Vamps (Amy Heckerling, 2012)

A lightweight vampire parody that mercifully pokes at the deeper lore rather than just taking potshots at Twilight, Vamps starts rough and ends an unexpected delight. Using the true age of Alicia Silverstone's vampire to make fun of her being behind the times, Amy Heckerling also mocks the faded relevance of their previous, iconic collaboration, Clueless. That gives the goofy jokes more (forgive me) bite, and it eventually leads to an emotional breakthrough for its characters that hints at some of the same care that marked Heckerling's best film.

My full review is up now at Spectrum Culture.

Aliens

Ridley Scott's Alien ended in such a way that it begged for a sequel. Even those of us who roll our eyes at the prospect of unnecessary "enfranchisement" had to admit that Ripley's story didn't end with her slipping into cryogenic sleep and hoping someone intercepted her signal. Yet with Scott himself reluctant to get trapped on one series of films, the prospect of a sequel faded into the back of 20th Century Fox's corporate mind for years.

Enter a young upstart named James Cameron, an up-and-comer who'd been thrown off the set of the great Piranha II and then knocked on Hollywood's door with a sledgehammer with The Terminator. A fan of Scott's film, Cameron had an idea for a sequel, but changing hands at Fox put his initial work on hiatus, waiting to see how The Terminator fared at the box office before giving him the keys. Even when they finally relented, they gave Cameron a budget only $7 million higher than the one Scott received seven years earlier. And where Scott got by with only a few distinct sets and a single alien, Cameron's film called for all-out war with more locations, a bigger cast and more aliens.

Thus, when Aliens finally hit screens, the money-saving techniques were plainly evident. The narrower aspect ratio, the heavy grain in the film stock -- reversing the issue of the original Alien's soft stock by leaping to the other extreme -- the recycling of a handful of alien costumes. What is far more noticeable and relevant, however, is the manner in which Cameron dispenses almost entirely with the elements that made Alien great, only to re-assemble the broken parts into a masterpiece in its own right.

Where Scott's film was atmospheric, graceful, cerebral, Cameron's is quickly paced, blunt and in your face. The degree of difference can be seen all over the place, from substituting Jerry Goldsmith for the always on-the-nose James Horner to replacing Alien's tagline "In space, no one can hear you scream" to "This time, it's war." Aliens is loud and brash, with a cast of characters who, in true Cameron fashion, are utterly two-dimensional but just kooky enough to be endearing. Cameron even has the balls to return to the planet where the Nostromo stumbled across the eggs, risking all sorts of plot holes just to maintain a continuity and to avoid larger logical questions. Then, he manages to change everything anyway by dropping in a bit of dialogue that explains Ripley floated in stasis for nearly 60 years, and in the interim, Weyland-Yutani set up colonies on the planet.

This addition, especially as it is fleshed out in the vastly superior longer cut of the film, allows Cameron to develop two of the more tantalizing threads left in the ether in the first film: the vicious anti-corporate mentality of the franchise (and something that would concern Cameron intermittently across his career with the Terminator films as well as Avatar), and the character of Ripley. As we learn in the longer cut, Ripley had a daughter when she left, only to return and find that her child had grown into old age and died while she drifted in cryostasis for six decades. Now, she must sit in a company hospital, discredited by a board of trustees that not only denied her story but charged her with destroying a perfectly good tow-ship, left under nominal psychiatric care as she thinks of the life she no longer has.

Eventually, a company rep, Burke (Paul Reiser), sheepishly and discreetly comes to Ripley and mentions that all transmissions from the colony on LV-426 have ceased, coinciding with a shot given to the audience of colonists sent to inspect the alien ship they somehow never noticed while exploring the planet and returning with a facehugger attached. Ripley, still scarred by what happened to her seemingly only a few days ago, understandably does not wish to go back to the planet to survey what's happened, but Burke's invitation amounts to a tacit acknowledgment of her truthfulness, and Burke will send her with a contingent of marines, though she takes little comfort in this.

If Scott's predecessor cut against the grain of post-Star Wars cliché by presenting a cast of characters who were average and relatable to audiences despite the centuries between reality and fiction, Cameron's film messes with military tropes. It's not entirely clear who controls the marines, but the squad sent to investigate the colony ultimately answers to Burke. If the military is not privatized in this future, it does at least openly look out for business interests. Cameron has never been what you might call subtle, but he gets at a side of Vietnam with this film that even the slew of 'Nam movies didn't address so directly: that war was started by the military industrial complex and kept going long after it became evident we had no business there and, furthermore, could not win. Cameron takes it one step further and brazenly warns of using federal (or planetary) troops to protect business interests.

