The top 5 female film protagonists
Jun 05
Sometimes, white-male-dominated Hollywood freaks out and breaks the rules and accidentally makes a movie with a woman instead of a man in the lead role. Sometimes, these movies don’t even objectify or ogle their subjects, they just treat them like regular people. Sometimes, these movies are even good.
In the wake of the culturally disastrous Sex And The City 2, I felt it was prudent — nay, necessary – to look to some more promising leading ladies in order to a) wash my brain out, b) remind myself that the XX-chromosomed world isn’t all glitter, high-heels, and awful one-liners, and c) remind myself of those rare good movies that accidentally swapped their male protag for a woman at some point in development.
So without further ado, here’s a list of my five favourite female protagonists from the past few decades:
5 – Sarah Connor (The Terminator & Terminator 2, 1984 & 1991)
I liked Sarah Connor better when she was just a regular gal, in The Terminator, than I liked her as the verging-on-insane mother-on-a-mission she became in Terminator 2, but either way, she makes a compelling protagonist. Plucked seemingly at random from a phonebook by a creepy Austrian bodybuilder — isn’t that everyone’s worst nightmare? — she carried herself well through all the crazy time travel bullshit, and came out at the end of it still resembling a realistic — if damaged — human being. Shame she suddenly and inexplicably succumbed to leukemia in time for the third one, though.
4 – Rosemary Woodhouse (Rosemary’s Baby, 1968)
Before I watched Roman Polanski’s classic horror film, I hadn’t really understood just how scary men could be — even regular blokes, like husbands, friends, and fathers. But as Rosemary’s paranoia escalated, I empathised with her every single step of the way, sampling a mere inkling of the constant fear some women are forced to live in. The fact that Roman Polanski is a convicted rapist only adds to the horror.
3 – Maggie Fitzgerald (Million Dollar Baby, 2004)
The realm of boxing biffo in film is one usually reserved exclusively for men, but with Million Dollar Baby Clint Eastwood and Hilary Swank showed us that it can be equally compelling to watch a couple of women knocking the stuffing out of each other as it is a pair of blokes. On top of this refreshing gender-swap, Million Dollar Baby isn’t your garden variety underdog sports film, either: it’s a gripping narrative and a rollercoaster of emotions, with a whole raft of memorable characters. Swank deserves every gram of that little gold statue she won for her performance here. God only knows why she went on to do crap like The Reaping, PS I Love You and Amelia.
2 – Ellen Ripley (Alien franchise, 1979 – 1997)
Before James Cameron got to the character and morphed her into some warrior-goddess-mother caricature, Ellen Ripley was just another member of a non-descript space crew. She may have been near (or at) the bottom of the pecking order aboard the Nostromo, but she was the only crewman with the balls to go toe-to-toe with the xenomorph… and live to brag about it. Ripley was still a strong woman in the sequels, but it was her quiet determination in 1979′s Alien that really set her apart.
1 – Ellie Arroway (Contact, 1997)
Being the first human ever to make contact with extra-terrestrial intelligence is kind of a big deal, but the obstacles Ellie had to go through just to say “G’day” to our interstellar neighbours — institutionalised misogyny, religious fanaticism, and terrorist attacks — only serves to make her an even bigger deal. Ellie’s passion, love and sheer unadulterated enthusiasm for science and the unknown is inspirational. It’s rare to see a woman in movies so passionate about something that isn’t shoes, so Ellie easily swipes my number 1 spot.
The fact that I struggled to put together five different female characters for this list is troubling. Browsing lists of the most commercially and critically successful movies, very few of them are driven by women. Fifty percent of the people on this planet are of the double-X variety; you’d think that would show up in our culture and our art, wouldn’t you?
I hope this has been as cleansing an experience for you as it has been for me. Why, I’ve nearly forgotten just how bad Sex And The City 2 was! Nearly…
Any suggestions for who you’d include in the list, or who you’d exclude? The first person to mention Angelina Jolie as Lara Croft wins a box full of sarcasm.
10 film trilogies with bad third chapters
Mar 22
Sometimes it’s because the studio makes so much money they can’t resist developing another sequel. Sometimes it’s because the franchise creators always planned a three-act story arc. Sometimes the studio funnels funds into the hands of franchise creators who don’t really know how to build on their first film. Whatever the case, 3 is the magic number in Hollywood: trilogies have grown in popularity since the overwhelming success of the original Star Wars saga, bolstered by the compelling continuity of the Lord Of The Rings model. But unfortunately these classic models have left us with some less-than-awesome knock-off products, where the third film in the series should be the best, but ends up being the worst.
