Yes, Father. I Will Become a Starship Captain.

J.J. Abrams' 2009 Star Trek reboot is only sort of like a Star Trek film. If it were a real, tangible item, you probably couldn't get a grip on it without it slipping through your hands like it was covered in afterbirth. In defense of the filmmakers, and I guess this whole review will be my defensive position on Team Filmmakers, the Star Trek series has been covered in duct tape for a while and has really needed a greasebath. It's a new direction for the series, yes, but it preserves the characters and it's the only way the Star Trek series was going to continue. I don't imagine the nerd scum would be happy seeing their favorite daydream blown off the cultural radar and into little tiny pieces of shrapnel called "Family Guy spoofs of William Shatner's voice".

J.J. Abrams has done so much to make this Star Trek film that it needed to be. It's fast-paced, shiney and fun as opposed to the last few films, which were like playing with a rusty pair of scissors. And while he may not have preserved Gene Rodenberry's original intentions, he's preserved his characters in a way that pays tribute to the original ensemble with new actors that don't have to be forced into the script to appease the hoards of bloodthirsty Trekkies. Despite a few lapses in narrative logic (okay, gaping plot holes, are you happy?), the script is exciting and fast-paced and each copy was probably lit on fire before being handed to the actors.

Even if this is the second time I've reviewed this movie here, allow me to summarize the plot. It's futuretime once again and Earth is as gay and boring as ever, while there's all sorts of excitement to be had in space. The USS Kelvin is attacked by a massive Romulan ship, commanded by the delightfully evil Nero (Eric Bana) who spear-guts (In the future? Hot damn!) their captain, leaving first officer George Kirk in charge of escaping certain death. His pregnant wife goes into labor (women!) as weapons systems and autopilot fail, leaving Kirk to pilot the Kelvin into the Romulan ship and buy the escape pods time to escape, creating a sassy 9/11 subtext.

Mrs. Kirk gives birth to Baby Kirk who grows up to be Big Poppa Kirk (Chris Pine) who enlists in Starfleet and meets Leonard McCoy (Pathfinder) and begins a rivalry with Spock (Zachary Quinto). When Captain Nero appears for the first time in 25 years and takes the Enterprise's captain, Christopher Pike (Bruce Greenwood) captive, Kirk and Spock must learn the true nature of friendship to overcome a villain they both have vendettas against.

But let's focus on that first paragraph for a while. Star Trek's opening is another in a long line of perfect opening scenes this year. Abrams is king of this scene, stacking one horrible revelation on top of another and buttfucking the audience into nosebleed with suspense. It's almost an argument for short films, strangely enough, where this ten-minute sequence outclasses an otherwise excellent film on every level, mostly because the writing doesn't have to spend time connecting the dots and the characters are established in such quick strokes. Maybe it's an argument for good writing. I don't know. The film never maintains that momentum, and I don't blame them, really, but that one scene is an action/suspense masterpiece that, surprisingly, preserves the slow, naval feeling of Star Trek space battles.

As an action film and as an adventure film, it is fast and jaw-shattering, but it never again manages to be king of suspense mountain and the construction of individual scenes becomes rather more pedestrian.

None of that's too much of an issue, a film two funzos lower on the fun scale than that first scene would still rock your cocks. The only grave mistake this film makes is with James Kirk himself. First, Chris Pine is miscast, but the role is also written wrong. I'm all for reinterpreting a classic character, but Kirk is at odds with the logic of the script. How can this cocksucker ever inspire loyalty in a crew? That's suppsoed to be the defining aspect of Kirk: he inspires loyalty. Chris Pine does the film no favors by playing Kirk as a smug bastard, instead of making him charismatic and forceful in spite of his dickheaded behavior, he's just brash and dickheaded in spite of his dickheaded behavior.

Treatment of other characters elsewhere is way better. Doc McCoy gets a perfect performance from Pathfinder, Spock is less sad-looking thanks to Zachary Quinto (who was always my favorite part of the perpetual shitwagon Heroes, Lost's bumbling little brother), Scotty gets Simon Pegg in his best performance since Hot Fuzz, and seeing that is worth the fact that you'll never make out with the ticket girl now that she's seen you buy a ticket to Star Trek. Uhura least resembles her original character, and is played by an indistinguished Zoe Saldana, which is a depressing thought, going back to her work here after her work in Avatar blew my mind all over the wall.

