebert gave this movie three stars, while in comparison he gave Michael Bay’s love letter to running away from explosions in slow motion (aka Transformers 2) only one star. I honestly feel the two movies are about equal when it comes to story quality, even if Transformers 2 did fall behind in the Shiny Liam Neeson With a Giant Beard department.

Needless to say, this movie was not what I had desperately hoped it would be – it was manifestly not a faithful remake of the old Clash of the Titans, just with better special effects. The story was changed in some fundamental ways, and as you can probably tell, I don’t think that it was the better for it. Below is my synposis of the new plot:

For no apparent reason, a bunch of Greeks have decided that they don’t like the gods any more. They never bother to tell us why. King I-Can’t-Be-Bothered-To-Remember-His-Name lays siege to Olympus. Zeus retaliates, as one might expect when the mighty God of Thunder gets a poke in the eye from a mortal, by having sex with the King’s wife. No, really. And then when the King gets angry and throws her in to the sea because she’s pregnant, Zeus finally gets around to zapping the guy with lightning. Which doesn’t actually kill him, for some reason. Instead it just sort of melts half his face, at which point the King decides to go live in the sewers and starts calling himself Calebos. I suppose we should feel lucky he didn’t build a pipe organ and start composing opera. At some point later, by the way, Hades pops up to see Calebos and infuses him with super powers via the Beam of Fiery Stenchy Breath and reveals that this is all just so he (Hades) can try to screw over Zeus.

A fisherman finds baby Perseus and raises him, which mostly involves complaining about how much the gods suck. They’re sailing around one day and come across a super awesome statue of Zeus overlooking the sea, just in time to see a bunch of soldiers from Argos knock it over in to the water. For no apparent reason Hades shows up, kills all the soldiers, and then blows up the fishing boat for good measure, just because he’s in a bad mood. This causes Perseus to spend the rest of the movie brooding and snarling about how a god killed his family, so all the gods can suck it as far as he’s concerned. I’m guessing one of the abilities of being a demigod is to be incredibly unimpressed when confronted by an actual god. And also to be the only man in Argos with a crew cut as opposed to an Ancient Greek Mullet, but that’s a different topic.

Hades, who needs both hair plugs and some Vick’s Vapor Rub, goes to Olympus and tells Shiny Liam Neeson that the humans are saying mean things about the gods, and that Hades would be happy to scare the hell out of them so they start praying properly again. All of the other gods stand around and look shiny and sound vaguely British, but contribute nothing of value to the plot. Zeus sends Hades off to do whatever he wants, then hangs out with his bald eagle, because apparently Olympus is in the western United States. Just so you know.

A few remaining soldiers, all of them wearing breastplates with the most stupid fake musculature EVER, find Perseus and take him back to Argos, where people are partying because the gods can suck it. Or something. Cassiopaea starts up about how her daughter is hotter than all the gods, even after Andromeda tells her to knock it off, since it’s kind of embarrassing. Hades manifests as a giant Hell Blender and grinds up all the soldiers, then kills Cassiopaea and tells the few people left alive that he’s going to sic the Kraken on them if they don’t sacrifice Andromeda to it in ten days.

Perseus, in keeping with the acting abilities of Sam Worthington, says some growly stuff about how much the gods suck but woodenly insists that he can’t do anything about it, and thus gets thrown in jail, because for no discernible reason everyone suddenly knows that he’s Zeus’ kid. A hot chick with nice hair shows up and introduces herself as Io and kind of explains things to him but not really.

Perseus suddenly decides that he’s going to try to help out Argos. I’m guessing it’s because he thinks the gods suck, but honestly I couldn’t tell you. He gets some ridiculous looking armor of his own and sets out with some soldiers and a couple of comic relief characters. There is dialog and some action and a half-naked holy man and frankly none of it makes sense. Perseus does some typical male bonding stuff with the soldiers, so it becomes apparent that they are all destined to die in ways that will make him strike poses both stoic and steely-eyed. The soldier in charge (who has both a mullet and facial scars) tries to point out to Perseus that he’s got some better-than-human abilities because he’s a demigod. Perseus insists that he hates gods, doesn’t want to be like them, and is going to be just a man, thank you very much. Io is also following along this entire time, looking like she’s just stepped out of a salon.

