Ocean Eyes: AVATAR: THE WAY OF WATER

The great Umberto Eco once reminded us: “Two clichés are laughable. A hundred clichés are affecting.” He was writing about Casablanca, but he might as well have been discussing the films of James Cameron. He’s a filmmaker whose love of towering piles of cliche is the very thing that resolves his contradictions. He’s a precise, technical director drawn to writing sloshing human melodrama. He’s a hard-edged action director with a soft-hearted love of family and romance. He makes gripping, and often intense, genre pictures that turn on protective parents and the warmth of motherhood and True Love. He’s a conceptual, even experimental, hand at pushing the nuts-and-bolts craft behind the camera. (Here, to his use of 3D, he’s added a variable frame rate that’s sometimes distracting, and sometimes enveloping.) And yet he loves pushing this tech in the context of broad, crowd-pleasing, to-the-rafters satisfaction. To do all this at once, and to keep getting away with it at such a high level of success, he simply must make these appealing epics—the Terminators, Titanic, and, yes Avatars that capture an audience’s imagination with the sheer commitment of their tellings, and the total control of one man’s complicated vision. Those cliches that pile up are our way in, and hold us in their thrall, deeper into the earnest plights of the characters on display. To borrow another phrase from Eco, “When all the archetypes shamelessly burst in, we plumb Homeric depths.”

So here we are with Avatar: The Way of Water, a long-awaited sequel to the 2009 original. It picks up over a decade after that one left off, in the far future, with ex-Marine Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) transmogrified into the body of a Na'vi, the blue giants indigenous to the world of Pandora. In that body, he turned against humankind and fought to repel corporate colonists looking to exploit the lush jungles for the minerals beneath the Na’vi’s sacred trees. Quite a feat for Cameron, making a whole new world full of culture and creatures and geography and spirituality, and then staging a rock-‘em-sock-‘em battle that had audiences hooting and hollering for the death of capitalist overlords. But that was then. Now Sully’s a family man, with half-human, half-alien teenagers, two sons and two daughters, he’s raising with his Na’vi warrior wife (Zoe Saldana). There’s also an abandoned human boy (he grows up to be played by newcomer Jack Champion) who dons an oxygen mask and leaps around in a loincloth as an adopted member of the tribe. They all clearly love each other, and enjoy their humble lives mastering their terrain and honoring their cultural traditions. You can tell right away that this is a sequel more intimate and tender, with a smaller interest in a family unit worth preserving even as the larger machinations of their world (and Cameron’s storytelling) are inevitably going to pull them back into the action.

So when the humans arrive for a second attempt at taking the land and its resources, Sully has even more reason to fight. And yet, after all the fighting that settled this issue in the first film, the heroes are reluctant to do it all again. Here’s a sequel about how the heroes would rather not do a sequel, what with life having moved on to more precious concerns. Alas, conflict imposes, and the villains are literal clones of the last ones. And so, what begins as an attempted insurgency becomes an attempt to hide—this time among the water Na’vi who commune with whale-like creatures—even as powerful forces amass to lure them out for the killing. Three acts: Run. Hide. Fight. Simple enough. Cameron knows how to pump up a conflict, stage memorable character moments, and pace a simple story so cleanly and clearly that we are once more drawn into the emotional investment of the world before we even realized that was happening. Of course we want the vulnerable to stay safe, the heroic to prove their worth, and the dastardly to receive comeuppance. There are those archetypes shamelessly bursting in. But Cameron also knows winding them up and letting them go in a fantastical location is enough to get the blood pumping with the earnest emotions and pleasures of the best pulp sci-fi. If you’re going to paint with a broad brush, you need a broad canvas, too.

There’s clear love for this fictional planet in a film that luxuriates in the world Cameron has imagined. First it gets exposition out of the way in the first hour or so. That’s all plot mechanics catching us up on the state of Pandora and its conflict. The middle hour simply wanders the ocean, meeting new tribespeople (Cliff Curtis and Kate Winslet) and creatures while learning their ways. I especially liked the whales that understand sign-language and whose murmurs are subtitled. That’s where Cameron once more surfaces his ecological concerns and real empathy for the environmental erosion that accompanies corporate oppression on the march. As he sees the displaced Sully family try to integrate in this potentially safe space, we see the inextricable ties between these people and their home. And it’s communicated through fluid sequences that dance across and underneath the water that generously allow the audience to study the topography and the tides, the flora and the fauna. Watching these Na’vi swim around their tropical paradise, I found myself remembering the Avatar super-fans who reportedly experienced real depression and withdrawal upon exiting the theater after repeat viewings of the original. They were distraught knowing this wonderful planet wasn’t a place they could actually visit. Here’s a movie that’ll repay that interest, dwelling in that long central passage of pure vibes, setting, and design.

