Category Archives: CGI

A Much Longer Review of Avatar

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Warning: Avatar spoilers litter this review like Ikran droppings across the rocks of the Hallelujah Mountains.

As I mentioned earlier, Avatar is a movie made almost specifically for me. It’s directed by a man whose obsessive attention to detail and fanatical devotion to technology has provided us with some of the most clearly designed and thrillingly executed movies of recent times. It’s about exploration of alien worlds and has an anti-imperialist message of clunking obviousness but surprising emotional power. It features the most startling visual effects ever committed to the big screen, and constantly pulls the rug out from under you with its dedication to outdoing itself. It’s filmed in beautifully rendered and cleverly composed 3D, and for once puts paid to criticisms that the format is a gimmick (even the sceptical Roger Ebert has been won over). It’s got a big battle between space marines and space monsters, and features a world that looks like a Yes album cover come to life (thanks to Anne Billson for the apt comparison). Basically, if it was going to make me hate it, it would have to try hard.

Luckily for me, after all of that anticipation, it didn’t piss me off — at least on first viewing, which was an overwhelming experience — but I can’t praise it without addressing some of the concerns raised by it. In the post-experience discussion I had with Daisyhellcakes, we kept coming back to the depiction of the Na’vi as a race of Native Pandorans treated so poorly by the colonial humans that they weren’t even offered beads for the rights to their sacred grounds. It’s problematic, to say the least. They are portrayed as simple, honest folk who hunt (but apologise to their prey before stabbing them in the heart, so that’s okay) and pray to a tree-god, and need to be rescued by one of the oppressors who just happens to be smarter and even more in tune with nature than they are. Scenes where the Na’vi cede control over their destiny to Jake Sully’s avatar make for queasy viewing, even if he did just land in their sacred space on the biggest, baddest, coolest multi-coloured dragon thingy you could imagine.

As Daisyhellcakes said after seeing it, she didn’t want to admit to liking the movie as much as she did because the wrongness of Cameron’s attitude to his noble alien race was so glaring. As Charlie Jane Anders points out here, this is a race that is so unfailingly noble they come across as a clumsy patronisation of the Real-World indigenous races that Cameron wants them to metaphorically represent. Apart from some douchebaggery from one guy early on, they’re all so great that they treat the imminent death of a human with the same amount of grieving and solemnity that greeted the destruction of their home and the death of their leader. Hey, I’ll bow to no man in my admiration for the eternally awesome Sigourney Weaver, but if I was an alien who had just lost the cornerstone of my culture and my civilisation, I’d be a bit more concerned about that than the death of some missionary who had been nice enough to hand out useless medicine that one time.

Still, as we talked we came to a sort of conclusion that although it made us uncomfortable, what the hell else was Cameron supposed to do? It’s tempting to think he is not up to the task of adding subtlety to any story he tells, but then he’s telling stories that fall apart when subtlety is introduced. He has his work cut out getting a lot of story and scene-setting out of the way, and at times the rush of exposition — either via voiceover or clumsy explanations by the various scientists studying the planet — means we’re really getting broad strokes already. This superb “nature documentary” about Pandora contains almost as much information about the planet and the creatures on it than is found in the movie.

As well as the Na’vi culture, some of the human relationships are sketched so lightly that their progression feels like a hint rather than an arc. Cameron was obviously ruthless in the editing room, and it stands to reason that he was already aware that portraying internecine battles within the Na’vi clan that embraces Jake would just bog the movie down further. We lose something to gain something else, and your enjoyment of the movie will likely depend on which you would rather have: sensitivity or bombast. If you think Cameron missed a trick not giving us tales of the ascerbic Na’vi arrow-maker or the cranky Na’vi mother who longs to join her lifemate on the hunt and is annoyed by his retrograde gender politics, you’re watching the wrong movie. This is good versus evil, and he’s going to make damn sure you know which is which.

Also, he might oversimplify the Na’vi, but so much thought has gone into the creation of the world and the people and their intertwined relationship that he can’t be accused of not giving a damn about the small stuff. Kudos to the production designers and astrobiologists and astrobotanists who came up with the convincing flora and fauna of Pandora. Their work is the most impressive thing about Avatar, and makes it feel like a real place. Even when doubts about the effectiveness of Cameron’s story began to itch at my brain, the secondary story — of Pandora and its ecology — was far more successful. I suspect that repeat viewings might make the problems of Cameron’s plotting seem more glaring. This morning Mr. Beaks from AICN quoted Kenneth Turan, who said Avatar would be the Jazz Singer of the 21st Century, a movie that changed everything but was widely disliked ten years after release. I expect my considerable affection for this movie will follow a similar trajectory to my opinion of Titanic, which I loved on first viewing, but disliked more and more with each revisit. Nevertheless, while the narrative clumsiness will likely annoy in time, the level of detail in this stunningly realised world will continue to hold my interest, and seeing new interconnections between them will become more interesting to me.

