What They Won't Tell You

It won't matter. Nothing I say will make the slightest bit of difference--but, hell, that's never stopped me before. Avatar is not a good movie. It's a crap re-make of a second-rate Dances With Wolves. It didn't matter that Star Wars: The Phantom Menace was a bloated, incoherent, ego-driven piece-of-crap film, and it won't matter with Avatar either. Millions of us will still spend our money on it. Hell, it might even make a buck or two, even with its absurd price tag (something around a quarter billion dollars!). A lot will be written about how good a movie it is, about how it "invents a new kind of film-making," but it will all be crap. Contrary to the hype, Cameron is not an innovative film-maker. He is a film-maker with a real talent for action sequences, and we'd all probably be better off if Hollywood took on the Hong Kong idea of letting one director make the film, with a second director given the action sequences. That way Cameron could play to his strengths, and the rest of us could watch decent films with wow passages. But instead we are suffering under the auteur theory of film-making, and we are often the poorer for it.
Cameron has a talent (or maybe only a knack) for taking existing film-making techniques and pushing it to its limit, while marrying it to a decent story with some kick-ass action sequences. Take a look at his (actually small and limited) canon of film. Terminator, where he takes blue-screen and stop motion and pushes it, smartly using the stop motion to animate a robot, so that any flaws in the technique will be hidden in the character. In Terminator 2: Judgement Day, he takes a new piece of software and uses it as a visual metaphor for the mutability of evil (as opposed to the mechanical implacability nature of it in the first film). But in all his earlier work (Titanic excepted), he is kept in check by producers, money, and limitations of the medium.
Almost none of this applies to Avatar. This is Cameron's return to feature films after the blockbuster success (even in the world of event films) of Titanic. But unlike Titanic, ninety minutes into Avatar, I was offering to leave. Don't get me wrong, the action sequences left me twitching like a brook trout on a fly, and that's what the action sequences were supposed to do. But in terms of story and character, I was bored. Seriously bored. And an hour later I was praying for a planet-killing strike from space that would take out both sides of this over-wrought and pointless tale. "Kill them all and release me from this hell," I whispered, but it was not to be.
3-D has been around since forever, and like having seen Ray Harryhausen's work before seeing Terminator, I've seen a fair bit of it. Up, last summer, was a lovely little film. And the classic Creature From the Black Lagoon is still, I think, a superlative film.

The Creature--still rockin' the house since 1954

Cameron, as is usual, ramps it up, pushing the new 3-D as far as its been pushed in modern film. But that doesn't, in and of itself, make the film any better. In fact, I found that the 3-D actually interfered with my ability to watch the film some of the time, getting in the way of what story there was. The CGI? Well, its the logical next step, the next phase as long as you have the $$$$$$$ to do it. Impressive, but doesn't replace the need for characterization. Or story. Or coherence or complexity. And while the luminous nature of the world on Pandora (the planet Avatar takes place upon) is interesting, it too becomes a distraction. And yes, I got the double meaning of Avatar; both the representation of a person in a virtual world and the embodiment or personification, as of a principle, attitude, or view of life. Or even the incarnation of a deity (after all, the central character was blessed by the tree/deity of the Pandorans not once, but a couple of times). Doesn't make the film the least bit better, though.
So go--you know you're going to--and spend your money and you can even talk about how good it was afterwards (but really, isn't it more like The Dark Crystal? High concept, beautifully realized world, but the script really sucked?). But seriously, you'd be better off with the old cellophane and cardboard glasses and a copy of Creature. 'Cause there's a lot more going on there than in Avatar.

Moon

OMFG. I've woken up from a nightmare that was driving me crazy. I had this nightmare that George Lucas, the guy who directed that reasonably nice little film American Graffiti had made an SF-like film called Star Wars that had destroyed cinema for thirty years. Thankfully, I know its only a dream because today I saw Moon, directed and original story by Duncan Jones. Thankfully, we now have an heir to Kubrick, Wise, and Roeg.
A tremendously self-assured debut feature from Duncan Jones, the film has a feel not unlike 2001, Silent Running, and even The Day The Earth Stood Still (not the remake). The film concentrates on a small story told against a very large backdrop, and Jones never bothers to tell you everything. Just as Kubrick dropped you onto a Pan-Am flight into orbit and didn't bother to backstory it, Jones does much the same. Why is Sam 1 dying? Well, Jones doesn't tell us, he let's us figure it out. The story about Sam and his wife and child? Maybe I'm the only one, but I didn't see the twist of the knife waiting at the end of that thread. Just hadn't thought of it.
The film develops slowly, focusing tightly on Rockwell's character of Sam Bell (very tightly—the credits list only 8 actors and one of them, Kevin Spacey, exists only as a voice). Sam is nearing the end of his three-year contract running a mining station on the border between light and dark on the moon. With 14 days to go, there's a problem; Sam grabs a crawler,heads out to fix the rock-combine, and has an accident. He awakens back in the base, cared for by Gertie (voice of Kevin Spacey), the HAL-like operating system that supports Sam. Restricted to base, Sam decides to head back out to the mining unit (yeah, it really looks like a combine harvester) where he finds the previous crawler. He climbs in and finds himself, dying in the driver's seat.
This is a film about loneliness and exile, about the things that make us human and the things that keep us human, about those who would exploit them for their own ends and those of us who are unthinkingly complicit. That this is a young man's film is obvious in the ending, where there still remains a belief that there are things that people will not put up with. Had Jones been twenty or thirty years older when he developed this film, I don't think that the casual belief would appear. We can be conditioned to accept anything, just ask Bush and Cheney.
I don't want to give away the ending—not that it's that important, but its the process of getting there I don't want to deprive you of. This is a tightly observed, carefully directed film that accomplishes the unthinkable—it makes me appreciate Sam Rockwell as an actor, not something I ever thought would happen. The twists and turns, the expectations set up and knocked down show a confidence with the idiom, and a strong awareness of the pop culture effect Jones' predecessors had. Whether this film will have the same type of effect remains to be seen, but this is a first feature from a young director, made for about 5 million, and is entering its third week running in Victoria. It's getting great reviews and solid word of mouth, so who knows, this may turn out to be one of the most significant films of the summer. Just don't go expecting Transformers—this is way smarter and way more adult.