Furthermore, the initial arrogance of the marines, with their smart weapons and state-of-the-art equipment, falters in the face of a less advanced but more committed foe. Granted, the aliens have an advantage over the Vietcong in that their are biologically superior, but the most terrifying aspect of Aliens is the inability of the humans to even momentarily stop an advance no matter how many creatures they kill. The aliens never retreat, never show any sign of dwindling numbers, and they can pop out of anywhere. Sound familiar?

As for the actual cast, you gotta love 'em. Cameron makes these marines the most hilariously cocky-cum-terrified misfits you ever saw. The C.O., Lt. Gorman (William Hope), clearly just graduated from the academy and is out of his element with the rest of the squad, who've done their time and formed a bond. They make for a veritable who's who of clichés, from the tough-as-nails, black sergeant who whips them all into shape (played by Al Mathews, because Carl Weathers must have been busy); a fiery Latina who does not react to the taunts of her male comrades because she's tougher than all of them (Jenette Goldstein, making up for Veronica Cartwright's hysterics in the first film); and a sensible corporal who matches the sergeant's toughness with a softer side (Michael Biehn); and a private who talks the most shit during the preparation for the mission, only to instantly morph into a coward when he finally faces the enemy (Bill Paxton). Also accompanying them are Burke and Bishop (Lance Henriksen), an android who inspires distrust from Ripley based on Ash's actions and spends most of the film walking the line of suspicion.

Given how shallow these side characters are, it's a wonder what Cameron accomplished with Ripley. In the extended edition, the director delves into the character, making explicit her sense of maternal loss. This, of course, is explored more thoroughly through the character of Newt (Carrie Henn), a young girl and the only survivor of the alien outbreak in the colony. Her ingenuity saved her, but when the marine stumble upon her in their first sweep of the colony, she's been driven half-feral and silent from shock. As Ripley nurses her back to health, Newt clearly becomes a surrogate child for the daughter Ripley never got to see grow up. So touching and believable is their chemistry, in fact, that even the special edition, which adds mostly additional scenes on this dynamic, does not slow down the film's perfect pacing.

Let's talk about that pacing. Alien worked primarily because Ridley Scott had a keen sense for shot length and plot advancement. His film is slow enough to sink into the mind and give the audience space to inject their own fears into the mystery, yet quick enough not to lose the tension. Cameron faces the problem of maintaining the flow of an action movie. The lulls of a horror film can be as effective in scaring audiences as the actual moments in which something happens, but an action film languishes in its moments of empty character building. Despite the limited budget and the ambition of the project, Cameron never once lets the momentum sag, even in the longer cut. If so many supporting characters are two-dimensional, Cameron at least acknowledges it and doesn't bother saddling us with cheap, dispensable background for them. Apart from Ripley, all of these characters live in the present, and they react to the situation, not dwelling on some past issue. And who has time to even think about what's happening in the moment when dozens upon dozens of aliens bear down on the humans at all times?

The speed of the film also helps Ripley's transition into the ultimate badass for feminists. The first film showed Ripley growing until she proved she had the capacity to survive. In Aliens, she evolves until she proves the capacity to save others. When Gorman blanches in the face of the alien attacks, she steps in and capably directs the marines, who almost never question the force in her voice. She also displays the most self-restraint, choosing to spare the double-crossing Burke even when he locks Ripley and Newt in the medical bay and unleashes facehuggers in the attempt to implant them with embryos to be taken back to the company.

Occasionally, Cameron's lines take on a certain hard-boiled charm. Paxton's goofy performance allows him to toss out nugget after nugget, the best being his macho breakdown when he paces around screaming "Game over, man! Game over!" until Ripley and Cpl. Hicks have to slap some sense into him. When the depths of Burke's malfeasance appears, Ripley spits in disgust, "I don't know which species is worse. You don't see them fucking each other over for a goddamn percentage." Of course, nothing beats that most crowd-rousing of lines, "Get away from her, you bitch!"