Here’s a list of the ten worst offenders, the offers which you can and should refuse.
10 - The Matrix
The Matrix was a pretty cool movie. It blended dystopian cyber-punk with off-the-wall kung-fu nonsense, and struck a chord with many a cynical viewer waiting for the twenty-first century to begin. The Matrix was way over-the-top, but it was a relatively restrained production when compared with its sequels. The Matrix Reloaded and Revolutions were shot back-to-back and released a year apart to keep people’s memories fresh, or something. Reloaded was flawed but still had its moments; Revolutions was just terrible. Everything — everything — was CGI. Main characters died for no good reason. That stupid fight scene in the rain where only one Smith fights Neo went forever and never really felt real or emotional. The prolonged robot attack on the human stronghold Zion was similarly endless and weightless. The first case in this list of directors given free reign and then screwing up their own franchise.
9 – Alien/s
Okay, the Alien films are technically no longer a trilogy, but for a while there they were just 3, and Alien 3 was an extremely disappointing follow-up to Ridley Scott’s and James Cameron’s classics. Where the first movie was personal and had the element of surprise in its advantage, and the second one utilised similar tactics to rollercoasters in order to elicit squeals of excitement from the audience, the third movie tried to go back to the personal tone of the first film, and failed miserably. Without the claustrophobic atmosphere and grim photography of the first flick, Alien 3 was a strange and unwelcome entry to the saga. Killing all survivors from Aliens but Ripley was probably a mistake as well, as was setting the film on a penal colony, not to mention the squeamish introduction of religious symbolism into the series. Let’s hope Ridley Scott’s 3D Alien prequel (never thought I’d type that phrase) doesn’t suffer the same fate.
8 - Back To The Future
Another case of the back-to-back double-whammy production, Back To The Future: Part 3 is the weakest of the three by far. The first movie was tight and clever and fresh, the second movie managed to retread the first and still not become boring, but the third one struck out on a limb and became uncomfortably dull. Giving Doc a love interest and sidelining series hero Marty McFly didn’t help the series, and neither did setting it in an unconvincing Old West town. Sure, flashes of wit and character are still there, but it feels so different in tone from the earlier flicks that it comes across as something of a disappointment.
7 – Pirates Of The Caribbean
The Curse Of The Black Pearl was a revelation, a truly fun and unique take on the perennially-popular pirate tales of yore. It made a star of Keira Knightley and introduced Johnny Depp to a whole new generation of love-sick tweens, kickstarted a potentially great franchise, and managed to be consistently entertaining and original in its execution. Not so its sequels. Like The Matrix flicks, the second one was still pretty good, with a few good set-pieces and amazing visual effects tempered by an overlong script and some flat characters. But the third, At World’s End, really dropped the ball. New characters came flying out of the woodwork, the plot became overly confusing, Orlando Bloom had nothing to do, sex symbol Jack Sparrow found himself stuck in some hideously boring fantasy la-la land, and all the wit, bravura and action of the first two movies appeared to have drifted out to sea. Let’s hope On Stranger Tides brings the series back on track.
6 – Spider-Man
As I discussed in the full Spider-Man 3 review, Sam Raimi did a massive backflip between the flat-out classic of Spider-Man 2 and the ho-hum melodrama of Spider-Man 3. Like a few other flicks on this list, the third instalment introduced too many characters, went on for too long, and became too melodramatic for its own good. I mean, seriously, three villains? In a single film? The audience’s credulity can’t be stretched like spider’s silk, Raimi. The 3D Spider-Man reboot (ugh!) will never replace the classic first two films in our hearts, but maybe it can erase the memory of the third one, which can’t possibly be a bad thing.
