Avatar

Watching Avatar, I was reminded of all the reasons James Cameron's films were so important to me as a boy and later a teenager. I am now something close to an adult viewer and I felt strangely in commune with my adolescent self. "I would've loved that," I thought, watching the giant dinosaur-bird-thing demolish the giant helicopter-warship-thing. My old self, I thought, would not have known what to do with the blue alien sex love scene but, again, I think he would've liked it.

Avatar feels like a great launchpad for a revisiting of Cameron's oeuvre. It's got everything that makes his movies great and everything that makes them silly.

Cameron's films will forever connect to the fourteen-year-old boys of the world. As an action director he is visceral and kinetic in the best way: his films are exciting and breathtaking and always feel "new" (even the old ones, still), but for all his talk of reinventing cinema, he speaks in a very old and trusted language. Where Michael Bay reaches his audiences (somehow) through noise and static, Cameron's genius lies in his ability to tell a fluid story with his camera. It feels great to be talked to again. With the language of film, Cameron is a master poet.

So no, I don't think anything has been reinvented here, except for a lot of special effects.

Those special effects, though, are not to be denied, and are the reason every professional filmmaker is currently dropping Avatar as the revolution Cameron claimed it would be. I am generally suspicious when I read an interview with a geeky filmmaker talking about all the special effects he needed to tell his story. In this case, however, I believe Cameron knew exactly what he was doing in the twelve years since Titanic.

Cameron made an appearance at ShoWest (the National Association of Theater Owners' annual Vegas tradeshow) in 2005 to announce that when he finished Avatar, there would have to be thousands of digital, 3D-equipped screens around the country. Have you noticed the proliferation of "digital 3D" cinemas in the past five years? There you go. This is why.

I have now seen the film twice: once on a full-sized IMAX screen with 3D glasses and a $15 ticket, and again on a screen not much bigger than my televison, with poor sound and poorer focus and only two meager dimensions. I can say that while the picture obviously wasn't as nifty the second time around, it still worked, and I still loved it. And that's because Cameron knows how to tell a story.

The key to enjoying Avatar is the same as it was with Titanic: these are both epic, three-hour disaster movies with a lot of amazing effects, but unless we want to see the boy and the girl in each other's arms, we won't care if their lives are in danger. It's about the difference between threatening the life of our main character and threatening the life of the person we know the main character to love (see also: Aliens, Terminator 2). What sets Avatar apart is that in this case, the girl our main character loves happens to be a ten-foot tall blue alien, and that's where special effects become necessary instead of decorative. "We figured the story wouldn't work if you didn't want to do her," says Cameron in a refreshingly candid interview for Maxim. This is about as perfect a definition of 'pathos' as I've ever heard.


The girl here is Neytiri, whose tribe lives in a very large tree on a distant moon called Pandora (cough). The Na'vi are a peaceful, spiritual race who communicate with all the flora and fauna on Pandora through what Glenn Kenny describes as "organic USB ports". From within their ponytails sprout bioluminescent feelers that hook into similar antennae in the animals or just wrap themselves around a tree branch, leaving the whole orgiastic population literally connected to nature. The humans that intrude on their land deplore them as primitive and undeveloped, but why fix what isn't broken?

The humans have come because they (I hesitate to say "we") have wrung the Earth dry of its natural resources and intend to mine Pandora for a powerful ore called "unobtanium" (which is a ridiculous name even if Cameron is just paying homage to a classic trope). There's a particularly strong deposit of the rock underneath the Na'vi's tree, so the humans are going to bust up the hood whether or not the Na'vi are still hanging around.

This is where our hero Jake (of the "Jarhead Clan") comes in, wirelessly piloting a genetically-engineered Na'vi body and earning his keep with the natives. Jake is the "diplomatic solution", charged with persuading them to move from their giant sacred tree so they don't all get killed when the humans swoop in to knock it down. From here, the story goes exactly where you expect it to if you've seen (obvious comparisons) Dances With Wolves, Pocahontas/The New World or Ferngully: The Last Rainforest.

What impresses about Avatar, and what transcends the sentimentality that so many haters claim turned them off from Titanic, is the fiercely political message. The film is anti-war, pro-environment and very nearly anti-human. As Jake earns his place with the Na'vi and his allegiances begin to sway, the audience sways with him until we are rooting for the blue guys. There is a faction of about four or five humans that have defected, but when it comes time for the climactic battle to save Pandora, it's the humans in their warplanes we must be rooting against.


What bothers me is hearing 14-year-old boys in the theater cheer on the devastation - "Yeah, get some!" I heard one say as a Na'vi warrior put an arrow into the heart of a faceless GI. Coppola said that all war movies are inherently anti-war, but as The Hurt Locker effectively illustrated, the anti-war sentiment is going to be in the eye of the beholder. I think Cameron gives it his all to set up this battle as not a good thing, but there will always be a boy in the audience who just thinks war is cool.