The finale of Aliens puts the final spin on the subject matter that crafts the film into its own distinct entity. Scott's film, leaving H.R. Giger's imagination to fill the cracks of our mind, presented an androgynous vision, pitting Sigourney Weaver, who, at six feet tall with an athletic build, combined traditionally feminine and masculine physical traits, against an alien comprising nothing but phallic and vaginal symbolism. Here, Ripley, traveling into the bowels of the infestation to save Newt, comes across the alien queen, a giant xenomorph laying dozens of eggs to wait for the next round of surveyors to infect. It's a maternal showdown that puts the final touches on Cameron's feminist vision. By triumphing over not only the male establishment that silenced her (by the end, the marines answer to her and the only one who lives, Hicks, treats her as an equal) but a projection of the motherhood she feels she lost, Ripley casts out her demons and just so happens to look like a complete badass doing so.

Upon its release, Aliens enjoyed a similar reaction to its predecessor: Scott's film got mixed reviews at first until the movie took off, but critics and fans alike instantly embraced Aliens, and its effect on reintroducing artistically qualified genre film to America, while not as powerful as the first movie, was substantial: Weaver even snagged a much-deserved Oscar nomination despite the Academy's long-standing ambivalence toward science fiction. The final two films in the proper Alien franchise would suffer from the sudden interest of the studio that casually let Cameron tinker with a classic, suddenly hounding studio hands during every bit of production and robbing the franchise of what made it stand out with its first two films: directorial ambition and artistic daring. Also, the other two had the rotten luck of following perhaps the two most enduringly entertaining and rewarding popular sci-fi films of the 20th century, and they just couldn't live up to the standard. After all, though I must confess to prefer the atmosphere of the first, Aliens is one of those precious few sequels that can stake a serious claim to being better than the original. Apart from Die Hard, I cannot name a more immaculately crafted action extravaganza. And Die Hard didn't also inject a thoughtful meditation on the role of women and maternal instincts within an action framework. Score one for Cameron.



*Some quick words on the Blu-Ray: I'm planning a Blu-Ray-specific review of the new Alien Anthology release for another site (if you're interested, check the Apocalypse Now review I did last week), but I thought I'd at least address some of the concerns related specifically to this entry in the saga. In an interview before the box set's release, James Cameron mentioned that he'd scrubbed all the grain from the picture's infamously thick and hazy stock, leading some to fear that he'd gone haywire with Digital Noise Reduction gizmos and smoothed things until the image looked too plastic. Fear not: Aliens has never looked so good, retaining a great deal of grain in most shots while adding a degree of dimension and depth never seen in the film's image. It's certainly not the greatest restoration I've seen, but frankly I'm impressed that Cameron and the crew that restored the film managed to create such a clear image, and they ought to share their methods with a number of other commercial studios (and to be fair, even Criterion restorers couldn't have totally salvaged this stock). A hearty round of applause all around for the transfer, which doesn't look as spectacular as the deepening of Alien's more softer look, but in many ways this is the more admirable of the two restorations.

Alien

Alien sits in the middle between the opposing styles of my two favorite horror films, the two films I believe represent the pinnacle of the genre. On one end is John Carpenter's Halloween, an elegantly composed film so meticulous that it has no jump scares but instead creates a deliberate and well-sustained atmosphere of unsettling discontent. You're waiting for something to jump out at you, but for the most part it never does. That film is about the inevitability of an unstoppable force. At the other pole is The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a film made by an equally gifted filmmaker who nevertheless has a sloppier style than Carpenter's immaculate perceptions. Yet that messiness works in Tobe Hooper's favor, allowing him to make a horror film that works, time and again, on a feeling of spontaneity. Even when you're watching it for the second, or fifth, time, it has the power to startle you because everything happens in the moment.

Alien certainly has the atmosphere and directorial sophistication of Halloween down pat. Its sets are complex while looking well-worn, with H.R. Giger's legendary monster instantly announcing itself as one of cinema's most ingeniously designed creatures. With a nuanced soundtrack and an equally delicate and haunting score, the grace and intelligence of the direction has lent itself to endless analysis over the sexual imagery of the film and the themes elicited from a creature with broadly phallic and vaginal physical characteristics, a debate that compounds when you consider the status of the franchise's heroine as perhaps the great feminist icon of popular cinema.

What so few critics do, sadly, is talk about how magnificently terrifying it is. Inevitably dated by the homages, the spoofs and the outright plagiarism, Alien nevertheless continues to hold a power over this viewer after a number of viewings, its pacing setting the mood in the first act, only to mingle with the more unpredictable action in the next acts that keep the film fresh. For as much as Giger's Xenomorph attracts attention for what it symbolizes, attention should also be paid to the simple fact that the creature's constant evolution, combined with Scott's wise decision to only show the barest glimpses of the monster, allow the monster to take on a greater psychic weight in the audience's mind instead of giving it away. Even with Spielberg's Jaws, the audience had a rough idea of the shape of the shark, if not the size. Here, it's all up to guess work, and that make it all the more scary.