5 – X-Men
Words can hardly describe the sheer disappointment inherent in X-Men: The Last Stand. Series founder Bryan Singer departed after the sublime second flick to pursue the equally disappointing Superman Returns, leaving the X-Men reigns in the one man fans feared the most: Brett Ratner. I’m sure Ratner’s a nice guy, and I mean him no ill will, but seriously, how do you ruin such a promising franchise in one fell swoop? So many random, unnecessary characters were introduced, you killed the captain of the Enterprise for no good reason, you included the pictured battle of powers, which looks suspiciously like something out of an episode of Dragonball Z, and you managed to do the impossible: you made Wolverine unlikeable. The poor folk who couldn’t wait for X-Men: Origins: Wolverine: The Prequel: The Movie Of The Comic were equally disappointed by the latter film’s failure to approach the quality of the first two X-films, and I think it’s safe to say, with a heavy heart, that the X-Men films’ streak of quality ended with X-2.
4 – Terminator
As discussed in my review, Terminator 3 exists in a curious state of having no purpose. Terminator itself didn’t need a sequel, but nobody complained when James Cameron’s seminal robo-action thriller Terminator 2 inevitably did roll aorund. But then there’s T3, bereft of its iconic director, devoid of an interesting script or compelling performances — and even Arnie manages to fumble his classic character. Of course Terminator Salvation was even worse; at least T3 had that hilarious crane-smashes-through-everything-in-its-path chase scene, as well as Arnie’s entertaining performance. Maybe James Cameron will be so upset that he lost the Oscar he’ll be inspired to actually make good movies again, and return to the universe he helped create.
3 – Jurassic Park
Goodness gracious me, what a cinematic abomination Jurassic Park 3 was. From the classless inclusion of a numeral in the title to the appointment of Joe Johnston in the director’s chair to the vomit-inducing fight scene pictured above, nothing about this film rang true to its source material. Jurassic Park was a streamlined vision of Michael Crichton’s techno-thriller novel, and Spielberg managed at least to include some of the morality and science of the source material in his taut and frightening adaptation. The Lost World wasn’t exactly gold, but it was still fun, and it showcases one of Spielberg’s most nail-biting action scenes (I’m talking about the trailer-over-the-cliff bit, where you almost forget for a minute about the dinosaurs, only to be forcibly reminded in a terrifying way moments later).
Everything about JP3 was cheap and nasty. The script was full of holes an illiterate five-year-old could have spotted, the characters (and the actors chosen to play them) were extremely boring and out-of-place in the Jurassic universe, and the inclusion of the spinosaur as the new big bad villain caused a million eyes to roll around the world. Spinosaurus was a piscivore with weak jaws and an alarmingly slim build — everyone knows T-rex would’ve owned him any day of the week – sorry, geeked out there for a minute. Anyway, you can’t just throw away the franchise villain in favour of the strange-looking spinosaur. Bigger is not scarier. Also, raptors that can talk and have cute quills on their skulls? No wonder Spielberg barely showed up to set in his role as executive producer.
2 - Godfather
In its own strange way, the third installment to what are arguably the two greatest films ever made lived up to the overall theme of The Godfather Parts I & II: family. The Godfather Part III is the bastard son of the bunch. The ugly duckling. The useless degenerate nobody talks about and everybody wishes didn’t have the family name. Let’s face it, The Godfather should never have been a trilogy. Part II was such stellar work, still regarded today as one of the greatest sequels ever made. Both The Godfather and The Godfather Part II came out in the 1970s and collected prestigious Oscars (we’re talking Best Picture). Over a decade passed before Part III came to fruition and boy oh boy do we wish it never had.
The release caught us all off guard, too. Our defenses were down. Francis Ford Coppola was the man. Both Godfather films, Apocalypse Now. Even The Conversation has qualities people still discuss today. So the community was excited and highly anticipated what the man would do with a third installment of his mobster story. So much about The Godfather Part III is problematic it’s hard to sum it up in a few words. The acting is horrendously forced, the plot is untidy and the overall execution, from editing to blocking, is tired and sloppy. The Godfather Part III could’t hold up under the weight of the spectacular films that preceded it. It collapsed in spectacularly embarrassing fashion.