Of course his interest in creating a complex faux-eco-system is part-and-parcel of his environmental message, which is heavily pro-nature and anti-strip-mining. This too has come under scrutiny, especially by those who think a movie that features this much CGI has been burning through rainforests worth of energy to keep its computers humming along. The pro-tree message is rammed home with such relentlessness that the mid-movie action scene is the lengthy destruction of a single tree, though to be fair it’s a pretty goddamn awesome tree. Complaining about how Cameron paints his political pro-environment message is fair enough, but where were these complaints last year when Andrew Stanton’s Wall-E told a similarly unsubtle story? That got a free pass, but Cameron gets pilloried. Not everyone has done that, and I speak as someone who was pleased to see Stanton’s messages stated so clearly, but the double-standard still irks. I guess that’s what you get when you make an action movie instead of a Pixar movie.

Besides, Cameron’s ideas about why Pandora should be left untouched are far more interesting than mere tree-hugging. The central idea of the movie is that all lifeforms on Pandora are linked together in a way that expands even upon James Lovelock’s Gaia theory, or Teilhard de Chardin’s noosphere concept. Pandora is a kind of brain, and the creatures that live upon it can access that brain through a neural connection. The Na’vi are also able to connect to the minds of the creatures around them, and control them in much the same way the humans connect themselves to their machines, except the Na’vi also form emotional bonds with the creatures and treat them as equals. It might just be an expansion of the idea that we are connected to all other living things, but when taken literally like that it is enormously appealing and deepens what might have initially seemed like a wishy-washy justification for the Na’vi’s special nature.

It also means that the “God” they worship is actually a kind of world-mind/flesh-internet that allows them to upload and download memories. Note that their culture doesn’t seem to have a history told via words or pictures: it’s stored inside the network of life on the planet. I’ve heard the movie referred to as Luddite as it praises New-Age-style philosophy over reliance on technology, but the biotech of Pandora works as a metaphor for the connectivity we currently enjoy thanks to the Internet. Though some scenes with the Na’vi plugged into the ground and radiating outwards from the Tree of Souls look kinda dippy, they have an unexpected emotional charge. The great revelation of our age is that we work better when we’re aware of each other, and seeing this network of co-operation represented in glowing visual style is a powerful reminder of how lucky we are.

It’s an idea that makes Avatar more nuanced than a mere Dances-With-Space-Wolves and more like Dune-In-A-Forest, especially as Sully can be seen as a Space Marine/Kwisatz Haderach hybrid. That said, no matter which pop cultural artifact Cameron was influenced by most, when necessary he pulls out all the stops and tops the action work he has done in the past. With the goodness of the good guys and the badness of the bad guys clearly explained, he can go all out with an emotionally satisfying final act where heroes are forged, villains are killed, and revenge is taken. This is what Cameron does best, and the final half an hour is some of the most thrilling cinema I’ve ever been lucky enough to witness. Any reservations we had earlier melted away in an onslaught of last minute rescues, defiant last stands, and tragic slow-motion deaths. Cameron’s facility with action serves him well, with skillfully handled set-ups paying off in a series of sub-setpieces that are layered together with a master’s touch.

Praise is also due for an earlier scene where Sully captures and tames a wild Ikran on top of the Hallelujah Mountains, and then goes on his first flight with Neytiri. It’s a stunning sequence, featuring visual effects of such complexity and clarity that I choked up. At that moment I knew I loved the movie with very nearly all my heart. It also helps that Cameron has elicited such strong work from his cast. Stephen Lang and Giovanni Ribisi are deliriously evil but enjoyably hissable, with Lang’s Quaritch getting a couple of cool moments in the finale that drew murmurs of great pleasure from the audience. You expect Sigourney Weaver to be great — and she is — but I was surprised at how good Joel “Hottie and the Nottie” Moore and Michelle “Ana-Lucia” Rodriguez were. Even better were the heads of the Na’vi clan, played by the ever-reliable CCH Pounder and Wes Studi. Praise is also due Laz Alonso as cuckolded Tsu’tey, and Sam Worthington makes good on the promise shown in Terminator Salvation with an impassioned and charismatic turn.

