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AVATAR: A BAD DAY FOR CONSERVATIVES? THINK AGAIN.

  

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Written by Alex Wilgus on December 23, 2009

U.S. Marines blow up giant tree.  An ex-soldier discovers the wonders of mother-gaia and becomes defender of nature.

Sounds like “Fern Gulley 3” right?  No, it’s the most important film of the decade and it’s as liberal as hell.  The plot is about a group of corporate marines who attempt to infiltrate a village of 10-foot blue alien cat-people who worship a tree-goddess.

Jake Sully, a crippled soldier enlists in the ‘Avatar program’ which allows a human mind to control the body of a genetically grown alien.  But before your conservative blood starts boiling and refuse to take your kids to see a godless, new-age attack on America and all the traditional values you believe in, take a moment to consider what this film actually means for us.

Avatar is the most incredible movie I’ve ever seen.  It is, bottom line:  awesome.  The visual heft is more than enough to levitate a ‘been-there-done-that’ plot to wondrous heights.  That’s the main selling point.  It is an astoundingly beautiful and visceral film for being 95% artifice.  Each effects-laden sequence is filmed in eye-popping 3-D.

The main enhancement is the ability to channel facial emotion through motion capture.  It represents a new era in filmmaking, where even the most farfetched dreams can be made on-screen reality (provided you have half a billion dollars).  Choosing not to see this film would be an error akin to skipping out on the first Star Wars movie (and The Phantom Menace, this ain’t).  This not a movie that will be enhanced by repeated viewings, but you should at least see it once, if anything because it is a good diagnosis of the soul of the 21^stCentury American.

Avatar has interesting parallels to “The Matrix”, a film that also came out on the eve of a new decade (and a new millennium for that matter) and effectively set the stylistic tone for the following ten years of film.

The aesthetic of the Matrix turned superheroes and robots into well-dressed, culturally savvy, nihilistic ass-kickers that turned the ordinary world into a supernatural playground.  It was a critique, a comment, like Fight Club gone Anime and just about every action film since then has been realized under a thick layer of its influence.

Avatar represents a new paradigm that will likely have a similar cultural effect.  In The Matrix, robots make people think they’re living normal life when in fact they are just hooked into a computer program, an excellent comment on the pointlessness of modern consumerism.  But the problem with the Matrix was that even though it was a mental prison, it was still cooler than dirty derelict reality and you couldn’t wait for Keanu to jack back in and do flips and stuff.

Jake Sully is the anti-Neo who actually finds his true soul through the computer program.  He lives in a circuited society and finds escape from it through another reality and then gets lost in that reality.  This is simply a more accurate characterization of what it feels like to be a 21^st Century American.

We lose ourselves in other realities all the time.  Sports, TV, golfing, World of Warcraft, alcohol, music, maybe even having an affair or changing one’s sexual identity.  However more or less socially acceptable your altered-reality of choice is, the reason remains constant:  we are tired of the reality we have built for ourselves and feel the need to ‘discover’ something else.

Wail on Obama haters but the truth is that, for good or ill, America is sick of anything status-quo no matter how solid the foundations may be.  There are no more illusions to be dispelled or barriers to be torn down, no square mile of land or sea left to discover.  Our great pioneer ancestors would be just as lost as we are today because they would have nothing to do.

There is simply nowhere else to go, no rock left unturned.  There’s just us earthlings bickering about whether to cap emissions or kill terrorists.  We are ready for another world.  Jake Sully is the new man of the age, one who is in touch with his own frailty and meaninglessness and hungers for something higher.  He will choose the ‘illusion’ that he is an alien over his human ‘reality’ because it is a better one.  Unlike Neo, he’s not coming ‘down to earth’ he’s rising up to heaven.  The story of Jake Sully is a religious one.  He wants to believe in something.  Avatar is the Matrix in reverse.

The truth is that Avatar is a historic movie no matter how you slice it.  Heavy-handed plot?  Sure.  Stereotypical characters?  Absolutely.  But those are minor details in the face of its visual grandeur, and rightfully so.  The film is a spectacular love letter to the supernatural wonders of the natural world and it would not have been possible but for highly advanced technology.

