Tag: Science Fiction

Movie Review: Avatar

Away we go! This is the first of ten reviews of Best Picture Oscar nominees leading up to the awards ceremony Sunday, March 7th.

*This guest post also appears on the Stilwell Film blog.

Admittedly, Avatar isn’t my thing, I’m not big on James Cameron or any alien films (not only his), I’ve never been interested in Star Wars or Star Trek (though I have seen enough of both franchises to hold a conversation), so I wasn’t planning on watching Avatar at any point in my life. However, this afternoon, I changed my mind when a free screening became available to me. With my original plans canceled and a spare two and a half hours available, I tucked into James Cameron’s latest film.

Well, Avatar wasn’t what I thought it would be, but it wasn’t any better. I spent most of the first half of the movie developing alternate titles ending with “in space.” “Pocahontas in Space,” “Dances with Wolves in Space,” and “Titanic in Space” all sprang to mind. For the most part, it seems Cameron has taken plots from various other films, thrown them together, dyed it blue, and placed it on the fictitious planet, Pandora, to create a science-fiction retelling of the Pocahontas mythos.

In this version, instead of John Smith, it is Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), the wheel chair bound ex-marine who takes over his dead twin’s avatar mission, and falls in love with the Na’vi people, specifically, the clan leader’s daughter, Neytiri (Zoe Saldana). He begins as an undercover spy, trying to learn about the Pandora natives’ culture to help the visiting Earthlings’ military and big businesses. However, as all stories like this go, he falls in love and is torn between the two worlds and races. The plot is laid out in the previews, and if you need help, Cameron lays the foreshadowing on thick throughout the film, but then the plot isn’t why most people are seeing this film, is it?

Special effects wise, the film is pretty fascinating. What more can one say? Seeing this on the big screen and in 3D probably would have held my attention more, but, alas, my free screening wasn’t at such a high standard. Would I sit through it again if I could get a free ticket to the 3D IMAX experience? No, but if you’re debating seeing it, definitely splurge and get your full money’s worth.

As much as I would like to sit through a movie like this and enjoy it for what it is (ground-breaking sci-fi entertainment that will go down in history), I simply can’t. James Cameron’s attempt to create a more spiritual, natural, and peaceful society leaves me annoyed that once again this idea is filtered through a white, Western, male member of a patriarchal society. Some theorists will consider Cameron’s Alien trilogy feminist, because of Sigourney Weaver’s empowered Ripley (legend says it was written to be asexual–with casting deciding the character’s sex), but she still has to prove her femininity and womanliness by saving cats and small children. I fear that many feminists will laud Avatar as well–for creating a world where the people worship a female entity (“Eywa”), because the Clan leader’s female mate/wife is as powerful as him, and since the female lead is as empowered as Ripley. However, like Ripley, Neytiri too has her feminine trappings, as her power can be explained away through her heritage.

When Neytiri first meets Sully, she commands the other warriors to stand down and allow her to take him to their leader–who happens to be her father. The warriors listen and obey her, but is it because she is a powerful woman, or because her father and mother are leaders among the Na’vi? Does she earn her power or inherit it? Similarly, in the legend of Pocahontas,* would John Smith have been saved if it was by any other girl in the village, or because it was the Chief’s daughter who saved him? Furthermore, to add to Neytiri’s street cred, her great-grandfather was Toruk Makto, a legendary Na’vi leader, basically giving her a birth right to power and respect among her people. For those who don’t believe it, I ask, would Sully have survived his first night among the Na’vi if the one speaking for him was any other woman and not the daughter of the clan leader and shaman (or would that be sha-lady in this case)?

I’ll leave you with that to ponder, while I try to work out the symbolism of taming a wild animal by penetrating it with your mystical hair, and end this review on a generally positive note. The first two-thirds are fairly entertaining, but the large battle scenes were just that–large battle scenes. Perhaps at an IMAX or in 3D I wouldn’t have lost focus, but I simply wasn’t interested and played on my phone instead. A lot of people will see this and love it, but if science fiction, action, and special effect-laden films aren’t your cup of tea, you probably won’t leave the theater an Avatar fan.

Director and Writer: James Cameron
Starring: Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver
Rated: PG-13
162 minutes
Avatar is nominated for nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Visual Effects, Sound Editing, Sound, Original Score, Editing, Director, Cinematography, and Art Direction. It also won the Golden Globes award for Best Picture-Drama and Best Director.

*I refer to the story of Pocahontas as legend and myth, because it is questionable how much of John Smith’s accounts are exaggerated, not to mention that he was also rescued by a Turkish princess when captured in what is now Hungary. The stories are similar, so the question is: Did John Smith make a habit of being rescued by pre-teen girls or did he blend the two together for his own benefit?

Elizabeth Tiller is a PhD student researching femme fatales in European cinema. Last year, she founded Stilwell Film, a non-profit that provides free outdoor film screenings to southern Johnson County, Kansas during July. In her spare time, she plays rugby, frequents karaoke nights, and watches high quality films like The Blue Lagoon.

Misogyny Still Reigns at the Box Office

Despite its abysmal reviews, Transformers: Rise of the Fallen took home the top spot at the box office over the weekend.