Best of all is Zoe Saldana, who gives an astonishing performance as Neytiri. With the performance-capture technology now developed to the level Robert Zemeckis has always aspired to, it feels as if there is no intervening layer of CGI between us and the actor, and of the entire alien cast, it is Saldana who seizes the moment with the greatest relish. Her manifestation of this serious and tragic character was the heart of the movie. If she had failed, our suspension of belief would have fatally faltered, but thankfully she exceeds beyond our wildest dreams. About twenty minutes after her introduction, I was amazed to find that I believed with all of my heart that Neytiri was real, and it is as much a testament to her skill as to the effects chaps at WETA that this mental conversion occurred. Thanks to this — and her entertaining work as Uhura in this summer’s Star Trek — I now look forward to her future work with much enthusiasm.

It’s an unfashionable statement to say I gave myself over to Cameron’s sincerity, especially as we’re dealing with a filmmaker who is considered to be a crass populist who can only bombard audiences with glossy imagery that hide a hollow core. I’d argue that Cameron believes deeply that the message of his movie is meaningful, and will be happy to have touched the hearts of millions rather than appealed to the refined intellects of a handful of joyless twerps. If so, I reckon he’s right. As for Avatar‘s status as the most advanced display of CGI wizardry yet made, and whether this is enough to qualify it as a great movie rather than one that is just okay but pretty, my own bias intrudes. Artistic merit is attributed to movies for many reasons, many of them nebulous. Such concrete things as effects work or production design are often not included among these criteria, as it’s surely obvious that they are base and do nothing to reveal human truth (often considered the least thing that great art should do).

In my eyes, though, the technical work done on Avatar in bringing to life an entire world filled with believable creatures in a series of interlocking relationships is as close to perfection as we’re going to get at the moment. If the breathtaking design work and detailed effects work displayed here isn’t allowed into the leather-and-mahogany drawing room called Art, then no design or effects work ever will be. At its best this is a moving sculpture, a dynamic tapestry, a web of interlaced speculative concepts and exquisitely rendered visual representations that literally dazzle. Ignore the faults, and forgive it for being clumsy. You need to see Avatar so you can experience the feeling of having your point-of-view float through the most beautiful landscape painting you’ll ever see.

Beowulf vs. The Luddites

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A couple of days ago The Guardian blog opened a debate about whether or not CGI should be banned from movies, and the Luddite hordes spoke in their masses, furiously railing against the death of quality cinema and laying the blame at the feet of ILM and WETA and all the other scumbags that have stopped our generation from producing nothing but Godfathers and Harold and Maudes and Five Easy Pieceses. Why stop there? Anyone who has seen Manhattan knows that black and white is more beautiful than colour, so why not get rid of that too. And with that goddamn Peter, Bjorn and John song so common on soundtracks nowadays, we would be better off getting rid of sound too. I’ve often thought that cinema died the day they got rid of the organ player in the corner of the theater.


The film that inspired the anti-CGI debate is Robert Zemeckis’ Beowulf, the performance-captured retelling of the poem. Granted, the blogger, Ben Child, thinks Beowulf is not that bad an example of CGI (and to be fair there were lots of commenters who thought the blog to be a silly reductive one), but still, railing against bad CGI and blaming it for the parlous state of cinema is absurd. There’s good CGI and bad CGI, just like there’s good filmmakers and bad. For every Stephen Sommers you get a Peter Jackson. Note also that a lot of bad moviemakers who rely heavily on CGI are young and not quite up to speed on how to tell a well-paced story, while reliable oldsters like Spielberg or Zemeckis are still cranking out good movies and revelling in the new options handed to them by this glorious magical toolbox. It’s a crappy argument, and ignores the real problems: profit over innovation; lack of inspiration; creative thought being overwhelmed by bombardment of repetitive story structures, formats and themes. Even worse is blaming overuse of CGI for bad cinema. Is CGI a person? Is he very forcefully making directors use him? No? Then please keep it down, you’re disturbing us while we try to watch Children of Men for the tenth time.

Perhaps I feel so belligerent because I was lucky enough to see Beowulf in the best format possible; IMAX Digital 3D, which is as far from the old skool, curtains-on-the-wall-and-intermission-to-change-reels, kind of cinema that you can get. It’s hard not to be overwhelmed by a movie that already has a magnificent visual sweep when it’s presented in a format that would even give something as subdued as an Eric Rohmer film the power to burst your eyeballs. Even taking into account the leg-up 3D gives it, Zemeckis throws some amazing stuff at the viewer: Grendel’s first appearance in the Mead Hall; Beowulf’s triumphant battle against him; the final scenes with a fantastic dragon.