1 - Star Wars (original trilogy)
And here’s the worst offender, the head honcho of the Third Film Failure Club, The Return Of The Jedi. The first film of the saga was plagued with poor production values and a cast and crew who actively railed against the film’s production, but miraculously George Lucas persevered and delivered a stunning slab of imagination and escapism the likes of which the world hadn’t sampled since the classic Greek myths of yore. The Empire Strikes Back improved on Star Wars‘ formula by playing with the characters and universe in a compelling way. Empire is most people’s favourite Star Wars flick, and it wins this with its darker tone and more complex morality. The Return Of The Jedi seems like a reflexive push in a new, lame direction. For every shot of Leia in the slave bikini outfit, there was a shot like the one where the droids’ feet stick out of the desert sands like some horrible Looney Toons skit; the heavy and suitably dramatic final showdown between Luke, Vader and the Emperor — the culmination of six hours’ worth of drama — is emotionally engaging to this day, but it is undermined by the inclusion in the film of a certain species of sapient organism known as ewoks.
The ewoks are symbolic of Jedi’s problems in general: it appeared to be pandering to children. The relatively serious fantasy of the first two films is completely undermined by the inclusion of walking, talking teddy-bears, and the main featured planet of Jedi is too familiarly Earth-ish to be atmospheric like Tatooine, Hoth and Bespin (of the first two films). Plus Luke is no longer recognisable — his trials with Yoda appear to have turned him from a whiney but honest youth into a crushingly dull and characterless adult. This is no single person’s fault. Lucas stepped back after the debacle of shooting the first film, and let the reigns fall into the hands of other (superior) directors for the two sequels. Empire benefited from this separation, but Jedi suffered. Then again it could’ve been Lucas’ vision from the start to end his fantasy epic end on the planet of the teddy-bears, in which case everyone should have predicted earlier just how much the prequel trilogy would suck.
There you have it, our list of good-turned-bad trilogies is complete. Do you agree with these choices? Are there other trilogies you’d include in your own lists? Do you hate ewoks as much as me?
TERMINATOR 3: RISE OF THE MACHINES review: why was this movie even made?
Jan 12
The original Terminator was released in 1984. Terminator 2: Judgment Day came along in ’91. Then, suddenly, entirely unsolicited, Arnie’s metal man made another appearance in 2003 with Terminator 3: Rise Of The Machines. If you thought T2 just about wrapped up every important narrative thread pertaining to John and Sarah Connor, their pet T-101, and the shenanigans of Skynet or Cyberdyne or whatever the bad guys were called, you’d pretty much be right. So why is T3 sitting on the DVD rental shelf alongside its superior, elder siblings?
The new film starts off dull and doesn’t improve. We are reintroduced to John Connor, now inexplicably hooning around the countryside refusing to settle down or face his destiny, and then we meet someone called Kate Brewster, and then … a lady Terminator comes back through time, and then Arnie’s T-101 model is sent again to stop her, and then … they fight. And then they fight again. And they fight a little more. And then the script attempts to sprinkle some bombshells in terms of John’s mysterious future, but they just seem weird and boring. More fighting occurs, and then the movie suddenly ends on a completely unforeseeable and unwelcome note.
The first problem in the movie is John Connor. He’s just not the same kid we left at the end of T2. He’s dull, boring, aimless, and there’s just nothing interesting for the audience to grab onto. There’s no moment where he ”saves the cat,” thereby endearing himself to the audience, there’s no real action or decision on his part, and he spends all his time running away from something you can’t run away from. This guy is stupid, and is a terrible protagonist.
Kate Brewster is barely any better. Sure, she saves cats for a living, but otherwise there is literally nothing about her to care for or encourage. She’s just an average middle-class white American woman, working hard and getting married and doing all those other cinematically boring things. She also interestingly cops all the hard knocks – the only major characters that die are close relatives of hers. I suppose the screenwriters had to motivate her somehow.
The running theme of incompetence tying these two characters together is the spectacularly awful casting. I’m sure Nick Stahl and Claire Danes are fine actors when given the right material and direction, but here they come across as totally unconvincing and superfluous, kind of serving as stupid cyphers to explain to audience what’s going on and how they’re supposed to feel. The men that play Kate Brewster’s fiancé and father are both horribly mis-cast as well — nice-looking fellas like Kate’s dad just don’t become warlords in movies, it’s jarring.
I have no idea how director Jonathon Mostow managed to do this, but even Arnie can’t pull off his old character. Mostow seems intent on building up any potential comic relief, and is obviously micro-managing Arnie’s timings and expressions, but it just comes off cheesy and unwarranted. And it’s sad to see that Arnie has forgotten all the great direction James Cameron gave him regarding expressionlessness and physical presence — here it’s just wrong, all wrong. This is one of the few Arnie movies out there where I actually feel uncomfortable watching Arnie, like his own discomfort is telegraphed straight into my brain by a subtle combination of expression and body language. I know Arnie was probably always awkward and possibly confused on set, but other directors do a lot more work to cover it up, but here it just comes blasting straight through. And this is coming from someone who’ll happily watch Eraser and Total Recall without cringing. Almost.