Elsewhere, Eric Bana is great in a role that's a bit too small for him, playing an evil wizard. There has been a lot of derision aimed at his performance and how it's one of the weaker elements of the film, but that's something I haven't even begun to figure out yet. He flies around in a giant spaceship that looks like a petrified squid and turns planets inside-out. He also made a spaceship that can only be navigated by Olympic longjumps, unlike the sterile white Plexiglas of the Enterprise. Really, the design is top-notch. It maintains a very 1960s-futuristic feel while at the same time updating it to something we recognize as futuristic (phones the size of feet!). It's not terribly subtle, but it's pretty sweet and it'll make any smelly Indiana viewer think that he's an expert on production design.

Okay, okay, LENS FLARES. I thought the lens flares gave the future a look of brightness and optimism and gave the film a totally unique look. It's a self-conscious move: lens flares, after all, are only produced by a camera. I don't think that's too different from modern films being shot in black and white or any amount of flashy cinematography. After all, any of those techniques are reminding the viewer, in a very deliberate way, that they're watching a movie. Maybe I'm missing the real reason that lens flares are the devil's tool, but for what it's worth, I thought they were great for what they were. As a technique to give the film a memorable look, it worked, and it worked on a thematic level.

Similarly, it's a good aesthetic to capture the action and translates well between the action and interactions between characters and between the ships. As I said before, the space battles are played as fast-paced naval battles and are shot with verve and style. The action between individual characters harbors one of the film's best tricks to keep the film flowing quickly. That is, none of the action sequences last very long at all. They're all shot and staged excellently, but that tendency for them to go on for ages and burn the audience out is ignored. Instead the action bleeds into the next scene seamlessly (watch the drill scene closely to see how each individual scene is attached to a much different sort of action scene) and the tension never even begins to fade.

So, let's recap. Great opening, looks like it was rubbed with ham, terrible lead performance, good supporting performances.

Take that, Star Trek canon.

9/10

Nemisees, Nemesi

There's a story that the producers of Star Trek: Nemesis wanted Nicholas Meyer, who directed Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan and Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country to direct their film. He asked to be allowed to rewrite the script himself, and when the producers refused, he turned down their offer. In that moment, the Star Trek franchise ended and would need to be pumped full of youth and lens flares before it would be suitable for human consumption again.

But you can't really describe Nemesis as being fit for human consumption. It's probably the most frustrating of any of the films, because if Nicholas Meyer had been allowed his rewrite and if he had been behind the camera, I have no doubt it would be the best of the original ten Star Trek films.

I don't mean to talk Nicholas Meyer up so much. After all, I don't have much love for Wrath of Khan, and while I quite liked The Undiscovered Country, it's no masterpiece and has its fair share of flaws. The problem is that up to this point, very few Star Trek filmmakers have had any experience behind the camera before making their film. Really, the only experienced director was Robert Wise, who made what is probably my favorite of the original six films. After that we had Nicholas Meyer make Wrath of Khan, his first movie, and then we had Leonard Nimoy for two films, then William Shatner, then we brought back Meyer. For Generations, we had David Carsons, who had never made a film before, and then First Contact and Insurrection, the first and second films of castmember Jonathon Frakes.

Now we have Stuart Baird, who will now be my go-to associative image for the word "hack". He shoots and stages the movie like his kid's first basketball game. Baird is an editor of some note, notably for his excellent work on Casino Royale, Lethal Weapon and the original Omen. He's got Edge of Darkness coming out soon, which looks like an entertaining, straightforward action film with a really pissed off Mel Gibson and directed by Martin Campbell. I'm sure his work there will be excellent as well, but as a director, he's really an unfortunate choice. He's the entire reason this film fails.

In this space adventure, Picard and the Gang run into a clone of Picard named Shinzon, played by Tom Hardy, one of our finest young actors. He has taken control of the Romulan and Reman (I GET IT) empires and is planning to destroy the Federation by killing their favorite sexagenarian. In other news, Data uncovers an evil clone named B-4 that has next to nothing to do with the plot.

