Freak Engine

How much has been written about Avatar – excuse me, James Cameron’s Avatar – at this point? Every nook and cranny has been dissected, criticized and over-analyzed at this point. Every nook. Every cranny. Except one. The one thing that frustrated me above all others in this film is also the one thing I haven’t heard much more than a peep about. In a word, it’s

UNOBTANIUM

Maybe it’s a small thing to most casual movie viewers, but I just could not get past the absolutely asinine name given to the ENTIRE PURPOSE for a military presence on Pandora (I’ll spare you from my thoughts on Cameron’s other overt 6th grade symbolism. Pandora?? Sheesh!). This has to be one of the most underdeveloped inciting elements (pun intended) in blockbuster history. I mean, I KNOW Cameron wanted to get down to Pandora so he could show off his pretty Na’Vi and their dragon-thingies, but couldn’t he have come up with a better reason besides this? I can hear the plotting session now:

Cameron: So, why are there all of these opposing forces converging on Pandora?
Overpaid Flunky (OF): Ummm…..corporate greed?
Cameron: Same reason as Aliens?
OF: Sure. Why not? Worked before.
Cameron: But what do they want?
OF: Oil?
Cameron: Too 20th century.
OF: Dilithium crystals?
Cameron: Too 24th century.
OF: Drilling rights?
Cameron: Too Abyss-y.
OF: Trade negotiations??
Cameron: Too Phantom Menace… Any other bright ideas?
OF: How ‘bout we combine all of those into one?
Cameron: A crystal that requires trade negotiations for drilling rights?
OF: Sure, boss.
Cameron: But what do we call the crystal?
OF: Well, it’s gotta be pretty damned hard to obtain.
Cameron: That’s it!! Unobtanium!!!

Imbecilic, right? Then why do I think my imagined plotting session is probably more in-depth than what actually happened?

To be fair, unobtainium (note spelling difference) IS an actual term, but it is used in science or engineering for a substance or variable that is theoretical or practically impossible to obtain in nature (see this Wikipedia article for a more in-depth discussion). Thus, the very fact that the unobtanium exists in the universe of Avatar negates the use of the term (whether Cameron changes the spelling or not). Guess they could have called it “obtainium” if they were THAT desperate.

For those who think I’m making too much out of all of this, it’s fair to say that I really liked Avatar and found myself lost in its world for most of the movie. Still, as meticulous a filmmaker as James Cameron is, a small touch like unobtanium really stands out as sloppy scripting. He can and should have done better, and the movie-going public should expect more. And anyway, everyone knows what Cameron thinks of these days when he hears the word unobtainium:

Tron is a cheesetastic load of crap.  What a mess!  I even thought so when I saw it as a kid (for some reason I still bought the soundtrack and I didn’t even like Journey) but I wanted to revisit it before the sequel arrives.  What a terrible, terrible mistake.

Nothing works in this movie.  The “real world” segments are plagued with terrible dialogue and even worse performances.  The computer world bits have the strangest visuals this side of Caligari but they have a terrible quality to them.  One might think the human actors were actually shot at the time of Caligari but I fear that’s just not so.  Shouldn’t computer-assisted/generated woo-woo look better?  Cleaner, sleeker, even cooler?  The strange black and white backlit photography on a light box animation stand blah blah blah process was expensive and dumb.  It just didn’t work.  It shows the limited thinking of animators on a real-world set.

The real trick to Tron is the fact that most of what we see on screen in the computer world isn’t CGI at all.  It’s a bunch of age-old studio trickery from matte paintings to traditional cel animation to *yikes* reflective strips on foam *shudder* and spandex *shudder even more* costumes.  Didn’t George Lucas prove that the whole reflective strips thing didn’t work when he tried to create the lightsaber FX in camera?  Very little of Tron is actually CGI.  What is there definitely deserves props.  This was 1982 after all, the era of the Atari 2600.  Entire video games took up less than 4k of memory at that time!  Just imagine.  A 15Gb game for today’s next-gen (sic) systems uses almost four MILLION times as much storage space.  At the time, Tron was definitely the state of the art but it was trying to look like even more.

Unfortunately, the effort put into Tron’s visuals was at the forefront of the picture’s development.  The story seems like little more than an afterthought.  Even Oscar-winning actor (and Dude extraordinaire), Jeff Bridges comes across as a community theatre has-been in this one.  I expect it’s because director Steve Lisberger came to the project from the world of animation where flat characters are the general order of the day.  I wasn’t there but the evidence suggests that he had no idea what to do with living, breathing bodies on a stage.  Even master thespian David Warner comes across as silly.  Maybe it’s the foam headgear.

The art direction for Tron was in some fairly capable hands.  Sci-Fi fans will no doubt recognize the names of Syd Mead and Jean “Moebius” Giraud as conceptual artists on the movie.  Both of these gents have done some stunning work in their careers.  I expect they even did some stunning work on Tron but the art director was left trying to figure out how to bring their lavish concepts to the screen and at the end of the day it just couldn’t be done.  It remains to be seen whether Tron: Legacy will succeed on that count.