Alien exists in a world where space travel has become banal. Where Star Wars kicked off a host of space opera imitators, Scott's film, working off Dan O'Bannon's script (itself a horror version of his comedic Dark Star, made by John Carpenter) presents the average Joe in space. Despite the humongous size of the Nostromo, the ship in which a crew far too small for its cavernous interior resides, the ship is a towing vessel, and its crew, with the exception of a science officer, would not seem out of place on any working class job on Earth. They bitch about paychecks, grumble over the food and worry about fixing the rundown ship. They are not presented as some facile family, but they do come off as relatable people, giving the film's upcoming fantasy a realistic foundation.

Awoken from their cryogenic sleep, the crew is surprised to find they've not returned to Earth's solar system but have been redirected after intercepting a distress signal in another part of the galaxy. Immediately, the crew voices their protest, asking if they're going to get more money and threatening to simply continue back home after a long haul. Only when Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), the warrant officer, tells them that company policy dictates all ships must respond to any distress calls under threat of forfeiting payment altogether does the crew stifle their grumbles.

This first act suggests no impending doom, no sense of disquiet. Its halcyon inactivity allows Ridley Scott to probe the main areas of the Nostromo with a fluid intelligence, using each shot to establish key sections of the ship while framing them in ways that flirt with the careful compositions of 2001 while still adhering to the fast pace of commercial sci-fi like Star Wars. Scott is a notably inconsistent filmmaker, but when he's on, he has an uncanny ability to suffuse artistic mise-en-scène, even a certain amount of grace, into shots that never lose their more direct, mainstream appeal.

When the tow ship arrives in the orbit of an uninhabitable planet and a search party lands a shuttle on the barren rock in adverse conditions, the noose gently tightens around the throat, more so when the crew happens upon a massive, derelict alien ship. Jerry Goldsmith's already subtle score steps back further to let the ambient sounds of howling wind and the creaking of the decaying spaceship. Compared to the almost pedestrian spin on interstellar magnificence of the Nostromo, the alien ship is more lavish, more intricately designed and ornate, clearly the result of bioengineering compared to the obsolete industrial construction of the Nostromo. Scott's talents have never been more evident than they are when the search crew stumbles across a gigantic fossil of an alien corpse. The "space jockey" instantly changes the dynamic of the film: where the enormous derelict suggested something bizarre, this humongous corpse, frozen forever at what could be a giant cannon, one last futile gesture of defense, inspires awe and fear in equal measure. What is this thing? Are there more of him in the sector? And why does he have a gaping hole in his chest?

One of the crew finds a section in the depths of the ship filled with large, leathery eggs and, well, you know the rest. Where Alien previously existed as a realistic depiction of working class slobs in space, suddenly the film explodes into surreal, hypersexualized energy. Poor Kane (John Hurt) looks into an open ovum, gets attacked by a clawed, acidic vagina from hell, which stays on his face for a day before everything seems to return to normal. Then, a penis with a mouth bursts through his chest. So it goes.

As if the attacks weren't frightening enough, Giger's Freudian construction of the alien plays on subtle fears, most of the actually masculine, concerning rape. The "facehugger" invades Kane's mouth and, in a sense, impregnates him -- even the science officer, Ash (Ian Holm), refers to the beast as "Kane's son." Later, when Ash is revealed to be with the crew solely to ensure that the company they work for can get a hold of the alien specimen for their weapons division, he attempts to kill Ripley by choking her with a rolled-up newspaper. The surviving crew finds them and literally knock off Ash's head, revealing him to be an android. And the milky substance that runs through his wires is blatantly reminiscent of semen.

This is all well and good, but the manner in which Scott never places the focus on Giger's interpretive imagery, allowing the audience to consider it on their own terms while he gets down to the business of crafting a thriller. The use of Jonesy the cat as a miscue seems dated today mainly because the "It's Only a Cat" cliché, which had existed in bare forms before but exploded after this film. Yet Scott slyly uses the cat as a means to warn the characters, who never figure out that the cat hisses when the alien is nearby because anyone who might have put two and two together subsequently met a gruesome end. The cat's hiss, in a way, becomes the alien's "theme." Elsewhere, Scott sets up the ingenious chase through the air ducts, in which the ship captain (Tom Skerritt, proving that not even faster-than-light travel and cryostasis could propel humans far enough away from '70s hair) crawls through the vents attempting to lure the alien to the airlock. We process most of the action via the rest of the crew, who monitor movement in the ducts on a scanner that shows a second dot coming at the captain impossibly fast, disappearing and re-appearing again. Veronica Cartwright had the thankless role of being the sobbing, hysterical mess, but you empathize with her terror as she watches some unknown monster closing in on her friend.