If you know me, you know I love dragons, and this is an incredible dragon. One of my favourite things about Zemeckis is his talent for staging visceral and thrilling setpieces, and Beowulf’s fight with the dragon is up there with the heartstopping finale of Back To The Future, or Ellie’s trip to Vega in Contact. When it was over I had to will my muscles to relax, it was that exciting.

The performance-capture technology has one great benefit; capturing performances. I think I can see a naming-chronology developing there. Ray Winstone is very entertaining as Beowulf, despite the terrible decision to let him talk with his actual accent, leading to the odd, “Gor blimey, arr fancy you, darlin’!” near miss. John Malkovich is even better as a Grima-Wormtongue-esque weasel advisor who mans up part of the way through the tale. I’m not sure whether I liked Anthony Hopkins as King Hrothgar; even taking into account the slightly distorting effect of the CGI avatar he animates, he seemed a bit sluggish. Angelina Jolie has gotten a lot of press for being digitally en-nakedised yet nipple-free, and she manages to look both more and less human than she usually does (though where did her neck go?), and Crispin Glover, as Grendel, peels the pixels off the digi-walls with his stomping, shrieking, Middle-English-spouting anger.


One of the things I liked most about the movie is that his attack on the Mead Hall is the result of his anger over the noise they make. I mean yeah, when our neighbours make a ton of noise I get angry too, but I don’t burst through their door, conjure up a bunch of blue flame, and then snap a bunch of guys in two while eating their heads. It’s not just because I don’t happen to be a superhumanly strong 10ft tall monster with a weirdly pulsating eardrum thing, either. It just causes more problems than it solves, is all.

Around this point I would save special praise for my man Brendan Gleeson, possibly the most reliable character actor in the world (and yes, he is so so great in this), but it’s my duty as a licensed, highly paid blogger to single out Robin Wright Penn, as Hrothgar’s wife Wealthow. There is a terrible sadness about her that breaks through the digital mask, to be replaced later in the film with barely suppressed bitterness and resolve. Shamefully, I’ve not really seen her in enough films to have given her any credit before now, but she’s so good in this I’ll have to keep my eyes peeled in future.


As for the CGI, I’d be lying if I said it was perfect. Arm movements still look clumsy from time to time, which is a surprise considering Zemeckis used motion capture with the actual actors and not animation. Making up for that, the close-ups are incredible, capturing the performances in all their expressiveness. Sadly, that level of detail is lacking in the minor characters; one recurring character (a lady with an epic embonpoint who seems to only be there as a cleavage-based distraction) looks very shaky. Sometimes those characters look too blank or, on the opposite end of the scale, too detailed. Dominic Keating plays John Malkovich’s deformed servant, but in one scene you can see someone else in a crowd scene with the same features. Perhaps it was meant to be the same character, but I doubt it. Even worse, Alison Lohman plays Ursula, Beowulf’s young concubine, but her digital face is so similar to Robin Wright Penn’s that I thought she was meant to be his daughter. As a result I spent the ten minutes following her introduction in a state of shock and confusion as Beowulf macked on her and made comments about “swiving” her. This means The Knockinge of Ye Olde Worlde Boots. Even after the early scenes of debauchery and lechery involving the menfolk, I figured this was taking it a bit far.

Still, these were minor concerns. The direction is confident and surprising, the action is memorable, the script (by Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary) is pacy and eventful while making sure to spend time on inserting plenty of thought-fodder subtext. Taking into account the staying-power of the original poem, Avary and Gaiman spend a lot of time establishing Beowulf as a teller of tall tales, even though he also happens to be a brutal warrior who probably doesn’t need to embellish his exploits. By the end of the movie, the theme of legacy, storytelling, and mythology creep in over and over again, with the concept of the victor shaping history being undermined by the final, wonderfully ambiguous shot. Add to that a subplot about the growth of Christianity and some hilariously unsubtle sexual metaphors (both visual and verbal), and my brain was kept mostly happy while my eyes were fried in their sockets by the 3D loveliness.

The most important thing, though, is that it is as much a film as it is a technological showcase. It does all of the things a film should do. That it is told with new(ish) gadgetry means nothing, unless you really want to rail against it because damn it, cinema peaked with Buster Keaton’s The General! To get that pissed, though, you have to be annoyed with the technological method of telling the story and not the execution of it, and if you do that, then that’s fine, but be warned. This is a far more solid starting point for the performance-capture revolution than The Polar Express or Monster House, and there are going to be a lot more movies made like this in the future, and even more troubling for the Luddites, the technology is only going to get better and better. No more flaily arms! Time to stop fretting about it and get used to it, if you ask me.