Hypocritical?  Maybe.  But we humans have always been a little backwards and Cameron knows it.  It’s built into the plot.  Jake uses hyper-technology to upload his mind into his alien body and only then dose he become one with nature and find purpose and meaning in life.  We use technology in order to escape it.

As for the bald-faced environmentalist message and the naïve ‘ham-handed’ anti-imperialist Dances With Wolves vibe:  maybe it is time to accept these themes as part of the national consciousness.  We are a part of a society that has done great good but also great evil.  We have stepped on and disrupted cultures.

Whatever you believe about climate change (and last I heard, the numbers were pretty clear), the truth is that we are a nation with a massive appetite for natural resources.  Are we to be a recalcitrant and gluttonous people?  A strong nation is one that knows how to atone for its sins.  How we respond to these issues is debatable but when you see Avatar, you’re going to find yourself wishing you were in Sully’s shoes.  My advice:  give in.  Set aside your political ho-humming and remember what it was like to be a kid again longing for adventure, romance and that ghostly feeling of purpose.

Originally published at www.parcbench.com 12/23/09
Direct link:  http://www.parcbench.com/2009/12/23/avatar-a-bad-day-for-conservatives-think-again/

ABC's 'V' Pilot Review

V FOR VERISIMILITUDE

  

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Written by Alex Wilgus on November 5, 2009

ABC’s remake of the 1983 miniseries “V” debuted Wednesday night.  It’s good.  Only one episode in it’s already better than anything ABC has to offer, cleverly avoiding the traps a first act tends to set:  overlong character development acted at mediocre caliber, slow reveals, laying an obvious groundwork for future plot twists.  V bypasses all that with an explosive pilot that moves at a pleasant clip.  It’s no-nonsense television and it’s a whole lot of fun though it’s not exactly breaking new ground thematically.

V is Independence Day meets Battlestar Galactica.  Giant spaceships roll into every major city in the world and the visitors (“Vs”) come in peace.  The reward for cooperation is new technology and a partnership with the potential to end war.  They begin propaganda campaigns via the media, begin seeding pop culture with their conspicuous single-letter brand and begin recruiting human youth for their new inter-species exchange programs.  For a small band of concerned citizens (an FBI agent, a banker, a priest and a news anchor; all evenly spaced throughout the societal spectrum) it is clear that the Vs are up to no good.  Whatever their evil schemes are, it involves seeding humanity with the most powerful weapon imaginable:  devotion.

The show’s not so subtle undertones rehash our modern era’s most familiar paranoia:  devotion.  The ham fists start flying when a skeptical priest questions the aliens’ motives to his superior, calling attention to their unsettling pretensions of salvation (knowing looks all around).  If that doesn’t get through to you the money shot of a big crucifix falling to the ground and shattering will.

V may be better than most network television, but the score is the same:  the faithful are creepy and the thoughtful are the underdogs.  If only that was true in the real world.  Today, attacking the devoted is like kicking the crap out of a dead puppy.  Patriotism is a bygone dream and Church has been silly for years now, and still we keep swatting at America’s last remaining vestments of faith and trust in higher things.  The show falls into the familiar vein of perpetuating the modern litany of skepticism.  Beware of people asking for your allegiance.  While Obama-haters may get warm fuzzies from the “don’t trust in hope” message, the show is primarily a rerun of the familiar modern litany of skepticism.  Beware:  brainwashers are among us.  Don’t believe in anything, trust no one but your own objective-rational faculties, and hold fast to…oh you know those good things you hold dear.  Now let’s all have a vacuous moment of silence in remembrance of a time when people actually believed something enough to dedicate their lives to it because as far as we enlightened moderns are concerned, they’re all just lizards in people’s clothing.

But never mind all that.  The show is a lot of fun, clearly influenced by classic Sci-Fi stories like the Day the Earth Stood Still, Invasion of the Body Snatchers and most particularly, an episode of the Twilight Zone called “To Serve Man”.  I know what I’ll be doing next Tuesday night.

Originally published at www.parcbench.com 11/5/09

Direct link:  http://www.parcbench.com/2009/11/05/v-for-verisimilitude/

Originally published on metaphilm.com on Thursday April 23rd, 2009

Direct Link:
http://metaphilm.com/index.php/detail/watchmen/

Article:

Watchmen

Semiotic Superheroes

On the verge of a new kind of visual storytelling.