In the climax, Scott mounts a sensory overload as Ripley sets the ship to self-destruct. Klaxons blare, lights flash and steam hisses through every leaking hole in the Nostromo. It's a bewilderingly executed segment, taking the well-defined structure of the ship's interior and throwing everything into chaos. When Ripley runs back to get the cat, there's no telling how far away she is from Jones, where the alien is, and how she can get back to the escape shuttle. Naturally, she makes it, and we get one last scare when the alien guesses ahead of Ripley and stows away on the escape pod.

In those final moments, Ripley becomes a hero for the ages, even if she managed to save no one else (well, except the damn cat). One of the enduring draws of Alien is that it's nearly impossible until the end to tell who will live. Ripley immediately projects a hardline approach in the movie, lecturing the engineers on company policy, refusing to let the search crew back because Kane's condition places them all in quarantine (our first taste of Ash's ulterior motives comes from him letting them in). But that severity is often costly in the movies, and usually the most focused one ends up dying. As Roger Ebert astutely noted in his "Great Movies" entry on the film, the cast is, for the most part, skewed to middle age. The youngest two, Cartwright and Weaver, were 29 and 30, respectively. The rest vary from mid-'30s all the way into the early '50s. These are people who just want to go home: would a fresh-faced Luke Skywalker ignore a distress call? Of course not. Hell, even Han Solo wouldn't, though he'd make a big show of ignoring it before his conscience nagged at him. Even with ship ranks, there's no real leader here, no clear social strata. They have enough of a bond with each other that each death affects them on a slightly personal level, but they're distinct enough that the driving impulse is simply fear that they'll be next. Also, their separation allows them to turn on each other that much more easily.

Not until James Cameron resurrected the franchise nearly a decade later and developed the tendrils of Ripley's personality would she become a screen icon, but what Alien lacks in its protagonist's distinction, it more than makes up for with an atmosphere and a sophistication that none of the sequels could even approach. Cameron worked magic with the material but nevertheless had to wrench it almost entirely from its horror roots into more direct action territory. Scott's film lives on as the most nuanced of the four films -- let us count those Alien vs. Predator movies as some separate, not at all equal, property -- gently laying the framework for the ideas other movies would handle more explicitly, such as the third and fourth films playing with the idea of the alien's host dictating its evolutionary outcome, the brilliant anti-corporate thread involving Weyland-Yutani's constant interference with lives simply to get a weapon they could never control, the ruthlessness but also the humanity of its heroine.

Alien revolves around these topics with the same fluid tracking shots that it uses to move through the Nostromo, and as much as I admire Scott's decision to leave science fiction after this and Blade Runner after guessing he could go no farther in the genre -- and thus far, no one else has really exceeded what he did with those two films -- I do so wish he'd made more space films. Rarely have I felt a chill run down my spine so disturbingly as I have when watching the captain, just before going to his death, asking the ship supercomputer, MU-TH-UR, "What are my chances?" After a brief moment, the screen returns with its reply: "Does not compute." In the intervening decades, Scott has proven himself to be anything but a master, connecting only occasionally, and often only with alternate cuts that never even hit theaters. Yet Alien is undeniably a masterpiece, one of those films that meets neatly at the nexus of genre entertainment and artistic endeavor, and whether those who enjoy it today do so for its ambition and vision or for the simply glee of its lasting scares, they're not missing the point.




