CRS
Chandler, Arizona, United States

There's an old saying. If you don't want someone to join a crowd, you ask them, "If everyone were jumping off of a cliff, would you?" Well, I have. So my answer would be "Yes". True story.
Profile continued . . .

ARCHIVES!
Review of Avatar

Thursday, April 22, 2010

this entry brought to you by the yeah yeah yeahs, "the sweets"





When King Kong was remade by Peter Jackson a few years ago, the detractors of the movie kept commenting that King Kong was a movie that didn't need remaking. It's a classic, they argued, and all attempts to remake classics simply fall on their face.

But have you ever actually seen the original King Kong? I watched it a week before I watched Peter Jackson's remake, and it's a mess of a movie. The plot itself makes absolutely no sense. They're going out to Skull Island, which for some reason is inhabited by giant dinosaurs-- why not call it Dinosaur Island? And there's a giant ape there, which doesn't make any scientific sense, but the science really is the least of the movie's problems-- exactly what sort of film it is the producer/director plans on making is never explained. He wants it on exotic locations, as if they want it to be a documentary, but they have an actress, yet they have no script. The movie is filled with racism and sexism, which is expected at the time, but the "hero" goes out of his way to constantly proclaim how much he doesn't need any woman, yet is ready to marry her in the last act with absolutely no motivation. The "heroine" herself has no character at all, faints at the drop of a hat, and her backstory, that of being a street worker being cast in a movie at last minute is completely unnecessary for the rest of the story, except possibly to explain why she is constantly fainting. Maybe she is malnourished? And when they capture the giant ape and bring him to New York, they plan a major, uproarious good time on Broadway, that appears to be nothing but staring at a giant ape for an indeterminate amount of time with no actual entertainment.

But the biggest problem with the movie is the last line, said by the director/producer of the farcical movie-within-a-movie-- "It was beauty that killed this beast!" So they're saying the ape was in love, and it was his love for the girl that killed the giant ape. Yet there was no attempt at any sort of showing the ape in love at all. In fact, the parody on The Simpsons about 70 years later that was about 7 minutes long does a better job at an actual love story than the original 80 minute movie did.

I say all this not because any of it actually matters. The original King Kong is, frankly, awesome. And while looking at it 80 years later, it's impossible to appreciate it as a story, it's still very easy to get swept up in the spectacle. At the time the movie's imagery wasn't just captivating, it was mind-boggling. The ape, an entirely fictional thing, interacted with people in amazing, holy-shit-how'd-they-do-that ways that, even to this day, aren't entirely obvious. Sometimes spectacle beats depth. There's not a damn thing wrong with that.

Despite the fact that the movie is the number one movie of all time, I have found myself, essentially since the day I saw it, having to continually defend how much I enjoyed the movie. In fact, more often then not, I'm not talking with anyone about how awesome it is. And the simple fact is, I don't actually disagree with any of the criticisms the movie gets.

Yes, the script is somewhat shallow, and there are more than a few lines that are complete clunkers. In fact, one thing that has annoyed me about people making fun of the script is that they would often say that James Cameron's scripts are always shallow. That's not true. Titanic's script was shallow. I actually would argue that Avatar's script is less shallow, but Terminator 2 and Aliens, despite both having clunky "director's cuts", have legitimately solid scripts with clever characters that actually feel like people. Avatar doesn't always feel that way. Sam Worthington's character, Jake Sully, breathes the life of an everyman, and it seems impossible not to be able to relate with him. Zoe Saldana's alien Neytiri is so natural and captivating that you cannot keep your eyes off of her.

Every other character is a character type whose only direction seems to be to play up that type as far as it will go. There is the bitchy business lady. The nerdy guy. The in-over-his-head company executive. The over-the-top macho army guy. Michelle Rodriguez is the same as she always is, and her character is completely useless, and half-way through the movie I realized I only was telling myself I liked Sigourney Weaver's character because I love Sigourney Weaver; if she'd been played by essentially anyone else, I would have been annoyed at how terribly one-dimensional she is. It's also impossible to see the movie and not feel the archetypal story setup, which is exactly the same as Dances With Wolves, and to a lesser extent, Lawrence of Arabia, Out of Africa, The Matrix, and about a dozen other stories with a white person visiting some native people and saving the day.

I say all that, and yet I loved Avatar, much in the same way audiences loved King Kong so many years ago. The truth is, once every generation-- or hell, longer-- there's a movie that is so full of innovation that it doesn't matter if the individual parts are a little weak. There's King Kong of course. Then Star Wars in 1976 (yeah, yeah, I know, Star Wars is king, blah blah blah-- go watch Return of the Jedi again and explain to me why the ultimate weapon to crush the rebels is the same damn ultimate weapon in the first movie, only this time incomplete). And now Avatar.

Yes, it's frustrating that Jim Cameron is capable of writing a better script, and yet didn't. But the first thing out of my mouth when I left the theater was, "I wonder how well the video game scored, because I want to spend more time in that world." The experience of the world was so well thought out, so immersive, and so, well, imaginative, the individual problems with the movie didn't matter. Furthermore, there's nobody that can pace a movie better than James Cameron, and true to form, the movie is a roller coaster ride, with one of the cleanest, most exhilarating climaxes in movie history-- up there with the climaxes of Aliens and Terminator 2.

Really, I brought up the King Kong analogy to defend Avatar from its detractors. The truth is though, I genuinely loved the story and found it utterly captivating. Yes, it was a lot like Dances With Wolves, but it is also grand in scope that it seems inevitable to not have ties with classic movies-- really, is Dances With Wolves and all the stories like it really so bad to be compared to? Avatar has a certain magic that feels undeniable to me, and I can't shake the feeling that to deny Avatar outside of some sort of counter-popularity hipsterness is to simply not enjoy event movies. And if that's not your thing then, fine-- but don't pretend like the original King Kong was this masterpiece that can't be touched.
-----



with love from CRS @ 7:11 PM 

0 Comments:

Post a Comment