Alexander Wilgus

Since their beginning, superhero flicks have always scavenged special effects magic and visual style from the tables of preceding adventure films rather than their original source material, comic books themselves. Superman could only fly through Metropolis after Skywalker flew through the Death Star Trench; Batman only became a believable crime-fighter in the vein of Jason Bourne’s hyper-realism; and I groaned aloud in the theater when my own best-loved comic hero, Spider-Man, performed a horribly superfluous Matrix-esque slow motion flip-dodge to evade a hail of razor-sharp projectiles. Superheroes are homeless on the silver screen. The characters that inspired action films on a large scale too often prefer to dress themselves in the precedents other films rather than establishing their own stylistic identities. Good comics do more than depict fantastical stories about characters endowed with great power. They create an environment in which art and symbol converge to create semiotic storytelling that has the potential to transcend the written word. Is it possible then to develop a true “comic book film” genre, and would it have anything to contribute to the medium as a whole?

My answer: yes and yes—if it can avoid being mere extensions of the Tarantino B-movie aesthetic and if it is possible to ban Frank Miller from ever using a camera again.

Comics films have split into two camps that employ two opposing philosophies regarding special effects: The mainline trend attempts to make superheroes relevant by using the latest special effects technology to make unbelievable antics fit into a believable world. The underdogs are films like Sin City, 300, The Spirit, and most recently, Watchmen, which spend their FX dollars trying to create just the opposite: an intentionallyunbelievable world in which superpowered tomfoolery entertains no pretensions of being realistic but instead create an environment with the capability to set its own rules, its own mood, and channel its own particular themes in a decidedly visual way.

In these films green-screen and CGI effects are taken in a fresh direction: one that does something artful, creating a stylized environment rather than just making the unreal appear real. This is the best way to realize on-screen the artistic contributions of the comic medium. The only problem is that, with the arguable exception of Sin City, these movies suck. But they don’t have to suck. Comic movies could represent a new kind of visual storytelling by combining digital effects with careful art direction and a stylistic use of special effects.

Zack Snyder’s Watchmen is a good place to start. Just to get this out of the way: I didn’t like Watchmen. I think it’s a hollow film that hides juvenile sensibilities beneath a thin veneer of “cult” cinema. It puts you to sleep with long sequences of dialogue and wakes you up with pornography and glorified violence. But it sure is pretty. If Snyder did anything right by me it was his meticulous recreation of Dave Gibbons” artwork from the original comic book. As it happens, the art of Watchmen has just as much a hand in telling the story as the dialogue and plot. In writing Watchmen, author Alan Moore took influence from William S. Burrough’s comic The Unspeakable Mr. Hart which, as Moore put it, used “repeated symbols that would become laden with meaning.” In Watchmen, Moore used the picture-book format to give the story thematic depth using suggestive symbols. Exhibit A: the bloodstained smiley-face.

This image consistently haunts the backdrop of the story’s illustrations and it’s up to the reader to understand what it means. The blood mars the face’s symmetry, like the ugliness of the human stain disrupting utopia, but look at it long enough and it resembles a clock with the hand set five minutes to midnight. Is it a statement about human nature? A countdown to nuclear apocalypse? Is it both? The image is an illustrated double-entendre that recurs at key moments throughout the book in different forms. A man’s face is scarred in the same pattern, a giant spacecraft crashes over the right “eyeball” of the Galle Crater on Mars, a grinning shark is wounded in the eye, two people embrace forming the shape of the blood droplet before they are both disintegrated when New York is destroyed.

Each event injects the symbol with new meaning and allows the reader to participate in the interpretation of it and by extension, the story as a whole. There are a plethora of similar images that recur in similar ways throughout the book. Watchmen is a deeply symbolic tale that uses imagery as a concise way to tug at the soul in ways that words cannot express. It is, in a sense, a more “Catholic” way to tell as story than a novel, as it is less bound by the abstract authority of pure logos and gives the mind more room to play in a pictorial realm of inference and interpretation.