Something I'd like to address. Picard's second-in-command, Riker, is retiring to spend more time with his back hair and Data is being promoted to his position. I get that Data is supposed to be this series' Spock, but Spock was capable, badass and Leonard Nimoy. I wouldn't trust Data to lick stamps. He's always malfunctioning and going kill-crazy, and he comes off like a child. I suppose that's the point, but I wouldn't trust him at the helm of the ship should the captain be taken hostage. How about Worf, whose every command would be "furrow brow angrily"? Or the unnamed helmsman afraid to take much action after what happened to the gay helmsman from First Contact. Or the ship's cook.

So Stuart Baird. I suppose we should get back to him. His action scenes are so by-the-books, so unengaging, so uninteresting that I couldn't imagine that he bent over backwards for this directing job, if the stories are to be believed. There's no flash, there's no panache, there's no passion for the art. For instance, there's a car chase scene. What happens in the car chase? They drive, they shoot, they escape. Shot from the middle distance, most likely while the crew was at lunch. There's a shootout. They let a sixty-year-old man fire two guns at once, one of which is a rifle. He takes cover and takes pot shots while Data deciphers a foreign language to operate the door controls. He doesn't pull much out of this excellent cast, especially Patrick Stewart, who has a script that finally comes within swinging distance of his immense talent, but he seems so disaffected and tired of the role, and the director is so incapable of getting anything out of him, that it might be his saddest work yet.

Worse yet is Tom Hardy, a brilliant actor in a very high-profile role, where he was obviously directed to say things quietly and menacingly, stand in the darkest part of the set and be bald. When I saw that he was in this film, I immediately got excited, thinking that we would at least get a good performance from him. It's such a fucking shame that Baird manages to squander the talents of Tom Hardy, but it's almost a feet of incredible failure. That's like making Chuck E. Cheese boring.

And speaking of Chuck E. Cheese, the script still suffers from the same problems, namely we spend a lot of time focusing on side characters just to appease fans, not because they can be effectively worked into the script. We get to address fun themes, like the nature of self and Picard goes up against a real villain who he has an emotional stake against. It has all the makings for a dark film where the Enterprise crew battles their most dangerous villain yet, but everything about the execution is terrible. There's really not one thing that the crew or actors get right, and it's disheartening. If the producers had given Meyer a few months to rewrite the screenplay, the franchise could have had its biggest hit ever, instead it got its lowest-grossing film ever and killed any notion of a Voyager or Deep Space Nine film.

I just wish the producers could have figured out what the problems were. They've had the same problems this entire series, and they never learn anything from the successes or failures. When the Insurrection script was rushed through development and even the director condemned the film, they didn't learn anything. When they hired Nicholas Meyer a second time and ended up with a good, successful film, they learned nothing.

These films have ignored very simple doctrines of filmmaking that could have saved them. Almost every one of these films, good and bad, seems to lack even basic filmmaking craft. The producers could have mined the independent scene for talented young sci-fi directors, which there were plenty of in the early 90s, especially, given that the Star Wars generation was just making an impact.

What a waste.

4/10

The Last Rainforest

First of all, I fucking called it.

Just wanted to get that out of the way before I got into anything else. All you faggots saying it looked retarded and that it was going to be the biggest flop of all time, commercially and artistically, can go to hell.

Okay, so my excuse for posting this so late: I bought my IMAX 3D tickets way the hell ahead of time, like two weeks in advance. Dragged some kids who didn't think it looked good with me to see it. As we were watching it, we leaned forward and had a little powwow session. We all three agreed that the 3D was really distracting, didn't look that good and was detrimental to the success of an otherwise very, very pretty movie.

Then we had an intermission, which the theater manager said we weren't supposed to have. Apparently they had assembled the print wrong because when it came back on the 3D looked just fine. I then made it my mission to see the film again because that unpleasant first half had messed with my perception of the film, and that was the fault of the theater owners, not the filmmakers. Also because the dicks at the IMAX 3D theaters don't let you keep the space goggles.