The script being read throughout this movie actually isn’t technically atrocious. Some of the dialogue is pretty snappy, Arnie gets some good one-liners, and there are some brave, potentially fanboy-upsetting retcons worked into the story, but every last iota of originality and fun is squandered by weak direction. I can’t stress enough how utterly dull Mostow’s shot composition and visual aesthetic are. Where Cameron went for bold, hard lighting and geometric frames and lots of wide angles of the imposing T-101, Mostow just goes for the lame old three-across-the-front setups for most scenes, with a brown, grimy palette ruining most interior scenes. His direction of the actors is similarly bad, with timing, characterisation, and nuance thrown out the window in favour of George Lucas’ infamous “faster, more intense” mantra. T2 was also a movie about the end of the world, but at least it took the time to make us care about the people whose world was ending. Here, it’s like, 3 billion people? Living in this world presented to us in TV-quality shots? With no likeable characters or charismatic actors to speak of? Eh, let ‘em burn.
Thankfully, the action scenes aren’t so badly mishandled. What is odd, though, is that the biggest action scene takes place towards the front of the film, leaving the rest feel top-heavy. But the sequence in which the T-X hijacks a crane and absolutely demolishes everything in her way is visually satisfying to the extreme. There’s something cathartic about watching the humdrum constructs of our menial reality getting torn to shreds and smashed onto the ground, and here Mostow’s shooting style is actually appropriate. He sticks with steady shots wide enough to capture the action but tight enough to be exciting — none of this ultra-close super-chopped action nonsense in the likes of Transformers and Quantum Of Solace, and scarcely a CG-enhanced shot in sight (in this sequence, anyway), thank god — and this action scene in particular is a lot of fun to watch. Subsequent action scenes never return to the scope of this first one, but they’re all okay, I guess, if you like watching two heavy, indestructable god-machines smashing each other into fragile things like walls and ceilings and concrete floors.
Oh, I almost forgot, WHERE THE HELL IS SARAH CONNOR? These movies are about her, this is completely 100% her story – John Connor is her son, her responsibility, her legacy, not the main character of the whole franchise, for Pete’s sake. For a good thirty minutes I kept wondering where she was, and then she gets ungraciously swept under the rug in a flimsy dialogue scene. That’s right folks, the woman who saved the world from nuclear annihilation succumbed to leukemia. Not to belittle the dreadful experiences of those suffering the disease, but killing an iconic film character with this invisible foe, and off-screen at that, screams betrayal to the audience that comes to see your movie as a continuation of a previous narrative, and in a world filled with time-travelling robots, it’s just weird. Realistic diseases are the least of our concerns, bearing in mind there’s an imminent nuclear holocaust breathing down our necks. It’s obvious that Linda Hamilton just didn’t want anything to do with this nonsense, and while I can’t blame her, the filmmakers should have dug up some archive footage of her character and built a real, satisfying reason to kill her off.
I’m the last person who’d be called a Terminator fan. I thought the first one was okay, but it’s severely dated by this day and age. I think the second film is just a good sci-fi action flick, well-constructed and fun to watch. I don’t really follow the unnecessarily convoluted Cyberdyne / Skynet nonsense, or pay too much attention to the time-travel aspect of it (wouldn’t the people who sent Arnie back in the first film know immediately that they failed, and just send another one? Or two? Perhaps earlier in Sarah Connor’s life? Idiots!), so I’m not a bona fide fanatic when it comes to the series. But Terminator 3 offends even me. As a casual observer of the first two, I feel like my casual observances have been repaid with mass-produced, pandering, sloppy, boring crap based on an uninspired script directed by an amateur. The only positive aspects for me were the action scenes and Arnie’s mere presence, and when “Arnie’s in it” is the best thing you can say about a movie, you know it’s got to be pretty bad.
