Tag Archives: movie review

Avatar

No, not that Avatar...

That's more like it.

I had thought, since you can draw pretty much anything given enough CGI these days, that special effects wouldn’t impress me anymore.  After spending two hours and forty minutes with my jaw hanging open, I stand corrected.  Amazing aerial battles, emotionally convincing mocap, and 3D that works.  And the plot is fairly decent for an action/adventure movie.  It’s got slightly more to it than Indiana Jones, more on a par with The Matrix.

Some other notes:

  • Surprisingly fair portrayal of the scientist characters.  Nobody broke out into maniacal laughter once.
  • Dr. Grace (the Sigourney Weaver lady) mentions that she would like to take some samples when she visits the Tree of Souls.  I would like to say that that’s a stereotype.  But if I were in her place, I would have been thinking it pretty hard.
  • The pipettes in the labs are exact replicas of pipettes found in early twenty-first century biology labs.  Who’d have thought it?  Eppendorf must have reached design perfection around 2009 and never changed their products since.
  • Plausible space travel.  The P.A. system informs Jake Sully that he’s been in hibernation for five years.  Factor in the fact that that’s five years from the ship’s point of view, not Earth’s, and you don’t even need to invoke FTL to get to some of the nearby stars.
  • Humanlike aliens: not so plausible.  But they had a good artistic reason to do it – the audience is human, and we need to be able to empathize with them.  I left with the impression that the Na’vi were an ethnicity, not a species.
  • Jake falls in love with the chieftain’s daughter.  Didn’t see that one coming.
  • Colonel Miles Quaritch says something to the extent that “Our only chance at security is a pre-emptive strike.  We must fight terror with terror.”  And the disclaimer says that “All connections to real persons or events is purely coincidental.”  Really, now?
  • Alien invasion movies reflect the zeitgeist of the times.  Perhaps we’re feeling  a bit guilty about environmental destruction?
  • The Avatar system brings up some very interesting questions about the nature of the human soul.  The scriptwriters chose not to go there, but they so could have.

9: Awesome Robot Pterodactyl


Warning: this blog post contains spoilers for the movie 9 (though not the spoiler for the really big secret).

9 does something that a lot of major, well-funded movies are not willing to do: it kills off characters. And it hurts. The MPAA’s rating of PG-13 is appropriate, so brace yourself for a difficult but thrilling ride.

At only 81 minutes, Shane Ackerman’s debut movie does not contain one iota of flab. A machine called the Brain has turned against us and wiped out humanity. The only survivors are nine little hackey-sack dolls. The Brain is still out there. It must be stopped, and it’s going to cost them.

As a matter of fact, the very tightness of the plot is one of the things I have to complain about the movie. 9’s creative team seems to be holding itself back from long, self-indulgent panning shots, but since the movie is so short anyway, I wouldn’t have minded slowing down to wander around in the neat world they’ve created a bit more. Only the major strokes of each doll’s personality are sketched out, and I think there could have been more there if they’d dug deeper.

But who the heck am I kidding? The robot pterodactyl was sweet.

On a technical note, I admire Ackerman & Co’s work at balancing the dolls’ narrative roles. I know from writing that when a bunch of characters have the same job, like members of a crime-fighting team, it’s hard to keep them from interfering with each other. Notice how the movie introduces the characters gradually and never allows all nine of the dolls to be in the same room together just to keep things from getting symmetrical. 3 and 4 are twins, so they have a different relationship to each other than they do to the other teammates, and there’s some factionation going on, so 1 and 8 are closer to each other than to the others.

9 is visually stunning, artistic, but also dismaying. The ending will leave you with a big, “But now what are they going to do?” It’s tempting to compare 9 to Wall-E, since they’re both post-apocalyptic animated films with cute robots for main characters. See Wall-E and then see 9 to cut the sweet, or better yet, see 9 and then see Wall-E to help you recover.

It’s true that the characters in 9 are simplistically done, but I’m still not going to forget 2 for a long time.

WALL-E

I just saw WALL-E the other day. Amazing movie – Pixar’s still batting 1000. If you haven’t seen it, go for the spork scene, and the 2001 reference. They’re precious. It’s been out for a few weeks, so probably somebody else has already said this, and better than I have, but I can’t help making a few observations.

(And I’m going to discuss the ending, so if you don’t want a spoiler, don’t scroll down.)

• These guys pulled off a movie with almost no dialogue. The first 15 minutes or so were really a classic example of sneakily giving the audience information. The billboards WALL-E passes, the pop-up hologram advertisement, the piles of dead WALL-Es let you figure out what happened without any character telling you anything.
• A rather daring use of live action.
• WALL-E’s eyes. They absolutely carry the character, just like ET’s eyes did. Notice when WALL-E temporarily loses his memory at the end, his eyes stop moving. You can tell there’s nobody home – it’s a zombie version of WALL-E. It seems that no matter how not human a character looks, you can pull if off if they’ve got really great eyes.
• This has got to be the cheeriest post-apocalyptic I have encountered.
• Where did the Axiom people get all those species from that we saw in the ending credits? I suspect they had a gene bank in the hull that nobody was paying attention to. Or maybe they looked that place in Iceland up on the encyclopedia.
• Where do new Axiomites come from? I bet they’re test-tube babies, like in Brave New World. Holding hands was such a strange new experience for John and Mary that I hardly think they’re doing it the old-fashioned way.
• Are they ever going to revive AUTO? They did with HAL (remember 2010?). What if the encyclopedia turns on them?
• WALL-E has spent 700 years intimately acquainted with trash and you expect me to believe he has never encountered a spork before?