A New Age

Faced with the perpetually overcast sky and the near continual downpours of rain that robbed today of almost all daylight, and eager to stave off the unremitting cold that seems intent on seeping into my bones and taking up permanent residence whenever I step outside, I decided it was best to stay in, put my feet up and watch a good movie. I settled for Sir David Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai.

I’d like to say that it was a casual choice but for the past few days I’ve had Ogden Nash’s observation, “progress might have been all right once, but it has gone on too long,” rolling around in my head. And with so much interest in motion capture, virtual sets, digital 3D, and all the other bollocks involved, I just wanted to watch a movie that replied on production rather than post–production.


If The Bridge on the River Kwai was made today no doubt a team of pixel–monkeys sitting at their computers would be employed to create the pyrotechnic finale. Or maybe they’d be doing the whole damn thing. Back in 1957, to make his film about obsessive characters the increasingly obsessive director, headed into the jungle with his cast and crew where they actually built the bridge and then eventually blew the fucker up – while a train was steaming across it – rather than relying on a miniatures unit to take care of business.

All told Lean and his team spent 250–odd days in Ceylon. In London last week for the Royal gala premiere of The Lovely Bones, Peter Jackson, who is producing the new trilogy of Tintin films announced that, having long finished filming, they had a final edit of The Secret of the Unicorn. All that was left to do was the computer rendering, which would take the next two years to complete. Two years? Two whole fucking years?!

I can understand motion capture being used as a tool to aid in the creation of a computer–generated character that will be inserted into live action footage. The best example remains Gollum in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. But to use the process to morph the actors into strangely exaggerated characters that inhabit a wholly CGI–environment seems totally redundant, especially when it takes up a massive amount of time, a huge chunk of change, and the end result is this strange, almost repellent quasi–animation that ultimately doesn’t work.

Once upon a time Robert Zemeckis made some pretty decent movies but now he’s retired from live–action to concentrate on motion capture the finished films haven’t been that impressive. Maybe Zemeckis became obsessed with the technology, or maybe he reached a point in his life where he preferred to film close to home and sleep in his own bed every night. Either way, someone should point out that if you want to make an really good animated feature, hire some expert animators rather than relying on expensive actors prancing around while they’re covered in little dots.


I sat through Beowulf and that was a struggle. It was like someone had decided to make a new car and asked shipbuilders to design and build it. If I want to watch an adaptation of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol I’d go back to the live action Scrooge starring Alastair Sim or the animated version directed by Richard Williams, again starring Sim as Ebenezer Scrooge, but not Zemeckis’ weird hybrid, especially knowing that they’d spunked $200 million on it.

The problem is these new movies seem to concentrate on the spectacle rather than the story. With Avatar steamrollering towards us it was eye–opening experience to read Joshua Davis’ article about James Cameron’s new movie in Wired magazine. In case you can’t be bothered to go and read it, here’s an excerpt:

He started by hiring USC linguistic expert Paul Frommer to invent an entirely new language for the Na’vi, the blue-skinned natives of Pandora. Frommer came on board in August 2005 and began by asking Cameron what he wanted the language to sound like? Did he want clicks and guttural sounds or something involving varying tones? To narrow the options, Frommer turned on a microphone and recorded a handful of samples for Cameron.

The director liked ejective consonants, a popping utterance that vaguely resembles choking. Frommer locked down a “sound palette” and started developing the language’s basic grammatical structure. Cameron had opinions on whether the modifier in a compound word should come first or last (first) and helped establish a rule regarding the nature of nouns. It took months to create the grammar alone. “He’s a very intense guy,” Frommer says. “He didn’t just tell me to build a language from scratch. He actually wanted to discuss points of grammar.”

Thirteen months after he began work on Avatar, Frommer wrote a pamphlet titled Speak Na’vi and started teaching the actors how to pronounce the language. He held Na’vi boot camps and then went over lines one by one with each actor. “Cameron wanted them to be emotional, but they had to do it in a language that never existed,” Frommer says. If an actor flubbed a Na’vi word, Frommer would often step in with a correction. “There were times when the actors didn’t want me to tell them that they had mispronounced a word that had never been pronounced before,” he says.

With the language established, Cameron set about naming everything on his alien planet. Every animal and plant received Na’vi, Latin, and common names. As if that weren’t enough, Cameron hired Jodie Holt, chair of UC Riverside’s botany and plant sciences department, to write detailed scientific descriptions of dozens of plants he had created. She spent five weeks explaining how the flora of Pandora could glow with bioluminescence and have magnetic properties. When she was done, Cameron helped arrange the entries into a formal taxonomy.

Why? With everyone pointing out Avatar’s remarkable similarities to Dances with Wolves, Return of the Jedi, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, FernGully: The Last Rainforest, Delgo, Battle for Terra, and now Call Me Joe, Poul Anderson’s short story from 1957 in which a paraplegic is put in control of an artificially–created life form to explore the surface of Jupiter, maybe Cameron should have obsessed less about the flora and fauna and concentrated more on creating a new and different story.

Just when you think blowing such an obscene amount of money on something so derivative is sickening it turns out Avatar is “literally vomit inducing”. Maybe this growing aversion to this new wave of films that rely on IMAX and 3D and all the shiny–shiny bells and whistles that goes with it rather than story are the first signs of me turning into an old fuddy-duddy. Instead of Avatar, this is the end of year movie that I’m most looking forward to...