So the best place to start, for more than a few reasons, is the story. On the distant planet Pandora, a corporation has taken to mining for a valuable resource and has hired out mercenaries to deal with the hostile environment, namely a 10-foot tall humanoid species known as the Na'vi, the very dangerous, very tough and very intelligent dominant species of Pandora. In order to better relations, Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) has been involved in developing the Avatar Program, a program wherein a human remotely pilots a Na'vi body, grown in a vat. When one driver is killed, his twin brother Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) is brought in to pilot his avatar, avatars being linked to drivers by DNA for full nervous system immersion (or some other sci-fi technobabble).

The human forces are led by the most evil man they could possibly have found for the job (Stephen Lang), who reminds me too much of my dad. He wants to use Jake's in with the Na'vi to acquire tactical data for the impending conflict. Unfortunately, Jake is being seduced by the Na'vi's natural lifestyle, in tune with the elements of Pandora, meant in no small way to remind you of Native Americans. He quickly falls in love with the strong-willed Neytiri, a hunter of the forest folk and heir to a seat of power in the Na'vi tree house gang. I don't think I'm giving anything away if I say that Jake eventually sides with the Na'vi against the humans.

This plot has come under a lot of fire for being too simple, but it works so goddamn well I don't see how the simplicity is even an issue. It's bare bones and elemental, and if there's one thing that Cameron has a real and true grasp on, it's the elemental. Col. My Dad doesn't have any redeeming human qualities, he's not even a character. He's just pure evil, not unlike Cal from Titanic. And as I said, Cameron has a problem with his leading men being ciphers, but for this film Jake Sully works perfectly and Sam Worthington's listless performance is a perfect match. It's like the performances in 2001 or Blade Runner, where the humans are intentionally played as bland archtypes to bring to the fore the personality of the environment or the other non-human elements. That the human element of the film is totally sterile is exactly the point, Jake even comments on it one scene, saying how much more surreal the human world is after spending so much time in his dreamscape. And the audience feels exactly the same. I wonder if the 3D element of the human scenes look strange and awkward on purpose, so that when we step into Pandora and it gels perfectly it feels natural and far more real, despite being a complete fantasy world.

And WHAT A FUCKING WORLD IT IS. Every plant, fern, rock or square inch of dirt pulsates with life in the most gaudy, colorful way possible. And when the lights went out and the world lit up with neon plants and fluorescent water, I had to take out my eyeballs and dunk them in a glass of water. The world may not work totally logically, but holy shit is it a wonder to look at. This may be the most stunning fantasy world ever constructed for film and my reaction to it is how I imagine people reacted to The Wizard of Oz back in the olden days. If this whole film is an excuse to give us vistas of Pandora, I am more than fine with that.

But that's not all it offers. First is, obviously, James Cameron's old pro hand at action. He stages masterful action in his sleep, which is why it's so surprising that an early chase scene through the forest (!) is pretty unspectacular, even a little bit bad. But I'll forgive that in a second for the epic climax, a battle tallying around twenty minutes that will overwhelm all five senses with the sensation of pepperjack cheese. I don't want to give anything away, but it's spectacular and if you have even a little bit of appreciation for action cinema, you're sure to love it.

And the other big thing is - hold on a second...

ZOE SALDANA FOR BEST ACTRESS

Okay. So Zoe Saldana is absolutely incredible in this film. The first truly great motion capture performance since Andy Serkis in Lord of the Rings. Her character is a combination of all the great things about actors mixed with all the great things about computer animation. It might well be one of the greatest combinations of actor and filmmaking craft towards the goal of creating a great performance. It's more than obvious that an inordinate amount of time went into animating her facial movements. Her performance is incredibly subtle, and while it's hard to say where Saldana's performance stops and the animation begins, I'd like to give equal credit to both sides. It's her strong, animalistic, sexual performance that anchors the entire film. It's a great example of a perfect performance and yet another marvelous female performance in a James Cameron film.

But the main character, if you'll excuse the faggotry, is Pandora itself. If there is an avatar in this film outside of the quite literal avatars, it's the Na'vi for Pandora. They represent the interests of the planet, commune with it and protect the balance of life, always acting with it and understanding it perfectly. It's the elemental tale of a world, not a people, fighting invaders. There are times when Pandora seems to even betray emotions.

