Review 'Avatar' and 'Avatar: The Way of Water'

I drafted this review awhile ago, and while I'd like to have rewritten some, the films are too dull to revisit.

Last year on Mastodon I said, "watching avatar for the first time the way james cameron intended: on a standard def hotel tv where the white balance is fucked up for some reason". Mr. Cameron may be thankful I saw only the ending rather than the whole film in that venue, but he'd be dismayed to learn that a few months later I watched the full film on a friend's much better projection system and I didn't find the experience to be much of an improvement. I've also watched the sequel since then and my reaction aligns with what Cameron served up: more of the same.

The Avatar movies are proven money makers (Cameron has multiple planned sequels), yet their only notable cultural impact appears to be a meme questioning how such financially successful films have had so little cultural impact. As a late viewer who avoided the early hype, the answer is obvious: the films are utterly forgettable in every way other than the technical wizardry required to make them. The plot for each is so basic that a mere reference to one or two other films adequately summarizes the story (e.g., Dances With Wolves (1990) and Fern Gully (1992)). The acting and dialogue fall flat. Fatally, the digital imagery, the film's supposed triumph, the reason to watch them at all, is actually largely uninspiring to my eyes. The blue Na'vi faces are so stiff they may as well be plastic action figures. Perhaps the actors did emote and the technology failed them. Landscapes are occasionally pleasant in a desktop background way. Animals have more creative and visually interesting features, particularly the whale-like creatures in the sequel, which have eyes that are more expressive than the main humanoid characters.

The techno-industrial form juxtaposes, without irony or acknowledgement, the films' own rejection of technology and uncritical industrialism in favor of a natural mysticism. A 2D film pretending to have depth.

Rated: not liked.

Review 'Civil War'

Marketing hype polarizes while this point-and-shoot frames a view from nowhere. Released into a violently charged political moment, A24’s advertising arm promises glimpses of future war-torn America, which distorts writer/director Alex Garland’s story of a journalistic road trip across these disunited states.

The action is reasonably taut and adequately gruesome – a spurt of blood here, hanging bodies there – but not memorable. We’ve seen these images before in other places and other movies. The presentation of the journalists’ still photos is uninspired, leaving them lifeless.

The main cast gives a strong performance, breathing enough life to almost fool you into thinking the characters are more than snapshots. Dunst’s stoicism carries the lead role. Garland, however, refuses any true depth. In a quiet moment, Spaeny’s Jessie runs down the highlights of Dunst’s Lee’s Wikipedia page and asks, “What’s missing from it?” only for Lee to respond with a small insight about her parents before the dialogue drops the topic and the scene soon ends. The film thus squanders the overwhelming boringness of wars and road trips.

Overall Garland errs twice with the structure: first a focus through veteran Lee rather than amateur Jessie, and then an avoidance of any serious contemporary politics. Lee, unfazed and outwardly uncaring (if not inwardly), leaves us with little emotional resonance for gruesome war. Jessie would have been the better vessel for the audience’s struggle to comprehend, but her perspective is not centered until a blunt final scene. Meanwhile, the simple diorama of confused and muted politics – a few lines from Offerman’s third-term president and a gunfight with boys in Hawaiian shirts – lacks emotional punch to justify everyone’s violent anger. The imagery stands as an undeveloped reality.

The film’s lack of humanity and war imagery coalesce to a nihilist message: journalism doesn’t matter. Even after all your journalistic goals are achieved, you didn’t change anything, you just saw a lot of fucked up shit along the way. The public vicariously bears witness to horrors via images from afar, when we choose the momentary discomfort, but nothing changes before we find ourselves on the frontlines, seeing our neighbors and ourselves doing what humans do. Suppose they hyped a war film and no one cared.

Rated: liked.

Review ‘Dune: Part Two’

'60s sociotechno psychedelia spices up '20s cinematic minimalism. Denis Villeneuve assembles his pieces in his desert, his Dune for us to see that the best laid plans of Muad'Dib and women aft gang agley.