Early in the film, Jake is being attacked by a gang of ravenous, fanged Pandoran wolf-creatures. He's saved by Neytiri, who smacks him when he thanks her. "This is a bad thing," she explains. "They did not have to die." That's anti-war movie-making in a nutshell. Is it a good thing that our hero was saved? Sure. But it's also a terrible thing that the war had to be fought in the first place. If he hadn't gone trespassing in the Pandoran jungle, nobody would've died.

In the next hour leading up to the final battle, Cameron references Vietnam, the Trail of Tears, the wars in Iraq and finally 9/11 as the humans come in and collapse the Na'vi's towering tree in a cloud of fire, smoke and floating ash. Is it cynical to imagine Cameron, who has allegedly been assembling this film since 1995, sitting in front of his television on September 11, 2001, thinking "I can use that..."? I suppose it's more likely he thought, as most of the world's artists did that day, "I have to use that - it's now my duty."

How you can sit through all this and end up excited for the battle is beyond me, but I suppose that's the way boys are. The action sequences are quite awesome in the literal sense of the word. I only hope that those in the audience shouting "Awesome!" are not missing the point. They are cheering on a story based on the darkest sides of our humanity. By the film's end, Jake is referring to the humans as "the aliens". We are the invaders, the murderers, who killed our planet and want to ravage another and another after that. Awesome.

This is the first part of an open-ended series revisiting the work of James Cameron. To read any more I may publish in the future, click through his tag.

Die Hard (1988)

Here's why Die Hard is one of the best Christmas movies ever.

Die Hard tells a Capra-esque story about a lonely man in a foreign land who just wants to get to his family for Christmas. Not only does the holiday serve as inciting incident (it's what finally uproots our hero from New York City and drags him to California), it's also worth looking into Hans Gruber's selection of the date for his big heist.

Getting off a plane at LAX, John McClane mutters a bemused "California..." under his breath at various points, once upon seeing a blonde bimbo jumping into the arms of her beloved. He's a stranger in a strange land - this provides much of the movie's pathos. McClane doesn't like even setting foot in Los Angeles (I can get behind him on this). When his limo driver Argyle is pressing for his life story, he explains that his wife abandoned him ("She had a good job that turned into a great career", he says) and took the kids to the other side of the country. Why didn't he go with them? He tells Argyle: "I got a six-month backlog of New York scumbags I'm still trying to put behind bars. I can't just pack up and leave that easy."


Obviously, there's more to it than that. A deep rift at least a continent wide has been keeping John from his wife. When he shows up at the Nakatomi tower to meet her at her company's holiday party, he discovers that she has been operating under her maiden name. The film is never explicit about what exactly the company does, and this is key. The closest we get to the inner workings at Nakatomi are when Gruber takes Takagi up to his executive office to shoot him in the head. Here we see some models of various infrastructural projects, and Takagi pledges that his company has always acted altruistically.

But the thing is: Gruber isn't even interested in the company. He's just there for the money. The entire scheme hinges on Gruber's particularly brilliant idea to disguise an extraordinary smash-and-grab as global terrorism. His plan is calculated to a tee and based around a number of circumstantial factors: on Christmas Eve, people are going to be well-lubricated and with their guards down, and the building, still partially under construction anyway, will be mostly empty.

Nakatomi is rich and some theives want to steal their millions of dollars in bonds. That this action can be so easily construed as terrorism - especially post-9/11 - is an essentially American perspective. Gruber is counting on the dumb Americans to get their panties all in a bunch (and most of them do) - it's the misdirection in his great magic trick. He orders the release of political prisoners he read about in a magazine just to confuse the police and buy time.

Of course, Gruber didn't count on John McClane. This is his great failure, and it's one we can fault him for. As Michael Scott so eloquently explained, what makes McClane such a compelling hero (at least in this installment of the franchise) is that he is, in fact, an everyman. He may be a New York City cop, but that doesn't count for much in Los Angeles (even to the LAPD). As one officer says, he might as well be a bartender up there. What counts from McClane is his resolve. Gruber assumed he would be busting up a party full of drunken, coked-up capitalists who would cower in the corner and wait for him to finish his plot. But it's Christmas, man, and John McClane has a family to reunite. Were Gruber not so cynical about Americans at Christmastime, he might've seen this coming.

Christmas is when the magic happens. It's when daddies come home to their daughters and spirits are raised in happy memories and optimism. The Nakatomi company may be Japanese, but Takagi moved to San Diego when he was two years old and built a global corporation. The Tower is built of money that the foreign bad guys want to run off with. Hans Gruber is attacking America the same way Osama Bin Laden did - he may only be a thief, but if you scare somebody you are, effectively, a terrorist. Gruber just has a different motive. He expects that Christmas will be when he can catch us at our most vulnerable (a notion shared by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab) but it's also when we are going to fight for our families.