The entire film would fall apart as anything but a visual exercise without Saldana. I'm no good at describing performances, but no female performance I have seen this year (despite being super behind, An Education isn't playing anywhere in my fucking STATE) even compares. I hope to god it isn't overlooked because it's motion captured. I hope the gorgeous production design isn't overlooked because it's in a big budget action movie. And I hope that James Cameron doesn't get overlooked for this sort of thing, the sort of thing that he's best at, that he excels at and that every other filmmaker in the world should sit down, shut up and take note of.

9/10

Sad Old Magician Repacking His Suitcase

After nine Star Trek films I feel like I'm playing with a jack-in-the-box. There are so many better things in this world, or this room, or under my couch cushions, for me to be playing with, but I've arbitrarily imposed upon myself the need to play with the jack-in-the-box. So I joylessly turn the crank until the clown or whatever other satanic images you can fit into it pop out. Sometimes it still surprises me, but rarely. And when it pops out, it bounces around on its string for a minute as I stare at it, and then I stare into the middle distance, thinking about something--anything--else that will take my mind somewhere where it won't waste away. And then I press the little clown back into the box and slowly start turning the crank again. If someone watched a person do this, they would probably cry.

And that's what I think of the Next Generation cast. At this point they're all well into their fifties, there's more Viagra and whiskey in their coffee every morning and sometimes they stand in front of the mirror in the morning and just cry. It's likely a side effect of the leg-chaffing cream they're getting slightly addicted to and they would file a lawsuit against that pharmaceutical company if they didn't still have to pay the mortgage on the cavernous manor they bought at the height of their coke habit. They kicked the habit a few years back and got in all the tabloids, but maybe it's time to pick it up again so that there will be something to do during the day instead of re-watching old episodes of The Next Generation.

What I'm saying is, when it comes to roles in blockbusters, they got the short, pointy, stabby end of the stick. They've been playing the same roles for the chanting mass of nerds for over a decade, despite being out of shape and tired and hairy. They've signed their souls over to the producers completely, and it's clear that those producers don't give a shit about the cast. They all seem to be so sad reciting their technical Trek jargon without a thick fog of cocaine to keep the fictional universe making sense. There's one very telling scene where Crusher and Troi talk about their breasts firming up that was clearly meant to create an audible rumble through the world as Trekkies fell over and started collectively masturbating. But it came ten years too late, and now they both look like skin puppets whose silicone breasts couldn't possibly be firmer if they were filled with helium. Although that doesn't discourage Jonathon Frakes, who seems to have used his position as director and Marina Sirtis's need to pay her private detective as leverage to get her into a bathtub with him.

So here's the plot. There's some colony on a planet and they never age for reasons that are never explained, probably because I don't care. The Federation is trying to relocate the colonists and the Enterprise crew thinks that's wrong. Hooray, let's get to the insults.

There was no way this group of fuck-ups could maintain the commercial and artistic success of First Contact, so it all falls apart rather unsurprisingly. I'll give Frakes some credit as director: he's not trying to just retread the success of First Contact, but that would be better than this out-and-out failure. I get that Star Trek is all about bright, shiny optimism, but contrasting that with the ever-present threat of evil and darkness is extremely effective BECAUSE of that. Making the sequel a sunny prancing through a field of flowers is turning the knob way back down. If we're going to turn down the excitement and tenacity of a film, at least replace it with something and not the dead air that seems to be the main character of Star Trek: Insurrection.

We took an important step towards a distinctive visual language in the last film with some darker cinematography. It still looked like crap, but after a half-dozen films that all look like shit, you'll take what you can get. This film puts it in reverse for about six blocks leaving us with some of the most plain, unaltered footage I have ever seen outside of a camcorder.

The only thing I liked about this film was a space battle played, like all space battles in this series, like a naval battle that really involves the characters more than the ship which is one of the few things this series has consistently harnessed for the power of good.

The other standout is, obviously, Patrick Stewart, who actually looks quite bored here. An actor of his caliber shouldn't be stuck playing the same character for a decade, as much fun as Jean-Luc Picard may be to watch. He's stuck with an unplayable romantic subplot that made me want to claw my eyes out and throw them at the screen and is one of the most disturbing crimes this franchise has committed.