*Addendum: I wanted to work this into the review proper, but I have such love for the marketing campaign that went into this film that I feel it should be its own separate thread. Today, the film's trailer is almost universally recognized as the greatest preview of all time. In the late '70s, films still often came packaged in the old-school way that went obsessively into detail in trailers, not so much about plot -- that came later when audiences seemed to react so viscerally against being surprised that the industry catered to their wishes to basically know the movie before seeing it -- but in the endless parade of sales pitches. Watch the original Star Wars trailer and listen to a flat voice drone endlessly about "a big, sprawling space opera of rebellion and romance," speaking about a raucous adventure with all the conviction of a police officer reading aloud the traffic report in court. The Alien trailer has no voiceover, not even dialogue from the film. This is old-hat today (the Coen brothers even did a funny version to advertise A Serious Man), but the crafting of the preview solely through the diegetic sounds of the film's atmosphere -- the echoing klaxon, the hissing stem, the shrieking cat -- gradually mounting until it becomes a horror film in miniature, is savagely brilliant and deeply ahead of its time. Then, of course, there is the matter of the tagline, "In space, no one can hear you scream." I would give that tagline the Nobel Prize for Literature. I am the sort of person who hates marketing. I hate trailers that give too much away, or that contain the distillation of a great idea that excites me for a full product that doesn't deliver (oh, Watchmen trailer, how you lied to me), but every now and then someone puts some thought behind how they sell a movie, and the results can be as engaging as the final product. Alien is one of a handful to get it completely right.

Avatar

I love James Cameron.

Let me back up. The Terminator was the first R-rated film I was allowed to watch as a child, at the ripe age of six (my parents brought down the hammer if nudity was involved, but for some reason all the violence in the world was fine, which more or less makes me a microcosm of warped American priorities in censorship). To this day, I prefer it over its smash hit sequel, not simply for nostalgic reasons but because the original is one of the most visceral and fast-paced (while still intelligent) action-thrillers ever made. As I grew, I came to admire his perfect visuals and and his Fulleresque dialogue, long before I knew who Fuller was so I could assign an "esque" to him.

Avatar, his return to science fiction following Terminator 2 and his first narrative feature since 1997's Titanic, will inevitably be lost in the hype, regardless of whether it makes back its considerable budget or flounders. It's almost impressive, given the sheer, mind-blowing, tongue-tying scope of the film. Cameron, along with the technical crew he amassed in his decade-long wait for technology to catch up to his vision, create a world that is animated but real, featuring motion-captured actors without ever looking like Robert Zemeckis' dead-eyed, creepy kid's films. The result is something, for all the inflated pre-release hysteria, truly revolutionary, even if it won't change the face of cinema as we know it.

Narratively, Avatar doesn't stray far from Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and one can easily draw lines to numerous science fiction, action, adventure and epic movies. Jake Sully (Sam Worthington, the next Jude Law in terms of ubiquity), a paraplegic ex-Marine, travels to Pandora, the moon of a planet orbiting Alpha Centauri to take his dead twin's place in a scientific experiment. The moon is inhabited by a species called the Na'vi, a race of 9ft tall, blue-skinned humanoids who just so happen to live on top of a reserve of unobtanium (the biggest shout-out the fictitious material has yet received). Humans cannot breathe the atmosphere, and the prospect of open war threatens PR liabilities for the company hiring all these contractors, so a group of scientists creates Na'vi -human hybrids known as Avatars. Controlled via a mental link, the Avatars allow the humans to venture into Pandora' endless forest, able to experience all of their senses while in bodies that can run for hours and withstand massive injuries. These humans believe that looking theNa'vi will gain the natives' trust, allowing for the introduction of education and modernization, along with a peaceful solution to a heartless corporation's money-grab.

As one might expect, Cameron does not exactly tackle this story, a conflict between pure, nature-loving natives and a corporation that treats an entire planet as so much dirt and sticks standing in the way of a fat quarterly report, with what we might call "subtlety." Jake works for the scientists, but his true allegiance lies with Colonel Quaritch (Stephen Lang), the leader of the mercenary forces who acts like Robert Duvall's Col. Kilgore on steroids. He infiltrates the Na'vi on the colonel's behalf, exploiting the tribe's acceptance of him when the seeds from their gigantic "Hometree " signal that he is special; naturally, the longer he stays with them, the more he comes to love their way of life. Eventually, he sides with the Na'vi over the humans.

Cameron's primary strength as a storyteller has always been his ability to cover up his vast weaknesses as a storyteller: The Terminator is, in terms of screenplays only, still his finest film, because it hits the ground running and features only two moments of pure exposition, one laced with an undercurrent of tension and the other culminating in a sex scene with some breasts. Know your audience, budding filmmakers. But with Terminator 2 and his mega-hit Titanic, he occasionally broke all narrative momentum for moments of expository dialogue and dubious displays of emotion. Aliens, in contrast to Ridley Scott's original, is absurdly direct, but so skillfully directed that one never questions the two-dimensionality of his characters or his blunt dialogue (that he would with this film seek to cover this up with actual 3-D visuals perhaps offers some insight into his mindset). This is a film where non-scientific humans are bloodthirsty killers and natives are literally in tune with nature, thanks to some funky tendrils in their hair. All roads in the story lead to Massive Firefight. Even the character names are basic and obvious: Jacob, the liar who disguised himself as his brother to steal his inheritance, infiltrates the tribe to betray them but later feels regret and shame. Cameron not only uses this story to comment upon the extermination of Native Americans that haunts America' past but on the problems plaguing our present: at one point, someone actually says the line, "We will fight terror with terror."