At some point during this testosterone fest, there’s a scene where Hades lets Zeus know that Perseus is around. This is apparently a surprise to Zeus, which was something of a surprise to me. And Zeus’ reaction is then to be butt-hurt, because Perseus never sent him a card on father’s day. Be that as it may, Zeus sends a magical sword to Perseus – which Perseus immediately refuses to use because HAVE I MENTIONED I HATE GODS AND AM BITTER? – and shows off his pegasus herd.

Rather than let us enjoy the pretty horsies, Calebos pops up out of nowhere and starts killing the soldiers. There’s some very confused fighting, and then Calebos gets his hand cut off. His blood turns in to the giant scorpions, which then leads to a surprisingly boring fight scene where the soldiers try to kill the computer generated scorpions. The only enjoyable part of the fight is when Io saves Perseus, then gets pitched down a hill for her trouble and we find out that her hair actually isn’t a solid block and that she can look ever so slightly grimy. The fight sequence ends with the brave soldiers surrounded by giant scorpions, and it looks vaguely worrying.

And then a Djinn shows up. No, you didn’t misread that. Apparently this desert belongs to the Djinn, and in movie geography ancient Greece is located next door to ancient Persia. The Djinn are all magical and tame the scorpions. Or something. And apparently decide that they like Perseus, because even Djinn think that the gods suck. Overnight, they build some lovely houses on top of the scorpions, and they all set off together across what appears to be the Sahara, to get to the mountains where the witches live. The grizzled old soldier at this point tells Perseus to stop being a petulant douchebag and actually try to reach his demi-god potential, because by not doing so he’s been letting the nameless and uninteresting soldiers get picked off like flies. As you might suspect, Perseus’ reaction to this is to scowl mightily and be even more petulant and douchey.

The scene with the witches actually runs about like the original movie, except the witches are much creepier looking. At the end, they make a big prophecy about how Perseus is Going To Die, which considering that he’s not actually immortal probably shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. Apparently this is a dealbreaker for all but one of the Djinn, though, and they run off with their scorpions. Perseus takes a little walk by himself, meets up with Zeus and is petulant at him, then Zeus gives him a coin for the ferryman. Which is probably the most fatherly thing Zeus has ever done; I certainly remember my days in college (the first time around) when I looked pathetic enough that my parents couldn’t resist slipping me twenties before I headed back to my dorm.

So the merry little band goes to the river Styx, and the Djinn is the only one smart enough to figure out how to call for Charon, I suppose so that the character has something to do since it’s incapable of engaging in even the meaningless dialog (due to a language barrier) that’s the halmark of this movie. Everyone hangs out on the boat, and Perseus and Io (who is once again perfectly groomed) have a moment so devoid of chemistry that I was forced to wonder if it had been written by Stephanie Meyer. They all get to Medusa’s lair; Io stays outside and lets all the boys go merrily to their deaths.

Now, I will say that I liked the Medusa’s lair sequence. I think they did a good job with Medusa, and I really liked all the eerie giggling that she did. Medusa also proceeds to kill everyone but Perseus, and I was hard-pressed to care. Perseus chops off her head, and goes outside to Io, who then gets stabbed through the back by Calebos. At this point, I was forced to conclude that Calebos’ Hades-derived super power is randomly popping up whenever the script calls for yet another fight sequence. Io’s stabbing is apparently all the motivation Perseus needs to stop being a childish about being a demigod; he grabs the until now ignored magic sword and slices the crap out of Calebos. The magical sword then sucks all the evil out of Calebos, briefly transforming him back in to King Whatever-His-Name-Was, who dies after telling Perseus “Don’t become like them.”