I was also so bought-in to the artifice of it all—the motion-capture performances of the bewitching blue characters, the all-encompassing depth and detail to the landscape and the way the sunlight breaks across a clear blue sea—that I would occasionally step out of myself and remember, with real awe, that I was basically watching animation for vast stretches. It’s an impressive technical achievement. But none of that vivid imagination—a cleanly designed comic-book fantasyland excursion—would matter if the story itself, and the characters within it, didn’t come to life, too. That’s the final Cameron contradiction to consider: the elaborate falseness, the enormous machine-tooled fakery, bringing forth ideas of sensitive smallness. Here’s a big-budget business casting its eye on the joys of close community with others and with nature, the restorative pleasures of family, the spiritual sustenance of the wilderness, and the nobility of standing against the calculating profit motive and doing the right thing. So once more he’s made a concussive epic concluding with explosions and gunfire—and this time includes a self-quoting climactic sinking ship to amp up the watery danger—but he’s populated it with such patient archetypical love for nature and these fantasy people that those depths are worth plumbing. Homer, it’s not. But Cameron’s good enough to fill the screen with spectacle straight from the heart of this ocean.

Flower Power: COLUMBIANA

Columbiana is an action movie that starts with a child sitting at the kitchen table as the goons of a slimy drug lord gun down her mom and dad. She then escapes and grows up to become a skilled killer out for revenge. It doesn’t sound too notable, does it? It sounds like countless other vengeance-fueled thrillers that have slunk across multiplex screens over the years. Indeed it is derivative and fairly predictable. But what makes Columbiana an interesting film, and sometimes a fairly enjoyable one, is the gritty sensuality at its core provided by its star Zoe Saldana.

After stealing scenes in genre movies both good (Avatar) and bad (The Losers), Saldana has finally been given a leading role. This time she’s not helping the action sequences. Here she is the action sequences. Playing the grown up version of the little girl we first meet fleeing her parents killers, Saldana keeps the pain of this trauma close under her skin while slinking through her days plotting out violence against those who have caused her family so much harm.

When we first see Saldana, she gets in a car crash with a police officer and stumbles out onto the pavement. Arrested, she’s thrown in the drunk tank to sober up. This can’t be the same little girl we just saw moments earlier mourning while arriving at the house of her uncle (Cliff Curtis), looking at him with a quiet fury and declaring that she wants to be a killer. In fact this is the same person. She’s only faking the drunken party-girl act. The instant she’s left alone she stylishly wriggles out of her cell to gun down the man the next cell block over, a man with Columbian drug connections. She marks him with the sign of an orchid, a Cataleya, her name. She’s sending a message to the drug lord’s empire, and especially his head killer (Jordi Mollà), the murderer of her parents. She’s coming for them.

The screenplay is by Luc Besson, the French genre specialist behind the likes of Le Femme Nikita and The Fifth Element, and Robert Mark Kamen, his longtime collaborator. It’s filled with the dusty old tropes of the genre, like the clueless lover (Michael Vartan) who wants to know more and the only F.B.I. agent (Lennie James) who can piece together what is really going on, all the while becoming sympathetic to the killer’s cause. But what the film lacks in originality of plotting and dialogue, it mostly makes up for in the sheer low pleasures of the way it sets up its action sequences. The aforementioned jailhouse murder is a stylishly complex sequence of meticulous plans, shimmying through ducts, and a tight-fitting bodysuit. Later, a Ponzi-scheming fat-cat casually mentions the danger of his pet sharks and, wouldn’t you know it, Cataleya makes sure he gets to experience that danger up close before the movie’s over.