And yet, Avatar is more than the sum of its clichéd script. The many comparisons people have made to Dances with Wolves are certainly true, but, when you factor in the visuals, Avatar edges closer to the great cinematic tone poems of natural beauty, Baraka and the Qatsi series. The rendered world of Pandora is a living, breathing specimen, its web of tree roots serving as synapses to accept stimuli and issue responses. The Na'vi can plug themselves into this world and, by the end, so can we. This can be partially attributed to Cameron's innovative 3-D technology, used not for distracting moments where objects arbitrarily fly toward the screen and, thus, the audience but to add stereoscopic vision to the mise-en-scène (though I confess I'm still not sold on 3-D technology and would have found the film perfectly lush and overpowering without it). More than simple technological breakthroughs, though, Avatar is so captivating because Cameron threw everything into the world and its fully animated inhabitants. The plants react to the characters' touch, glowing, shrinking, expanding at under the weight of footsteps or the light caress of a finger; the animals have obvious real-life counterparts but are perfectly crafted to look like a part of Pandora itself. Cameron helps us achieve a oneness with Pandora, its unspoiled beauty contrasting harshly with the angular machines the humans bring to subjugate it. We never see Cameron's idea of a futuristic Earth, but Jake mentions once that it no longer has trees, and the harsh juxtaposition of the modern, "civilized" world and the untainted purity of "primitives" in Koyaanisqatsi.

The Na'vi, even above Pandora, are a technical marvel. Taking the innovations behind Gollum and expanding them, the Avatar crew create the most photorealistic CGI creatures yet: every moment is fluid, the gracile bodies of the towering creatures bending and twisting with pure beauty. The Na'vi also sport faces matching the actors playing them: Worthington's Avatar gradually shifts from looking bemused and stupid to a collected warrior who projects an aura that signals he's a leader of men (or Na'vi). Weaver, so authoritative and intimidating in her height and intellect among the humans but filled with awe and a dopey, nerdy glee while walking through the jungle in her Avatar.Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), the warrior princess who teaches Jake and falls in love with him, is oddly, inescapably sexy. While Cameron has never completely fleshed out a character in his life and doesn't start here, the Na'vi and the humans in Avatars have personalities where the Injuns of Dances with Wolves are uniformly portrayed as noble creatures in a pathetic grab for political correctness; I was overjoyed to see a Na'vi that was just a complete dick for most of the film. I saw Avatar with a group of friends, one of whom left the theater waxing about how he too wanted to be a Na'vi after watching the film. Who on Earth wouldn't?

How then, does one rate Avatar? It's impossible to ignore its narrative deficiencies, what with its tendency to stop all plot movement for moments of blatant moralizing and its half-hearted attempt to link this pure fairy tale to political relevance (how sad it is, though, that Cameron's dialogue that concerns the War on Terror has likely been in some version of the script for years and still applies). Yet some of the breaks in the story allow us more time to marvel at Pandora's lush offerings. Even if his script is his least-engaging, least-suspenseful yet, his visuals have a maturity to them that stunned me. When Cameron retreated from fictive films to wait for the development of the necessary technology for this film, the King of the World lost his action throne to Michael Bay, an inbred Hapsburg whose malformed brain concocts ludicrous decisions that fly from jaws that cannot properly close. Compare Bay's style of hectic, sloppy filmmaking to Cameron's willingness to literally stop and smell the roses, or the poetry of a bombing run so horrific that its haunting reverie is in no way undone by James Horner's derivative score. There is true beauty in Avatar, the sort I'd never expect a director like Cameron to depict.