Chalamet impresses as he continues Paul Atreides' metamorphosis from mousy-framed prince into prophetic leader and somewhat reluctant warmonger while Zendaya charismatically stares through the bullshit. There's an air of meet-cute between them, but their chemistry, at times, trends more to awkward than passion. Ferguson mesmerizes as the expectant witch-mother who communes with her unborn daughter to guide Paul toward the future she chose for him. Bardem, the true heart of the story, effortlessly drips welcome humor into his performance even as he tragically embodies the skeptical longing for the sublime we feel in our own lives. Still further well-named pawns – Skarsgård, Butler, Seydoux, and more – all command their presence on screen. Walken remains the only questionable choice, offering up a serviceable weak emperor, but perhaps plays it so feebly as to overpower the character with his own presence. One does wonder, though, if his swept back hair and dour face with pursued lips was an intentional gesture at Trump or merely coincidental.

The film's expansive running time avoids self-indulgence, instead giving viewers' eyes time to adjust to the austere beauty of Arrakis. We are encouraged to drink up the desert, become intoxicated with it. Ironically, however, the filmmaker reaches the near-height of his skill under the black sun of the Harkonnen home planet. ("Near-height" because I believe we will continue to see even greater things.) Confident in the powers of cinema, Villeneuve explains the alien sun's optical properties in one shot with a simple fading transition from color to inverted black and white as characters move across the screen from inside to outside. We see a close-up of Seydoux's pale, beautiful face looking through opera glasses at Butler's pale, distorted ugliness as he embraces his sadism in a gladiator pit; but then later we see such beauty, even under normal light, is just another knife here.

The action remains taut, well-choreographed, and tense, serving the story rather than offering mere amusement. Hans Zimmer, though, continues to obliterate everything on screen with noise.

The story, so straightforward that we are told it in advance, still surprises as the film intentionally shifts the landscape beneath us, leaving us with more questions than answers: Who are we? How do we make choices? Where did our ideas and beliefs come from? Summarizing further would be a wasted effort. You don’t understand the desert by inspecting grains of sand – you experience it. A heady mix of human ideals and pure cynicism.

Rated: liked.

Review 'Sisu' (2022)

A barebones revenge plot supercharged by the senselessness of mechanized war provides fanciful violence tempered by gruesome carnage. Writer/director Jalmari Helander skillfully lets loose the unbridled rage of Aatami Korpi (played by Jorma Tommila) on film's natural enemy: uncomplicated, irredeemable Nazi scum.

Hints of a deeper backstory, perhaps apocryphal, offer a relief against Tommila's furious stare that transforms an otherwise mute one-dimensional character into one of flesh, blood, and legend.

Aksel Hennie has the screen presence to give his portrayal of an SS officer enough nihilistic verve to want to see him snuffed out.

The film, nearly unfairly, employs an adorable dog for melodrama, but the dog is reportedly the lead actor's own and the film doesn't get too carried away (also the dog is adorable).

An efficient warmachine that slays.

Rated: liked.

Review 'Eyes Wide Shut'

Turn-of-the-century kink reaches anticlimax decades later. I watched the film on New Years Eve before it left Netflix. Delightfully, it is a Christmas movie by 'Die Hard' rules. The film shows some wonderfully composed shots from the watchmaker Kubrick, but suffers from poor acting by its stars.

Kidman falls flat while Cruise flits between suave and morose. The two combine to create awkward interpersonal scenes that the movie asks us to overlook. The nudity is tame today and the sex is oddly stilted, but surely stirred in 1999. In one scene Cruise's character observes two naked women eat each other out on a pool table, a superficially arousing sight – except that both women wear masks, so what are we seeing? Taken with scenes of Kidman and Cruise's remarkable lack of chemistry, the movie presents an antiseptic libido in marriage and in kink.

The sex cult, while not the point despite what any marketing copy may have said, limply exits the film in a forgettable scene of dialogue between Cruise's character and his wealthy buddy.

Conceptually, the movie works, but without strong leads, the movie lacks any verve. An intricate watch that ticks.

Rated: liked.