As for the rest of the cast, Jonathon Frakes looks like he's having fun, which makes him look weird and out of place next to the rest of the cast. Brent Spiner doesn't look like he wants to move a lot and F. Murray Abraham is unrecognizable and unremarkable, which is a good way to categorize his work post-Amadeus.

I've heard that Nemesis essentially ended the franchise, but I have a hard time imagining it being at least less engaging than this film. But if it's true, I can't really imagine there being a darker time to be a fan of a series.

I can't give it a one, or even a two in good conscience, it's just not offensive enough to the senses, just horribly boring. And that makes me even angrier at it: I can't really justify its crucifixion. I don't hate it, I just feel sorry for it.

3/10

Gazing Back

So here we arrive at where James Cameron gives away his sentimentality and the fuzzy teddy bear hiding beneath his human skin. I mentioned in both my Terminator review and my Aliens review that those movies were the grim torments of the movie gods, but in the most deliriously invigorating way possible, like being hit in the face with a Monet. You may be bruised and bleeding by the end of either of those films, but you'll be ready for round two. None of the films we'll be watching in the next week will be anything like those in terms of tone. They'll all be airier and poppier and while of course I do not prefer one style over the other, I do think that James Cameron, at least initially, had a better grasp of the dark and grim. I like feeling like I'm trapped in brightly colored bubble gum as much as the next guy, but I'm sad that Cameron was never able to exercise the same amount of control over tone and deliver a film that leaves me feeling something distinctive, whether it be the rape-victim shakes or polka-dotted fervor (although crazy housewives the world over will argue with me on Titanic).

Like all of Cameron's films, I've seen The Abyss before, but for this viewing I opted for the Director's Cut, seeing as this retrospective is a celebration of James Cameron as a director and based on some kind words my brother had for this version.

The Abyss takes place in an underwater oil drilling rig that looks like it could be a summer getaway for Victor Von Doom. There, blue-collar worker Virgil (Ed Harris) and his estranged wife Lindsey (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) are asked to aid a group of navy seals in finding a missing nuclear submarine. Before long they encounter strange, brightly colored creatures zipping around adorably and casually causing adorable mass pandemonium. Evil military man Coffey (Michael Biehn) wants to nuke them, but the compassionate protagonists want to try and make contact with the strange creatures. Paranoia ensues for the viewer does not know: are the creatures benevolent, or are they as devious as they seem?

If you're thinking to yourself "man, that sounds an awful lot like Close Encounters of the Third Kind", then grab a Medal of Honor from the basket. I know that the originality of a story is almost trivial, but damn it, it's like making a movie about the life of a magazine mogul and his disk sled told through flashback and called Citizen Blaine or something. Spielberg kind of staked out this territory in '77 and made a movie that anyone would be hard-pressed to top. I can't decide if James Cameron's decision to put a paper cut-out of Ed Harris in front of Richard Dreyfuss and repackage it as a different film makes him very ballsy or just stupid, but The Abyss has at least one huge thing on its side: it is maddeningly suspenseful.

Really, as much as I bitch about them being exactly the same movie, the similarities are nominal. Close Encounters had a smaller thematic scope (and was more successful for it), while The Abyss is a bit more genre-oriented. And would you look at that! Genre-oriented. Just the sort of thing I like. The Abyss is largely a locked-door thriller with underwater aliens serving more as a macguffin than an integral part of the narrative. Their presence only serves to aggravate the incredibly tense conflict between the rig workers and the military dudes.

And that conflict, so often played out, is given new vitality by Cameron and I have NO idea how. For a 19-year-old I think I'm a pretty observant moviegoer, but I remain absolutely perplexed by this unusually potent thriller for the second time through. Both times I've been driven to the brink of insanity by this film's tense conflicts and both times I've emerged from the other side without my usual look of smug triumph.