All the slick action would be for naught if it weren’t for Saldana. She successfully inhabits the physicality needed for the action and she can more than pull off the emotion, like in a scene in which she allows a single tear to run down her cheek as she explains the reasons driving her towards these violent tasks. But most of all, French director Olivier Megaton (not his real name, but the fact that he chose a perfect name to scream French action director shows where his ambitions are) allows his camera to regard Saldana with a reverence to her beauty, her textures, and her physique. There’s a little adolescent objectification going on here, to be sure, but the way Megaton allows the camera to be so in awe of her incredible feats of destruction goes a long way towards letting the film feel more respectful than mere ogling. (Megaton’s Transporter 3 treated Jason Statham in much the same way). Saldana brings freshness to Columbiana that it would not otherwise have. This is a slick, stylish, Euro-flavored actioner that feels as fresh as its lead and as stale as its script, but that more or less works out to an enjoyably dumb time at the movies.

Air Master: THE LAST AIRBENDER

M. Night Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender, adapted from a well-regarded Nickelodeon cartoon unseen by me, arrives with breathlessly negative reviews. Going into the theater, I was well prepared to witness a complete debacle, wrongheaded in every decision. Having now seen the film, I can only assume that the wave of overwhelming negativity arose from a combination of Shyamalan’s diminished reputation and the reportedly terrible quickie 3D-conversion cash grab applied in post production. I saw the movie in regular old 2D and I still view Shyamalan as a filmmaker of talent and promise. I admire the earnestness he seems to bring to each new project. The Last Airbender is a flawed movie, to be sure, but it’s not nearly as bad as some – okay, most – are saying. I don’t doubt the sincerity of the bad reviews, just their intensity.

I could talk about all the flaws of the film. I could say that the acting is wooden, the dialogue is weak, the exposition is burdensome and omnipresent, and the rules of the fantasy world are poorly explained. That’s all true, but I’d rather start by talking about what I liked about the film, which has plenty of matinee charm. Shyamalan conjures an interesting fantasy world (even though I assume he lifted it faithfully from the cartoon series). It’s a place where different tribes worship different elements. The special among them, the benders, can control these elements. The plot of the movie concerns the reappearance of, in the form of a young boy, a special bender who can control all of the elements. The fire people, who have long ago slaughtered the air people, rule cruelly over the water, and earth people. This special boy threatens to overthrow the ruling fire people and bring about a more harmonious existence for all of the elements and their people. Naturally, the fire people want to stop him.

It’s in the not-so-grand tradition of the mid-80’s explosion of post-Star Wars fantasy-based copycats like The Beastmaster and Willow. Though, granted, The Last Airbender is better than the former and about on par with the latter. The movie is fairly typical fantasy stuff about tribes and kingdoms, warring factions, Chosen Ones and magical powers. But Shyamalan has a good eye for composing interesting shots and a good sense of pacing. The movie looks good and moves nicely. (It’s even blessed with a very likable score from James Newton Howard). I enjoyed admiring the costumes, creatures, and vehicles, especially a many-legged flying beast and strange steam-powered battleships, which are used by the people of the film’s universe. I liked their powers and the ways in which they are used; tendrils of water and bursts of fire pop nicely in the slick style of the production (at least in 2D). It’s a nicely rendered place that seems consistent with its own rules, and Shyamalan renders it with his typically excellent use of space and focus.

But those rules are also a big problem. Shyamalan doesn’t lay them out clearly or efficiently. Instead, exposition weighs heavy on every scene, coming unceasingly and not often convincing or palatable. It’s enough to give a viewer mental indigestion while trying to process every new back-story, legend, and piece of magical know-how. It all feels just strange enough to need additional decoding and just familiar enough to not need any points belabored. Of course, Shyamalan isn’t helped by having an especially wooden cast of central protagonists any more than the cast is helped by having to recite his creaky dialogue. The young bender at the film’s center, played by newcomer Noah Ringer, fits the look of the part but adds little else, adrift in the condensed silliness. He’s given help by a couple of young water people (Nicola Peltz and Jackson Rathbone) who also do little more than read lines and stare off at the effects. The older members of the cast fare a bit better. I particularly enjoyed the attempts at scenery-chewing villainy from dependable character actors Cliff Curtis and Shaun Toub as well as Dev Patel (of Slumdog Millionaire) and Aasif Mandvi (a current Daily Show correspondent).

On the whole, The Last Airbender is not a film worthy of intense scorn. It’s a pleasant fantasy adventure that’s messy, goofy, and deeply flawed, yes, and it’s probably not as good as its source material, but it’s hardly the worst movie of the year. It’s not even the worst movie in wide release this weekend. I like what Shyamalan’s up to with this film, with his attempt to branch out from small-scale character-driven supernatural thrillers and get into epic mythmaking of a grander design. It works more than it doesn't if you approach it at its level.