John McClane is cast here as the perfect American hero. He's a cowboy. The Nakatomi company is filled with globe-hopping traders, but this New York City cop is purebred. He's a die hard, and if he didn't have his police training he'd still be resourceful and willing to stand and fight to the death. Lucy McClane, his young daughter, appears twice in the film to ask when her daddy is coming home. Terrorist or no terrorist, you get home to that girl for Christmas.

McClane does suspect he might die. He knows he's mortal but he's willing to make the sacrifice if it means saving the day. At his lowest, after Hans tells his henchmen to "shoot the glass!" and he gets his feet all cut up, he radios his brother-in-arms down on the ground to deliver a message to his wife.

"I want you to tell her something," he says. He's not even sure what it is yet. This is a great soliloquy: within this beat, McClane realizes that he is sorry. "I want you to tell her that, um ... tell her it took me a while to figure out what a jerk I've been. But, um, that ... that when things started to pan out for her I shoulda been more supportive and I just shoulda been behind her more. Ah, shit. Tell her that ... that she's the best thing that ever happened to a bum like me. She's heard me saying 'I love you' a thousand times. She never heard me say 'I'm sorry.' I want you to tell her that, Al. I want you to tell her that John said that he was sorry. Okay? You got that, man?"

When the battle is won, John introduces his wife to his compatriot Sgt. Al and he refers to her as "Holly Gennaro", displaying a newfound acceptance of his wife as an independent woman on a career path. When she corrects him - "Holly McClane" - the arc of their relationship is complete. The credits are rolling two minutes later, in which time Al, Argyle, and William Atherton's sniveling Action News reporter Richard Thornburg all get wrap-ups (Al fires his gun again, Argyle busts out of the locked-down parking garage and Thornburg gets one right in the kisser from Mrs. McClane), but the reconciliation of the McClane family is what Die Hard is all about. And what's better for a Christmas story than a man and woman who love each other working out their issues and going home to give Lucy a big stuffed bear?

Sherlock Holmes

Guy Ritchie's new incarnation of Sherlock Holmes comes with two surprises: 1) the story, though dull, at least makes sense and doesn't flail out of Ritchie's limited grasp and 2) the film recasts Holmes and his life-partner Dr. Watson as the most blatantly homosexual pair of screen idols this side of Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist. I hesitate to use the word 'subtext', though that is technically where the gayness lies; the homosexuality is never explicit, unless you count the pet names "Old Cock" and "Mother Hen" as 'explicit'.

I have to wonder if the two leads, Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law, decided to see if they could pull this off without telling anyone. (I can envision the two of them meeting at a pub the night before production began to wager their paychecks on whether or not Ritchie would catch on.) The two of them are playing in a different film than all the other actors, although the script does seem to back them up: Watson is moving out - the two men share a flat - and in with a woman whom he intends to marry. Neither seems particularly thrilled with this - there is no chemistry between Watson and his fiancée, and the marriage for both is decidedly convenient. Holmes in particular is facing a rapid descent into depression, drug-addiction and alcoholism. He proceeds to prank the happy heterosexual couple throughout the film with varying degrees of taste.

In fact, Holmes' and Watson's relationship follows a pretty standard rom-com arc. It begins with the other woman, whose presence leads to hijinks of an increasingly bitter nature. This results in Watson giving Holmes the silent treatment for most of the second act of the film, until Holmes lures him back into his heart with a delicately choreographed re-enactment of one of their favorite dates (in this case: solving murders). Finally they team up once more to bring down the bad guy - you kind of hope Watson will refer to Sherlock as "Shirley" during their sweet rekindling.


Not that there's anything wrong with that. The flirtation between Downey and Law is pretty much the only interesting thing the movie has to offer. I suppose it's worth mentioning that if homosexuality ever does become acceptable in mainstream culture, we stand to lose a great wellspring for subversion.

Oh, yeah: there's some complicated business involving a bad guy with a plot to take over the world. Lord Blackwood wants to take over the Parliament so that he might stage a coup to regain control of "the colonies" across the Atlantic (nefarious!) and he's going to do it with a biological weapon that will incite fear in the common people (relevant!).

Sherlock Holmes, we may recall, is allegedly a detective of some kind. Most of the detective work we witness involves deducing how best to beat up henchmen. Apart from this, there are a few revelations of the indecipherable-jargon variety and some plot twists that just don't qualify. Why, if you're trying to surprise your audience with a dead villain's resurrection, would you set up the action by showing Holmes drugging his bulldog into a sedated state which, to the very same doctor that will pronounce the bad guy deceased, is indistinguishable from death?

The bulk of the film is loud, obnoxious action perforated by lengthy spans of tedious exposition. It's really quite boring, although it provides one of the more impressive motivations I've found in a while to make me wish the two leads would just quit bantering and make out already. As homoerotic tension goes, the movie is something to behold. If you're looking for anything else - an action-packed holiday thrill ride for the family, for example - go with Avatar.