Manifestation Destiny

If there was money to be made, I’m sure at some point in the future the major studios will try and convince the cinema-going public that film viewing is best experienced by having everyone stick their heads in a bucket of sewage garishly coloured with food dyes, which is then hit repeatedly with weighty sticks. If that fate awaits us it means that in the meantime the shit has to remain smeared up on the screen. But to make us see it in all its glory, the big new gimmick is to get it in our faces in glorious 3D.

If stereoscopic cinema really is a valid artistic endeavour then surely it would only be used where necessary. Instead this growing shower, soon to become an utter deluge, simply boils down to Hollywood’s latest effort to crack down on piracy and make more money. Whether this works remains to be seen but today everyone got the opportunity to be hit in the face with an early shit pellet in advance of what looks like the massive turd being squeezed out later in the year.

Today was Avatar day. Being one of the lucky ones who didn’t have a ticket to see the 15 minutes of footage being screened exclusively at IMAX cinemas today, I had to make do with watching the teaser trailer that the article in today’s Evening Standard, which unbelievably took up two-thirds of page three, reminded me was now available online. Good or bad, at least it meant I could now visit the Apple website without that irritating countdown clock telling me how many days, hours and minutes it was until I could wallow in the majesty of James Cameron’s visual feast. Or not.


Was that it? Really? That was what we’ve been led to believe is spearheading the vanguard of a filmmaking revolution? Wow! No wonder the geeks at the recent San Diego Comic Con, which gives practically anything fantasy related a home field advantage, were warned not to raise their expectations. Of course I wasn’t watching it in three glorious dimensions and maybe that would make it far more aesthetically pleasing. But under the obviously archaic constraints of Quicktime it looked like utter dog toffee. An alien landscape that appears to have come straight off an old Roger Dean album cover? Oh, fuck the fuck off!

There’s an argument to be had that Cameron’s films have got progressively worse the more money he has in his war chest. Aliens remains an astonishing film considering the relatively minuscule $18 million dollar budget. Less money means having to be inventive. More money leads to indulgence. While these charges can be levelled at every filmmaker, Cameron’s work not only got more crappy but they got more sappy. This sentimentality never gelled comfortably with the more macho content of his films, which meant it felt like watching a brutal prizefight where the bruised and bloodied winner was then awarded a cute little kitten.

The Abyss worked when it racked up the tension between the disciplined Navy SEALS and the more easy going blue-collar workers within the partially flooded confines of their underwater drilling platform. Once the floaty aliens arrived it seriously plumbed the depths. Without them causing the submarine to pile into the rock wall at the beginning of the movie there was no story, but to have the undersea ETs ready to pass judgement on humankind’s destructiveness and then let everyone off because the estranged husband and wife admitted they still loved each other could have contributed to the audience contracting diabetes.

Terminator 2 may have been a little too slick and shiny for its own good but watching opposing robots maim, kill and then happy slap each other for a couple of hours makes for an entertaining diversion. But to hear Linda Hamilton’s character declare, “...if a machine, a Terminator, can learn the value of human life, maybe we can too,” just before the credits rolled, meant that all the shootings, stabbings and shit being blown up real good counted for nothing when you had to shuffle out of the cinema gulping back a mouthful of your own sick.


So what to make of Avatar? The treatment had been knocking around for a while, long before the film went into production, so the basic premise is well known. Cameron has already gone on record as describing it as “Dances with Wolves in outer space,” and people have already flagged up the similarities to Return of the Jedi and Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within and FernGully: The Last Rainforest. Or you could check out the trailers for Delgo and Battle for Terra, both of which opened in the last year and made so little money they hardly appeared on the radar. Is this what $260-odd million gets us? Because wasting that kind of money on something so totally derivative is just utterly obscene.

If all Cameron is really concerned about is delivering a new and exciting visual experience, why didn’t he just create an extravagant amusement park ride? Yes, cinema is a primarily visual medium but there has to be more to it than just pretty pictures. We can go to an art gallery and sit in front a Monet or Rothko or Turner or Rembrandt for that. Every time Cameron sets out to push the outside of the filmmaking envelope he really should be reminded that before he starts tugging furiously on the money cock it helps to have a decent story that will be worth the effort that goes into making it. Otherwise “Avatar Day”, if it really is the future of movies, might just as well be called “We are so utterly fucked! Day”.