Uh… whatever, jerk who just stabbed the well-groomed lady.

Perseus and Io have another moment, which is – though this should be impossible according to the laws of physics – even more devoid of chemistry than the last. The eclipse starts up, then Io turns in to pretty lights and disappears. And Pegasus, knowing just when a deus ex machina is called for, shows up to carry Perseus back to Argos, covering the distance that apparently took 10 days to travel in something like five minutes. That’s what I call horsepower. (Har har.)

Oh, and at some point, Shiny Liam Neeson says, “Release the Kraken!” This, and the super pretty magical flying horsies, were worth the six bucks I shelled out to see them.

Meanwhile, back in Argos, the Kraken shows up. Andromeda gets hung by her wrists from some sort of wooden sacrificial structure and looks vaguely annoyed by the inconvenience, but otherwise unbothered. In a long and incredibly confusing sequence that lacks any sort of tension, Perseus does a lot of flying around on Pegasus, chasing after a little Hades minion that grabbed Medusa’s head when I blinked. He gets the head back, the Kraken gets turned in to stone, and then Andromeda gets dropped in the ocean. Hades shows up, Perseus whips out the magical sword, it gets zotted by lightning, and the uses it to knock Hades back in to the underworld.

Then he gets around to jumping in to the water and rescuing Andromeda, who has very impressive lung capacity. Andromeda asks Perseus to be king of Argos. Perseus says no, and then rides off on Pegasus, who takes him back to where Hades killed Perseus’ family. Zeus shows up, and there’s some very nonsensical dialog about how people are going to worship Perseus like a god, and Perseus should try to treat them better than the gods apparently did. Then Io appears, and I suppose it’s happily every after, but I had long since stopped caring.

…and that’s it. Maybe it was because I was extremely hungry by the end of the movie, but I found the climactic action sequence both confusing and boring. Throughout the entire movie, very little of what the characters did made any sense. None of the occasional quasi-philosophical things that the characters said about the relationship between men and gods made any sense. The relationship between Zeus and Hades was reduced to a lame charicature of what we saw in the Disney movie Hercules, which already stank of a Christian-style God versus Devil conflict tarted up with a thin veneer of Greek culture rather than anything representative of the actual mythology. Perseus had no character arc beyond scowling a lot and jumping around in a teeny leather skirt; in the end, we’re left to wonder if he was supposed to accept or reject his partially divine heritage, and if we can really be bothered to give a shit about it in the first place.

Give me the old Clash of the Titans any day, thanks. Maybe the special effects were crap, but at least I could buy Perseus going through all the dirt and mess because he wanted to get in to Andromeda’s pants. Making it in to a revenge fantasy where Perseus really just wants to stick it to the gods might make it more butch than the old movie, but I find CG scorpions and a bombastic theatrical score a poor substitute for the old exuberance.

Full disclosure: In my last semester as an undergrad, I took a 3000-level writing course that was devoted to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass, and I loved every minute of it. Not only did we examine the book minutely, we read literary criticism about the book, historical notes about the book, and did a lot of discussing of the various implications of plot and setting. So it may be that I’ve been primed to have problems with nearly any interpretation of Alice, since I’ve gotten far too deep in the details.

That said, there were things I loved about Tim Burton’s new Alice movie, and things I really hated.

MASSIVE SPOILERS AHOY!

The Things I Loved
Mia Wasikowska did a really good job as Alice, I think. Once Alice as a character started finding her spine and did more than stare unhappily at things, she really shone.

Tim Burton, as usual, did wonderful visuals. There is little about the setting I could complain about, and I really liked his interpretation of many of the characters.

I loved the Cheshire Cat more than words can describe.

The entire first half of the movie was lovely, and interesting, and felt like the story was really going somewhere. I’m not actually that much of an Alice purist; I like seeing the different ways people react to the book and interpret it, because it shows what a profound meaning the story has to a lot of us. And in this case, the movie doesn’t change the events of the books; it builds on them, acting as a continuation of Alice’s life, thirteen years later. And in the first half of the movie, there is some very solid development of Alice’s character and an apparent direction that she’s going in; it’s not subtle, but it doesn’t have to be.