Terminator 3 score
32/100
SPIDER-MAN 4 scrapped in favour of franchise reboot
Jan 12
Hollywood is officially broken. After a recent flurry of casting rumours (Anne Hathaway, John Malkovich as new villains), delays, script problems and fan plot speculation regarding the planned fourth, fifth and sixth Spidey flicks, Sam Raimi has finally had enough of Sony’s shit, and has officially left the building, taking with him Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst, the heart and soul of the films, and any sense of dignity the series might once have had. I was doing my daily news rounds, saw a little piece on Malkovich publicly confirming his involvement in Spidey 4, and then BAM — a headline about Spider-Man 4 being unceremoniously let go.
Deadline brings us the bad news.
You’ve got to wonder what Sony was thinking. Until The Dark Knight came out, Spider-Man 3 was the highest-grossing superhero film of all time, despite its mixed reception. If I was Sony, I’d let Raimi loose on the fourth film, maybe with the mandate to pare down the number of villains introduced. I’d try to keep intact and nurture the creative team behind the first three films. I’d plan on turning a dime by putting the same names on the poster as I did the last three times. I wouldn’t reboot the freaking series.
I don’t want a reboot at all. I don’t want to have to go through Peter Parker’s formative high school character-building sequence again just to get to the web-slinging, heart-breaking action. I don’t want to have to put up with someone who isn’t Tobey Maguire filling the shoes, I’d feel guilty and awkward. I’ve grown attached to Maguire as dorky Peter, and anyone else in the role would just feel like a whole different character. And who would they get to direct? Brett Ratner? God save us all.
Anyway this reboot is due in northern hemisphere summer 2012, by which time we’ll have had Iron Man 2, The Avengers, Captain America, Nick Fury, Thor, The Fantastic Four (another, more reasonable reboot), X-Men: First Class, as well as The Green Lantern, Jonah Hex, and god knows how many more Marvel / DC superhero flicks. The world’s gonna burnt be out on over-the-top action and ordinary people fighting extraordinary fights. You’d think around this time we’d be hankering for a revival of the feeling that for many people started the superhero movie craze: the perfect time for a good old-fashioned Spidey sequel.
Sure I’m taking this a lot more sensitively because I literally just watched all three Raimi-helmed Spider-Man flicks, but I don’t think I’m being too unreasonable here. It’s like Bryan Singer leaving the X-Men movies — oh wait, he did that. Okay, it’s like Peter Jackson not directing The Hobbit — oh wait … It’s like James Cameron not finishing off the Terminator movies — damn it! It’s like Steven Spielberg walking away from Jurassic Park — argh!
Okay, okay, I should have seen this coming. But seriously, sometimes Hollywood is a stupid, stupid place.
AVATAR DAY / hype retrospective: I don’t think so, Jim
Dec 10
“James Cameron”: the man’s name is synonymous with large-scale action blockbusters. His sci-fi actioners reigned supreme from the mid-80s till the early 90s, giving us a string of classics: The Terminator (1984), Aliens (1986), The Abyss (1989), and Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991); the common theme among them? Ordinary, complex, flawed human beings dealing with utterly foreign, incomprehensible sentience in extraordinary circumstances, running the gamut from space travel to time travel to life at the bottom of the ocean. Cameron then flipped around and casually spun out True Lies (1994), a romantic comedy / thriller espionage / action flick starring Jamie Lee Curtis (the 80s queen of scream) and Arnold Schwarzenegger (the 80s king of, er, everything). Entertaining as it was, it found Cameron in unfamiliar ground, and was a minor disappointment after the decade of pure science fiction gold he’d been consistently delivering.
And then there was Titanic (1997), Cameron’s last feature film for over a decade, and also the highest-grossing film in the history of everything that has ever existed, ever (although if you adjust for inflation I don’t think it’s still the highest–why don’t these record-keepers ever adjust for inflation?): a three-hour epic on the high seas with the kind of pioneering, state-of-the-art effects we’d learned to expect from Cameron during his 80s run as king of action, as well as a complex, remarkably human story interwoven with the inevitable tragedy of the whole ship-sinking affair. Again it was Cameron breaking new ground thematically and visually, and being a slave to historical accuracy isn’t fun for anyone, filmmaker or audience, but Cameron tapped into a vast and varied well of emotion for the film–there was something for everyone in Titanic.