Here are some highlights from Rotten Tomatoes:

“It’s a wad of chaos puked onto the big screen, an arbitrary collection of explosions and machismo posturing.” –David Cornelius, eFilmCritic.com

“Will insult your intelligence, hurt your eyes, and offend your sense of decency until you worry that your skull might explode while your brain trickles right out of your ears.” –Tricia Olszewski, Washington City Paper

“A perfectly dreadful sequel that’s the filmic equivalent of a 150-minute waterboarding session.”

–Matt Brunson, Creative Loafing

“Put in your earplugs and grab the aspirin. Enjoyable for the [sic] only the easiest to please 10-year-old boys; this deafening, tiresome epic is a skull-splitting hot mess for everyone else.”
–Diva Velez, TheDivaReview.com

And, my personal favorite: “Only an a*****e could have made this film.” –Rob Humanick, House Next Door

I share these snippets to illustrate, if you weren’t already aware, that this movie was clearly made for, and marketed to, young fanboys who like to watch shit blow up. But what else do they like to see? If you guessed “Megan Fox dry-humping a motorcycle,” you are correct.

In a recent interview, Fox told reporters, “Women in movies, in general, are sexy—especially in Michael’s movies. And if you want to make movies that people want to see, that’s part of it. That’s part of the formula.”

The director, Michael Bay, also chimed in. Referencing the shot of Fox sprawled across a motorcycle in hot pants and biker boots, he says, “We got that first shot out of the way, just to get it out for the young boys … and moved on.”

So, according to Fox (and Bay), making movies people want to see entails objectifying and exploiting women. And what’s worse, Fox goes on to say that making these Transformer films and gaining so much exposure (for her hotness) has opened up many doors for her—she’ll soon star in one film opposite John Malkovich and another film penned by Diablo Cody.

This rhetoric reminds me an awful lot of other excuses actresses have made for the roles they choose. Katherine Heigl famously called Knocked Up a sexist film, and then went on to star in a slew of women-friendlier movies, such as The Ugly Truth and 27 Dresses.

And Elizabeth Banks often finds herself in the same predicament: “‘You can go be in a female-driven indie and make two cents and maybe get an Independent Spirit Award, but then you can’t pay your car lease,'” she says. “‘So Vince Vaughn makes movies, he needs a girl to be in it with him, it might be me.'”

I understand and sympathize with actresses in today’s Hollywood climate. Studios continue to argue that actresses can’t open movies, that any successful women-centered film (Sex & the City, Mamma Mia!) is merely a fluke, and that they don’t find it profitable enough to continue greenlighting movies that exclusively focus on women.

I get that it’s a rough climate out there for young actresses especially, but I’m not exactly sure what the solution is. We need more women filmmakers, obviously. And we especially need women audiences to stop seeing every single ridiculous incarnation of The Proposal and He’s Just Not That Into You. While I don’t want to play into the blame-the-victim ideology, I don’t think it’s too much to ask for these actresses to take themselves a little more seriously as actresses and a little less seriously as male fantasies.

Making blatantly misogynistic films clearly pays the bills for them, but at what cost to women as a whole?

Flick-Off: The Day the Earth Stood Still

This Flick-Off is a guest post from Bitch Flicks follower kb.

In The Day the Earth Stood Still, the alien Klaatu (Keanu Reeves) is a diplomat for a group of intergalactic civilizations who lands in Central Park to speak with the world leaders of the human race at the U.N. His intention is to “save the Earth” by reasoning with them to change their way of life so they do not destroy the planet. When U.S. leaders respond with unilateral violence instead, Klaatu begins the process of collecting the animal life forms of the Earth’s various ecosystems in globular “arks” before unleashing a swarm of self-replicating nanobots to destroy human civilization, thus saving Earth from us.

Eventually, with the help of Karl Barnhardt (John Cleese), a physicist who won the Nobel Prize for his work on biological altruism, Helen Benson (Jennifer Connelly), an astrobiologist at Princeton, convinces Klaatu that humans can indeed change, and he interrupts the attack of the insect-like bots.

The remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still‘s fraudulent feminism is exposed in how Klaatu (Reeves) is finally convinced to spare humanity in his bid to “save the Earth.” In a supposedly progressive way, the remake turns the traditional stay-at-home mother of the 1951 original (Patricia O’Neal) into a Princeton astrobiologist who is important enough to be put on a “vital list” of scientists and engineers who the U.S. government calls upon in the event of an imminent collision of “Object 07/493” with Manhattan. However, this liberal update is nothing but subterfuge.

Throughout the movie, Benson (Connelly) tries repeatedly to persuade Klaatu that humans can change, including taking him to see Professor Barnhardt (Cleese). The unflappable Klaatu begins the process to end the world anyway, and remains unconvinced by Barnhardt’s syllogistic arguments. In the film’s climatic moment of revelation, Klaatu sees Benson consoling her stepchild (Jaden Smith) at his father’s grave.

Only after witnessing a mother’s love does Klaatu feel that there is another side to humans (besides their unreasonable and destructive one), and curtail the attack of the killer nanobots. Unwittingly then, Benson changes Klaatu’s mind based on the advice Barnhardt gave her as they fled his house: “Change his mind not with reason, but with yourself.” In your standard anti-feminist fare, Barnhardt’s advice can only mean one of two things. Being a family-friendly film, the remake of Day passes on Benson’s seduction of Klaatu, deciding instead to confirm that she is a mother first and foremost, her position as scientist at a prestigious American university be damned.