I also have to take a moment to bash the score.  Wendy (aka Walter) Carlos was tapped to create a synth score for the pic.  Makes sense, right?  Except for the fact that Carlos’ work was in emulating real world orchestral scores using synths!  WTF?  So they hired someone to do a synth score but make it sound like maybe it wasn’t synths at all?  Huh?  Why not hire Kraftwerk?  Or Yellow Magic Orchestra?  And ditch the Journey marketing push, guys.  Their music just doesn’t fit the techno theme, IMHO.

One good thing did come out of Tron.  It was a kick-ass video game.

Now that Blade Runner has been released in every incarnation ever seen by anyone anywhere, it’s hard to know which version to talk about.  What exactly is Blade Runner?  Which version is THE movie known as Blade Runner?  Even though I like the version without the voiceover, Blade Runner will forever be the version I saw in the movie theater during its initial release.

My friend, Steve Sewell, was the only one I could talk into going to see the movie with me.  At the time I remember thinking that Harrison Ford’s extremely short haircut was really weird and now I sit here typing this with hair that’s much shorter.  NOT less hair, mind you, SHORTER hair.  There’s a big difference.

We watched the movie in awe, not entirely certain of what we were seeing.  I don’t think either of us (or the other twelve people in the theater on that particular Saturday night) breathed a word while it played.  We even sat silently through the credits and neither of us were the type to insist on watching credits).  We were stunned.  What exactly had we just seen?  To this day, I’m not sure.

I went back the following week and saw the movie by myself.  I think it was the first time I’d ever done that and I was practically alone in the theater.  BR wasn’t exactly the smash hit that Warner Brothers had hoped for.  According to BoxOfficeMojo, it made just over $6 million in its opening weekend.  Not horrible but then again this was a $28 million sci-fi movie.

At the time I knew nothing about the business of filmmaking.  Sure, I read Starlog and the other movie magazines but they hardly ever told the complete stories behind anything film-related.  To me the success or failure of a film simply boiled down to one question.  Did I like it?

Blade Runner was, and continues to be, a hard sell for some people.  It was marketed as an action movie but there really was more angst and brooding than there was action…and that was exactly what I liked about it.  1982 was also the year that Khan almost got his wrath on and Arnold hit the top with Conan for the first time.  There were lots of other quality movies that Summer (including the ET juggernaut) but none of them had the tone of BR.  None of them, not ever Khan, felt like they were taking you to a place you’d never been to before.  The world of BR was a sad place.  It was a difficult place to be and that was reflected in all of the elements of design.  Sadness pervades the picture making it appealing to an angst-ridden teen but not such a good date movie.

I guess I sorta understand why many people don’t want to see “downer” films.  A lot of the time I don’t either, at least if that’s all a movie has to offer.  I skipped Hostel, for example, for the same reason.  But real tragedies, in the Shakespearean mode of the word, usually have a lot more going on than just tragedy.  Tragic characters often have the most to live for.  They experience tragedy because of their desire to make things better for themselves – because they’re alive.

At the beginning of BR, Deckard might as well be dead.  He’s anesthetized to the point of being a sleepwalker.  In 1982 I saw him as the typical adult.  I saw him as exactly what I didn’t want to be when i grew up.  To me, most adults were asleep.  They didn’t appreciate the power they wielded in the world.  They weren’t trying any more.  They had accepted their lots in life and were just going to make it to death’s door.  Oh, there were a few people I looked up to, like Keith Richards or George Lucas, but most of the adults I actually had contact with in Macon, Georgia from day to day were wasting their time.  I liked seeing that an adult could be roused from their slumber even if it meant there was that drive in the country at the end of BR.  I also liked wallowing in the darkness that preceded that ascent.

I should also mention the music.  I was never a big Vangelis fan but the BR soundtrack truly captured that movie for me.  I liked that it was mostly constructed of minor-key electronica that essentially faded into the background of the BR world but somehow stuck with you.  It was a crime that the original tracks weren’t released until 1994.  The New American Orchestra version of the music (which I bought on LP at the time) paled in comparison to Vangelis’ originals.  According to usenet sources, this was Vangelis’ choice because he resented the use of other music in the film.  I’ve never figured out how withholding their work from release has ever helped a recording artist, but that was his choice at the time and we all paid the price for it.  I sat through those credits the first time because that music was the world of BR.  Listening to it, even now, plops me right back into that theater seat.  Before the coming of the VCR, soundtracks were pretty much the only way you could relive the experience of the movies.  That’s probably why a good score in even the crappiest movie can win me over every time.

Looking back on the film and all of its different versions, I’m left with the thought that the original BR achieved greatness and the subsequent versions perfected it.  I suppose if I had read PK Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep before I’d seen the movie, I’d have felt differently.  Much like The Shining, the book and movie are such completely different entities it’s hard to accept the second one you encounter.  But BR was my first encounter with the work of PK Dick and it was a wonderful, dreadful experience.