After the records were smashed and the world wept in theater seats when Jack finally let go, Cameron fell off the cinematic radar. He churned out a few curiously dull documentaries about expeditions to research sunken ships (Bismarck and Titanic) and a couple documenting deep-sea exploration and some of the unique life forms that live down there in the deep. It seems Cameron enjoys the high pressure and responsibility of being in command of such dangerous ventures as exploring the deep sea, so it comes as no surprise that he’s come back to cinema to change the way we view movies forever.
This finally brings us to Avatar. Cameron supposedly wrote a treatment for the film in 1994 (so, around True Lies) but held off on filming it because it was too ambitious–the technology for realistically depicting an alien planet was beyond us circa 1994. And so he continued to hold it off, spent some time underwater yelling at people (Cameron is a perfectionist, so I assume he yells a lot in everyday life), held it off some more, discovered that digital cameras were capable of shooting stereoscopic images around 2000, realised two years later that digital projectors being rolled out world-wide in the next decade would be able to support the kind of digital 3D format he was interested in shooting with, possibly met up with pal Robert Zemeckis (whose awful 3D mo-cap uncanny valley extravaganzas have been disappointing audiences for years) and suddenly decided not to hold it off any longer.
So here we are. It’s 2009. December 10th. A week before Avatar unspools (or unpauses, as it will be showing mostly on digital screens), we are finally getting to the pointy end of the hyperbolic timeline. Despite my faith in James Cameron as a visionary, trend-setting director, I now have some doubts about Avatar. But before I get to now, let’s go back a bit: in August, Cameron held a worldwide 15-minute 3D Imax preview of the film to kick the marketing machine into gear. Cameron made a lot of promises leading up to Avatar, and this was his first chance to deliver on his many, numerous, varied guarantees. Here’s a brief rundown of his biggest promises:
January 2007 – James Cameron states that filming is pretty much finished, and that the next two years will be spent exclusively on attaining ‘photorealism’ in the animation. Photorealism means ‘as though taken by a real camera’–animation indistinguishable from real, live-action shots. There are no degrees of photorealism. It’s either photorealistic or it’s not. There hasn’t been a single visual effect in the history of cinema that people haven’t subconsciously registered as not being real, and if they deny that they’re lying. Claiming photorealism is a big call–and a big turning-point in cinema. Cameron goes on to claim the performances are 95% acting, 5% animation–ears and hair and whatnot are dealt with by hand, the rest automatically translated by electronic programs; and explains that the film was shot with stereo HD cameras.
April 2008 - James Cameron states that in 10 – 15 years, all display devices will be stereoscopic–3D TVs, computer monitors, phones and, of course, cinemas. This is a big call to make because to date there hasn’t been a single movie that’s compelled the audience to get behind the new tech in a big way–Cameron’s implying Avatar will usher in that support. (Incidentally, this interview is fantastic for filmmakers curious about the performance, lighting and technology of 3D photography.)
May 2008 - Cameron claims the captured performances will be photorealistic and as emotive as real, live-action performances.
August 2008 - Cameron states the film will be 60% computer-generated, 40% live-action.
September 2008 - “[Avatar] makes Titanic look like a picnic.”
Mid-2009 – Empire ran a print article on Avatar in which James Cameron claimed the ecology of Pandora, the fictional moon on which the film takes place, was designed from the ground up: geography, biology, ecology, history, and the native society. Cameron implied that the biological, evolutionary, and ecological realism of the film was unprecedented, and claimed that the ecology was fully-functional and self-contained, as a real alien ecology would be.
August 2009 - Cameron compares the plot of the film to that of The Matrix and The Wizard Of Oz, claiming Avatar’s plot will take people by surprise and draw them in immediately.
This is a brief run-down, incomplete at best, of the claims Cameron made of which I was aware before Avatar Day. Hearing these things from the genius who brought us Aliens and The Abyss, I was inclined to take these claims seriously. So, with much anticipation, I sat down in the quarter-full Imax theatre (Imax is short for ‘image maximum’–eurgh), put on the polarised glasses, and felt my anticipation rise as the 4K double digital projectors whirred to life above and behind us.
Then–there he was! James Cameron himself, in 3D! Live-action! Wow, just watching him talk to us is amazing! I thought at the time. Look at his nose! It’s like I’m in the room with him! James finished his brief introduction, asked if we were ready to go to Pandora, and then the 15-minute preview began.