What James Cameron may have created, in his dogged,uncompromising, notoriously difficult way, is this generation's equivalent of Star Wars. Like Lucas' landmark cash-cow, Avatar sports a deeply clichéd, often flat-out boring story, but one filtered through the prism of such visual innovation and imagination that everything else becomes secondary. My generation never had such a film; I leeched off of Star Wars like every other kid who grew up in the '90s -- the closest thing we had to a technical breakthrough that allowed for sumptuous fantasy filmmaking was, well, Terminator 2, which could hardly introduce children to their own imagination like Star Wars or this can. As I am now old enough to see the glaring flaws of Lucas' film, and of this, I wouldn't dare proclaim Avatar a masterpiece, but it has filled every thought I've had since leaving the theater. Cameron announced that, given the time, money and resources he sank into this project he was considering writing two sequels. Where this story can go I'm not sure, but if it sets up the possibility for an Empire Strikes Back-like maturation of tone and delivery, the best is yet to come.

1989 Rewind: Ghostbusters II

I'm just going to go ahead and say it: I like Ghostbusters II. Yes, it's so derivative of the first, unbelievably superior film that I didn't even bother writing a review for that one since I'd re-cover too much ground, but that just goes to show that the first was so good even a shameless retread is worth watching.

Even though I like the film, I must recognize that the first 10 minutes border on the insulting. It's not like Ghostbusters established much of a mythos -- though it did spawn a beloved cult cartoon -- but Ramis devotes the early parts of the film to shamelessly expositional dialogue to explain all of the stuff that happened in the interim between films. I don't believe that a comedy film shouldn't have plot, but why on Earth must we sit through hearing about Dana's (Sigourney Weaver) break-up with Peter, her marriage to that musician dude and their divorce, not to mention how the Ghostbusters are somehow now kaput despite a hero's welcome at the end of the last film? And don't even get me started on Ray (Dan Aykroyd) and Winston (Ernie Hudson) showing up at a kid's birthday party for some desperately needed cash only to dance to the actual Ghostbusters theme song.

Its plot, though clearly strung together to allow for bits and witticisms, actually works. It takes some contrived steps to make the Ghostbusters the underdogs again -- the city of New York served them with a restraining order from catching ghosts after all the collateral damage they caused last time -- but it lets them essentially stick to all of the character traits the actors hammered out so well the first film. Now they must contend with a mysterious slime filling the tunnels and a painting containing the soul of a 17th century tyrant seeking to become corporeal again by possessing Dana's baby.

Really though, Ghostbusters II, like the previous film, is all about the cast. Hudson gets the fewest lines, but his presence is necessary to give this group a working man feel as opposed to a group of nerdy, irresponsible scientists. Ramis and Aykroyd throw this off a bit by telling one too many nerd jokes, which go beyond the cheeky, literate humor of the first and into hoping that the audience will laugh at that which they do not understand. Nevertheless, they have enough peevish delight in them to give the characters a certain endearing dopey quality. Rick Moranis, who nearly stole the show the first time, has a bigger part and manages to add some dimensions to his bashful fool. When he tosses out a line like "Well, I used to have a roommate, but my mom moved to Florida" without a shred of irony, you know you've struck gold.

Of course, it's Murray, who crystallized everything that would make him BILL MURRAY in the first film, who carries the film as he scores hit after hit as the drier-than-the-Sahara Peter Venkman. He broke up with Dana because of commitment issues, but you get the feeling he did it just so he could keep chasing her. Every single word that flies from his lips has that glorious and utterly inimitable combination of an abyss of cynicism and a boyish gleam. There's a reason why his collaborations with Ramis remain so rewarding: they were the perfect fit. When Egon investigates Dana's apartment and clinically says, "I'd like to run some gynecological exams on the mother," no one on Earth but Murray could deliver Peter's response, "Who wouldn't?" and make it even funnier than it is on paper.

As with the previous film, Ghostbusters II climaxes with an over-the-top effect that's as hysterical as it is thrilling. The Statue of Liberty gag would be seen as absurd and narrative-killing in any other feature, but how exactly do you jump the shark on a franchise that previously featured a giant, killer marshmallow? I find myself laughing almost continuously through the scene, and the overly action-y showdown at the end does little to detract from the laughs.

Despite great scenes like this and assured acting from the returning cast, Ghostbusters II still suffers from stale rewrites and some dialogue that's just too straight-faced for its own good. Peter MacNicol also grates as the skittish foreign servant of Vigo, while Kurt Fuller's mayoral assistant reeks too strongly of the EPA agent from the previous film. Having said all that, I still enjoy the film. Where Ghostbusters is a stone-cold classic, this sequel is more of a rainy day movie to lazily pop in when you finish the first film and want just a bit more Venkman. And who out there doesn't want more Venkman?