In its first half, the movie builds itself up to be the story of a young woman asserting her independence, both from the control of family and from the control of an incredibly restrictive society. We see it starting off with Alice in the real world being taken to a party, where a snotty red-headed lord is going to propose to her; a big point is made over and over about how her life has been planned out for her, how this is what she ought to be doing, and what is expected of her.

After she escapes the proposal without giving an answer and falls down the rabbit hole, the development continues. Suddenly Alice has a set destiny in Underland (not Wonderland as she mistakenly called it as a child), dictated by a massive scroll that chronicles all the days of the world. The scroll shows her fighting the Jabberwocky with the Vorpal Sword, and she is informed continuously that this is what she must do, that is has to happen. Alice is unhappily dragged along with this, until she’s finally had enough and decides that she’s extremely tired of being told what she’s going to do. Instead of going to see the White Queen like everyone tells her to, she decides she’s going to go rescue the Mad Hatter from the Red Queen instead and goes off to do just that, showing just how determined and strong she can be.

This leads us to…

The Things I Hated
Because then the second half of the movie suddenly throws the whole plot in to reverse and backs right over you. Midway through rescuing the Mad Hatter, Alice recovers the Vorpal Sword and is told to leave the Hatter behind and go to the White Queen. Instead of doing what I’d expect – what all the plot about finding one’s own destiny has laid the foundation for – Alice does as she is told with barely a peep of protest. (Though I will admit, the Mad Hatter being rescued by the Cheshire Cat was a lot of fun.)

Well, you say, maybe it isn’t all that bad, since everyone (the Hatter included) was telling Alice to run to the Queen and not worry about them, because the sword was important. Possibly. But once Alice arrives at the White Queen’s palace, she basically gets handed the “this is your destiny, it has been foretold” line all over again. She puts up a token resistance, the substance of which seems to be that she’s scared of fighting the Jabberwocky, not that she’s really sick of having other people plan out her life for her. And then ultimately, with very little fanfare, she goes along with it.

During the faux internal conflict where Alice is trying to decide if she’ll fight the Jabberwocky or not, I still had some hope. I thought it would be a chance for Alice to show her spirit (and the strength of her friendship with the various denizens of Underland) by coming up with some sort of innovative solution. It didn’t happen. The dashing of that hope came when the White Queen asked for a champion, and all of the main characters stepped up to volunteer, with Alice being the last; the White Queen’s response to Alice was ultimately, “Well that’s nice, but you have to fight the Jabberwocky alone.” And Alice does, with no further complaint.

It was disappointing. Very, very disappointing. Even more so, because it didn’t have to be that way. There were so many other directions that the ending could have gone, ones that would have made a lot more sense in regards to both Alice’s previous character development, and the way she reacts upon returning to the real world. Roger Ebert speculated that it’s because a big action sequence at the end is the (incredibly disappointing) safe bet. He’s probably on to something there.

But this sudden, jarring, and disappointing reversal in the course of the plot transformed the movie from one that I really enjoyed and was considering buying once it came out to one that I won’t care if I never see it again.

Things That I Could Have Lived With If The Plot Hadn’t Given Me The Finger
Seriously, I am beyond tired of people confusing the Red Queen and the Queen of Hearts. They’re two incredibly different characters with very different motivations. And mixing the chess and card metaphors without any kind of explanation was something I found very annoying.

The Red Queen’s bizarre accent was another thing that was pretty annoying. Her enormous head also got on my nerves at first, but at least by the end of the movie, it had been remarked on and made in to something of a joke. I did like that. I also was amused by all the courtiers with exaggerated physical features turning out to be fakers.

Crispin Glover as the Knave of Hearts really skeeved me out, and I can’t even really say way. Ugh.