Perhaps it's the underwater setting and the very real, very prevalent fear of drowning that, strangely, few films ever exploit. Drowning is #2 on my list of fears, a list that features two items: 1) Dragons and 2) Drowning. But I don't think that one thing can account for the outrageous effectiveness of this film, and it's time to give the other players their due. Despite being nearly three hours, The Abyss is as immaculately paced as any of Cameron's films, using its extra running time for great effect, even managing to keep my pulse up through its roughly 40-minute denouement. The actors, in particular Ed Harris and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, create very sympathetic and real characters, full of life and passion with a clear, but largely unspoken, love and mutual admiration. If James Cameron has never fully received credit for his ability to pull the very best out of his actors, it hasn't been for lack of my chamioning. I wouldn't say it's the best role of Ed Harris' career, for there are so, so many great performances in his career, but it's the best thing I've ever seen Mastrantonio do, by far, even if her filmography is significantly more limited.

And would you believe me if I told you that James Cameron finally found a use for Michael Biehn? Yes, as the jittery, violent and totally illogical SEAL commander sitting around and whittling on his forearm, Michael Biehn has finally found a role that matches his facial features. It's as natural as anything I could fathom Biehn doing; he would probably have a similar reaction if the waiter told him they didn't serve Pepsi products.

Although Coffey's character doesn't make much sense to me. He seems to have the deep sea cabin fever they talk about even before he arrives on the platform, most likely because he's played by Michael "I sleep in an electric chair" Biehn, and his evil plan is to nuke the creatures because "there's no way of warning the surface"? There are so many undocumented plants and animals on Earth not because they're hiding in the bushes or under rocks, but because scientists can't keep up with all of them. If we wanted to document all the creatures in the Amazon rain forest, we'd have to level the trees and wipe them all out all the plants and animals to have enough paper, and then James Cameron would have to make a movie about it, the prick. We have plenty of moral conundrum surrounding the discovery of new creatures without Lt. Tweak trying to nuke anything that can't be found in a K-Mart.

So yeah, Biehn is far more cartoonish and less humanistic than Harris and Mastrantonio, but I can't really pass judgment on his place in the film because the effectiveness of the movie is something that I don't understand AT ALL.

The film's claim to fame is its special effects, specifically the famous water tendril scene, one of the first examples of CGI integrated with live action. One of Cameron's greatest assets as a human being, and the chief reason that I remain wildly, unapologetically excited for Avatar is his ability to always use special effects technology effectively and never overreach the limits of that technology. For 20-year-old CGI it holds up astonishingly well, as do the alien fish monsters and their horrible neon metropolis. It's exactly the sort of thing that you would think of if I said "cutting edge in the late 80s", right after you imagined parachute pants.

I never liked the ending in the theatrical cut. It's one of those movies that makes the viewers feel like they aren't violent, selfish libertines with a stack of bodies that would make John Wayne Gacy look like a ballerina. It reminds me of that little kid who sits on the curb and asks you to sign a petition to end world hunger. I know I love world hunger, but I also know that the poor little guy's heart is in the right place. He doesn't seem to understand why world hunger exists. That was always a footnote in the original film, but dear GOD is it prevalent in the director's cut. We have roughly eight hours of heavy handed message delivery before the merciful end. After watching this movie I ate an entire shipment of Peace Corps brand potato chips out of spite.

So, to recap, we have an exceedingly well-constructed film with great performances and great effects marred by a simplistic message. LET'S GET USED TO IT. There's a lot of that coming up and we'd be wise to brace for impact.

9/10

Sonic-Electronic Ball-Breaker or: Femnism in Action

1986 saw James Cameron directing a sequel to what is inarguabley one of the best films ever made: Alien. With its absolutely impeccable mise-en-scene used in every single shot to evoke claustrophobia or dread, its production design full of the Everest of nightmare imagery and a director of commercial fare who, like so many directors before him, made his greatest film his first.

James Cameron's sequel Aliens is widely regarded as one of the greatest sequels of all time, and that's a perfectly fair assessment. While some morons believe Aliens outmatches Alien, I can't even imagine a film as great as Alien having a sequel that lands anywhere near its predecessor. The fact that it actually ends up being a great movie is cause for celebration. It's not the unmitigated masterpiece that Alien is, but it's brilliant in its own right.