The first scene we saw was live-action. So far, so good: boots and uniforms and scars in 3D look fine, just fine. I could live with watching movies this way (except for the dullness of the image, caused by the polarised glasses). But then we saw a chopped-up version of the scene where hero Jake Sully first takes command of his half-alien, computer-animated Avatar. The first thing I thought was this: in this lighting, that doesn’t look like a real creature. The lighting was realistic, the skin textures were high-resolution and semi-transparent, but the blue thing lying on the table in front of me just didn’t look real. Maybe it was the subtle movements of the face / hair that didn’t jive with my perception of reality, but something was off, something was heading for the uncanny valley.
And then we were plunged into the jungles of Pandora, where most of the rest of the preview took place, and it was here that the disappointment really set it. The rest of the characters we saw were all mo-capped, and having already established that mo-cap is still somewhere in the uncanny valley, I was desperate to see a real, 3D human face somewhere, but instead all I got were avatars and pure na’vi (the Pandoran natives). Sure, the technology is further along than that of Zemeckis’ films–light shines realistically on their faces and a myriad of subtleties have carried over very nicely–but you still know you’re looking at a digital product: it’s in the eyes, mostly.
But the worst was yet to begin–the ecology of Pandora is ridiculous. If you ever studied biology casually in high school, or even if you’ve ever been to a zoo, you’ll agree that the creatures of Pandora are bullshit. Four eyes on a creature the size of a small lorry? Evolution would have shaved that adaptation from the bloodlines millennia ago. Six legs on a horse-sized / shaped creature? Four legs are all creatures that size can manage on land–six is unnecessary, a waste of resources, and would get in the way of locomotion, causing the rest of the animal’s anatomy to be unnecessarily contorted in such a way as to accommodate the utter bullshit adaptation of an extra pair of legs–this is not the way evolution works. There’s a reason that dinosaurs, lizards, amphibians, mammals and even fish have a quadriplegic design–efficiency of locomotion.
And then there’s the na’vi–if predators bigger than my car have four eyes they can presumably see better than your average lion or tiger, so if you evolve in a dark green jungle, how the hell do you expect to wind up with electric blue skin and survive to have children, let alone kick off a civilization?
Add to this the fact that there are two massive, completely different, hulking carnivores in the same patch of territory and Cameron’s claims of ecological realism go straight out the window along with his claims of photorealism. The above paragraphs may seem nit-picky to you, but James Cameron promised me something. He promised realistic, intelligent portrayals of extra-terrestrial life, not the same stock-standard Hollywood bullshit monsters we’ve seen a million times in Star Wars and Star Trek. Sure, the gas mixture on Pandora is sufficiently different from ours to cultivate different forms of life, but if there are green plants, yellow sunlight and blue water involved, there would almost certainly be some oxygen; and if the life-forms end up evolving into humanoid forms, the would almost definitely be a lot of oxygen, because body plans like ours are likely arrived at by the evolutionary accommodation of oxygen transfer and utilisation.
Plus of the 15 minutes we saw, I’d say the ratio of animation : live-action was about 9 : 1, trampling Cameron’s earlier 6 : 4 claim. This is important because immersion is broken or interrupted by things that look fake, especially in 3D movies, so if your whole movie looks fake, you’re up the creek, mate.
The bulk of my disappointment is a direct result of James Cameron’s bullshit. I challenge you to read the linked articles, watch the trailers and clips, and not feel the same way as I do. If you’re going to change the face of cinema forever, at least be cautious and humble about it at first, don’t start bragging before the cat’s even out of the bag.
So Avatar Day was, for me, a complete disaster. The story was lame and familiar, the animation was merely good and not fucking perfect as Cameron promised, and the ecology and realism of this alien world were pretty poor at best. My faith in the almighty genius of the Cameron was shaken that day, and I’m sad to say it hasn’t recovered after watching all the yawn-inducing stills trickle through over the months. The only shining light in the dark is the second trailer for Avatar–we see a lot more humans in live action, and the plot seems to be a little more involved than just ‘infiltrate the natives, realise they’re better than you’ plot we were rolling our eyes at six months ago.
What do you think of the Avatar hype? What was your initial reaction to the first trailers / clips that filtered online the last few weeks? Any hope left for Cameron as a director?
Stay tuned for Captain Howdy’s take on the hype over the weekend.
OPINIONS COUNT