The interaction between Alice and the Mad Hatter felt like it was trying to go somewhere and never quite did, which I found a bit frustrating. I actually really liked the Hatter, in spite of the ridiculous dance interlude at the end, and the random, cringe-inducing Scottish accent.

I had such high hopes. At least it was pretty.

Hey, it’s a post that’s not about hydraulic fracturing! SAY IT AIN’T SO!

I saw Avatar on Christmas Eve with my handsome and talented fiance. I was actually supposed to see the movie on the Monday before that, but I was having stomach problems that day and elected to stay home so I could lay on the couch and feel sorry for myself. Mike (the handsome and talented fiance) saw the movie without me with our friends. With his assurances that it was excellent – and excellent enough to make him want to see it at least twice in theaters – we braved the ice and snow to catch the noon showing.

I just saw the normal version of the movie, by the way. I’ve had multiple people now tell me that 3-D is the only way to go, but honestly I thought it was just fine in boring old 2-D. And with the added benefit of me not having to wear uncomfortable fake glasses over my real glasses, which is the reason I don’t bother with 3-D. I’m sure it’s all very pretty, but I have a hard time getting in to movies when I’ve got two pairs of glasses sitting on my nose and tugging on my ears and feeling generally awkward and annoying.

The movie is beautiful. Very, very beautiful. Very, very, very beautiful. I think there was a moment or two where the CGI broke down, but they were few and far between. The technology sure has advanced, and it made for some spectacular looking aliens and a breathtaking world.

The story itself is fairly unremarkable. It’s not a bad story, though I feel like the story was more there to prop up the HOLY CRAP LOOK AT ALL THIS COOL STUFF than anything else. The movie is very, very worth seeing, and you should go do that. In fact, go watch it now, because I’m going to do a little bit of complaining and discussing issues people have brought up about the film that is going to involve some spoiler-like stuff. But let’s be clear… the complaining I’m about to do in no way means I didn’t like the movie. I loved it. I want to see it at least once more in theaters, maybe twice more if I’m lucky and have the time. I’m going to buy the DVD. I’m going to obsessively watch all the special features. I just also have no problem admitting that it’s not the most perfect piece of pretty film ever created.

SPOILERS BELOW

Race
A lot of people have likened the movie to Dances With Wolves. I tend to agree. In fact, rather than go into detail about how and why I agree, I’m going to send you to this post from Io9, because I think it sums everything up nicely: When Will White People Stop Making Movies Like Avatar? I’ll just say that I would like, just once, to see a big box office movie like this where the brown people (or the blue ones, as the case may be) get to save the day without the white hero saving them.

In Avatar, what basically summed up the whole issue for me is the scene where Jake comes flying up to the Tree of Souls on the scary giant read bird-thing. He goes up to the guy that’s the best warrior of the tribe, the one that’s supposed to take over as chief now that Neytiri’s father has gotten turned in to a battered blue kabob. And he says, almost literally, “I can’t do this without you… Translate for me.” Now, I’ve had various people argue that I’m taking it the wrong way, that the pause between the two sentences significantly changes the meaning, and such. But frankly, it still came across to me that Jake was in one breath saying he needed Tsu’tey to follow him, and in the next asking the man to be his mouthpiece. It really rubbed me the wrong way. Imagine how different it would have been if Jake had walked up and Tsu’tey had said something like, “I’m going to lead everyone in to battle. Will you help me?” At which point Jake could have coughed up all sorts of useful information and been very involved in the defense, but still wouldn’t quite have been the white dude leading everyone to victory. Because considering the technological gap, I think it’s fair to argue that the Na’vi would have had a heck of a time scraping together the victory they did without some outside help.