For those of you who don't know (and for those of you who don't, get the fuck off my blog), Alien ended with Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) unsympathetically blowing Michael Seymour and H.R. Giger's masterpiece out an airlock and snorting a line of phenobarbitals in celebration before falling asleep for sixty years. That's where Aliens picks up. Ripley is awoken and is immediately handed a pickax despite possibly being the oldest woman on the planet. Before long, a swanky, charming corporate type who only cares about the dollars and cents shows up to convince Ripley to go back to the planet where she first encountered the alien lifeform. It seems that the big corporation has lost contact with the settlers they impulsively let live on a planet overrun with murderous aliens. It's up to Ripley and an ill-equipped, under-manned squad (that means eight soldiers) of space folly to go in and clean up the aliens that seemed to effortlessly wipe out several hundred people.

There Ripley encounters the sole survivor of the alien onslaught, a little girl named Newt for some reason. Ripley robs the cradle and runs off with her shiny new daughter to replace the one whose life she slept through.

So we're off to fight the aliens, and what a fight it is! Essentially highjacking all the brilliant design work of the first film and throwing it into a brilliant action film. Aside from the designs, a general narrative continuation and Ripley, the films aren't that similar. Ripley, like all the characters in the last film, was barely more fleshed out than she had to be. Like most slashers, she exists to be killed by the glorious beast at the center of the film. Cameron gets a lot of mileage out of fleshing out her character and really bringing Sigourney Weaver to the film's fore in a performance that's as great as everything you've ever heard.

And here's where James Cameron's noted femnism works the best. Now, I don't think of myself as a sexist, but I DO think that there are irreconcilable differences between men and women that don't begin and end with penis/vagina. For instance, men are inherently stronger than women. Don't believe me? Arm wrestle a woman. Or, if you're a woman, arm wrestle a man. The man will almost always win. That's not to say that a woman can't win, in fact I've had a woman crush my arm into a bloody powder. I dated a girl that could kick my ass, but that's the exception that prove the rule.

Anyway, I was going somewhere with that. Ripley could easily be the best female action hero ever. Most of the time a female action hero is a woman with a ballsack. She suddenly punches out burly Russian lumberjacks three times their size without breaking a nail, puts on a barrelfull of muscle and becomes the picture of emotionless head-smashing (see: Sarah Conner in Terminator 2). She fails to retain any uniquely feminine characteristics (I consider violence and hot tempers masculine characteristics, although again they're not exclusively masculine characteristics; I just find men more inclined to those traits, generally speaking) and fails to be anything more than a generic action hero. With a vagina. Ripley is strong, intelligent and uniquely feminine, making her the perfect model for female action heroes. In any case, there's usually a REASON we're putting a female lead in a film primarily targeted at adolescent males, right? Why not make it something that defines her character as a strong FEMALE? Her maternal instincts guide her actions, but not in a shitty Hallmark Channel sort of way, in a "grenade launchers and flamethrowers" sort of way.

So if a lot of the thrills of the first film came from the mystery of discovering what the alien was, Aliens derives most of its thrills from seeing the aliens organize and put those traits we discovered in the first film into action in their own environment rather than the "alien" environment of the Nostromo.

As far as Cameron's direction, which, if I'm remembering correctly, is the entire reason I'm watching this movie, it's another action masterpiece. This film has more in common with The Terminator than any of his subsequent films in that afterward you feel like you've been dragged through a field of thorns, mud and cancer. Helping play into that is a billion false endings that never feel gratuitous or cheap because we're invested in the story and characters. Also the razor-sharp editing does a lot to keep the film moving, never lingering on the various plot points and always moving towards the action or the impending sense of doom. It's one film that uses every second of its two and a half hour running time to great effect, despite my frustration at this recent trend of action films outliving your children.

But the best thing he does as a director in this film is that he takes the alien muppets (and make no mistake, they are fucking muppets) and making them absolutely convincing just with his editing and camera work. It's one of the most repeated stories in filmmaking legend that the shark in Jaws became the quintessential unseen menace because Spielberg couldn't get the goddamn animatornic shark to work. This sort of filmmaking is a casualty of the rise of CGI and if there's anything to blame for the fall of horror, it's that. Cameron's lumbering alien muppets were clearly not suited to be convincing antagonists until he teamed up with his virtuoso crew. It's the sort of thing only a truly great director can pull off, and I think James Cameron happens to be a goddamn brilliant director.

It's no Terminator, but it's one hell of a film.

10/10