It is just this attention to detail and understated sense of grandeur that caused the book to be deemed “unfilmable” by fans and most vocally by Moore himself. They obviously hadn’t counted on today’s state-of-the-art post-production technology, which allows for an unprecedented amount of graphic control, right down to the shape of the bloodstain on the comedian’s smiley-face button. Snyder may have failed in making Watchmen a focused and coherent film but he succeeded in translating this “semiotic storytelling” to the screen. Though most people doubtless found these details to be little more than “easter eggs” for the fans, I think it is an admirable exercise in the human propensity to recognize and perceive meaning in symbols and engage in interpretation rather than just passively accepting given entertainment.

Watchmen proved that comics have ability to engage us semiotically and add layers of understated symbolic depth using pictures rather than the written word. Snyder may not be the most mature filmmaker in the biz, but he did understand the importance of visual storytelling in truly bringing a comic book to life. This method of repeated visual cues in building thematic grandeur has been used from time to time in cult cinema (e.g. John Patrick Shanley’s Joe vs. the Volcano; Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain), but the broad appeal of comic book films, particularly those starring iconic superheroes, have the potential to put visual symbolism into mainstream consciousness and re-activate our right-brained sensibilities, dulled nearly to dormancy by ultra-realistic entertainment.

Superheroes were never meant to be realistic: they were meant to be symbols. Men and women in capes and costumes with spiders, bats, and large bold letters emblazoned on their chests do not at their core represent some escapist desire to achieve the impossible. They are iconic incarnations of man’s hopes, fears, dreams, and desires, figures with an endless potential for social and political commentary, and self-reflection but only insofar as they remain symbols. Take them out of their mythological habitat, put them in the “real world” and the only way to keep them from resembling goofy dressed-up action figures is to give them a complete makeover (à laThe Dark Knight) or at least by adding in a few moments of self-aware, ironic banter:

Wolverine: [eyeing his tight, black costume] You actually go outside in these things?

Cyclops: Well, what would you prefer? Yellow spandex?

From Bryan Singer’s X-Men

Bruce Wayne: “[a] guy who dresses up like a bat clearly has issues.”

From Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins

The power of symbol is more potent than the thrill of seeing people fly or climb walls. Watchmen, for all its faults, puts superheroes back in their original semiotic habiliment, one that privileges symbolism over realism and creates stylized mythology rather than just another super-powered action movie. What would it look like to restore the pantheon of traditional comic book heroes to their original exaggerated environments instead of taking such great pains to realize them in a contemporary setting?[1] Maybe Batman would just make more sense fading into the inky shadows of a dark CGI Gotham City or Spider-Man would be better rendered in his original bright newsprint tones. I say we put those green screens and color-correction to good use and create more permanent “myth-scapes” for our symbolic heroes who are currently lost in the YouTube generation of shaky cameras and stark, warehouse backdrops. I fear that our commitment to the recreation of reality condemns our heroes to an unending cycle of re-incarnation since what is now seen as “contemporary” will someday be considered “dated,” and archetypal characters, stripped of their mythical qualities in favor of the instant gratification of “relevance” will certainly find themselves in need of yet another update in another ten or twenty years. Superheroes deserve better. :::

Wayne: “. . . as a man I'm flesh and blood I can be ignored I can be destroyed but as a symbol . . . I can be incorruptible, I can be everlasting . . .”

From Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins

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[1] Incidentally, it may seem antithetical to my point that the only blatantly stylized feature-film realization of a popular superhero also proved to be his most obviously dated and unrelentingly goofy incarnation, but I happen to think that the method of Adam West’s Batman: The Movie is just the medicine superhero cinema needs. The film and subsequent TV series faithfully captures, through color, camerawork, set design and acting, the spirit and style of the happy go-lucky Silver Age Batman and Robin comics in all their campy glory. Adam West’s Batman policed a theatrically innocent world that, though absurd, effectively contextualized the pre-adolescent ethos of 1960s America in a stylistic rather than realistic way. Using modern special effects technology, we could conceivably do the same thing today and pursue a wider range of themes.

Alexander Wilgus is a freshly graduated, yet-to-be-employed, churchgoing, country boy, film nerd, philosophy major, comic geek, freelance writer working hard to keep good filmmaking appreciated.