As an aside on the race issue, my mother’s apparently heard complaints that Avatar is in some way anti-American. It all sounds very defensive, and I have a feeling this connects to the race/white guilt issue, since it really is a movie about how it’s shitty to abuse the native people and take their land just because they’ve got something you want. To me, this falls in the same category as the people who get defensive when you point out that it sucked to live in Hiroshima and have an atomic bomb dropped on you. People can make arguments to justify the action all they like, but it doesn’t change the basic fact that it sucks to have an atomic bomb dropped on you, period. When there’s this sort of bitter defensiveness, I’m forced to wonder just why it’s so hard for some to realize – or at least admit – that we’ve done some things in the past (in the very recent past, in some cases) that haven’t exactly been an ice cream social for all the involved parties.

The Military
I would like to get one thing straight. Avatar is NOT an anti-military movie. I’m sure that after watching Stephen Lang gnaw on the scenery for five minutes as Colonel Quaritch, it’s easy enough to pick up that impression. That Colonel Quaritch is actually not actually in the military any longer is an extremely easy fact to miss. As a near throw-away line at the beginning of the movie, Jake Sully narrates that the forces on Pandora are actually mercenaries, soldiers hired directly by the company. I think that little understated and easily missed line is a very important one, to be honest.

If you look at James Cameron’s other big movies, I think it’s actually pretty fair to say he’s mostly been pro-military, or at the very least not anti-military in them. The Colonial Marines in Aliens were certainly heroic. In The Abyss we had one Navy SEAL go bad due to HPNS, but in the end the other SEALs come through and help the civilians save the day. True Lies gives the Marine Corps a chance to show off their jets, which is always good for a “Woohoo, America!” moment. I would even argue that the Terminator movies are not actually anti-military, but rather anti-corporate and anti-taking-soldiers-out-of-the-loop-in-favor-of-autonomous-robots.

Honestly, keeping in mind from the start that the badguys of Avatar were basically corporate mercenaries immediately made me think of the scandals we’ve seen in Iraq and Afghanistan that have involved military contractors, which are basically mercenaries. (Blackwater and KBR, for example.) I don’t know if that’s what was on Cameron’s mind, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that was a factor in making the Avatar villains corporate hired guns.

The Ladies
I’ve seen a couple comments about James Cameron liking his “woman trapped by destiny” characters. I suppose it’s true… you could definitely draw some parallels between Rose from Titanic and Neytiri in Avatar. I do have to say, though, I actually really like how James Cameron does his female characters for the most part. Rose and Neytiri may be initially “trapped by destiny,” but the major theme of their stories is that they escape from those destinies on to a path of their own choosing. (The fact that it involves falling in love with a different guy… okay, you’ve got me there.) But James Cameron also brought us Ripley, Private Vasquez, Sarah Connor, Helen Tasker, Lindsey Brigman, and Trudy Chacon. I think it’s fair to say that the man likes to see the ladies kick some ass. It always thrills me to my toes to see situations in movies where the women get to defend the men – and effectively – since it doesn’t happen nearly as often as I like. Neytiri taking out the evil scenery-chewing Colonel-that-would-not-die and thus saving Jake filled me with absolute glee.

The Environmentalism
You could probably accuse the environmentalist message of being heavy-handed, but in all honesty I felt that message was subordinate to the “treating the native people like they’re sub-human and kicking them off their land because they have something you want is not cool” message. I suppose that there could possibly be people offended by the notion that strip-mining a pristine world and destroying its vegetation might be a bad thing. These are quite possibly the people who were yelling “Drill, baby, drill” at the RNC, which means I wouldn’t want to sit next to them in a movie theater anyway.

In all honesty, I think the environmentalism of Avatar is an interesting thing to think about, depending on how deeply you want to get in to it. For example, could the corporation have found a way to get the resource that it wanted without causing environmental destruction? Was the open pit mine not really necessary, but mostly used because it was cheap and fast and the corporation had no reason to care? But I also think that if you start parsing the environmental theme like that, it becomes apparent that it’s deeply tied to the movie’s other themes, such as corporate greed and racial guilt. For all that the story is rather heavy-handed at times, the very fact that you can jump off from it in to these sorts of discussions means that it may very well be a deeper film than people (even myself) really give it credit for.