Avatar - The Way of Water (James Cameron, 2022)

Over a decade after the expulsion of the humans from Pandora, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) enjoying their lives with their family.

When the humans return, their peaceful existence is threatened. This threat is exacerbated by the resurrection of Quaritch (Stephen Lang), who is focused on terminating the Sully line.

Fleeing the forest, the Sully's head out onto the ocean, to find refuge…

 

After a dozen years, we are back on Pandora.

James Cameron is back with another multi-million dollar movie at the cutting edge of technology. The cast are all back - even the dead ones. And the papyrus font is nowhere to be found.

Internet nerds are sharpening their imaginary swords. And weary punters are trying to figure out the best time to take a pee break.

It’s Avatar time!

If it were not for the financial imperatives and success of the previous film, Avatar 2 would be better appreciated as a bizarre vanity project.

Does it justify three hours? If you are a fan of James Cameron and his obsession with the ocean, yes.

Cameron’s storytelling can be blunt and obvious in its functionality, but there is something almost poetic in the extended second act.

Now that he is not the sole focus of driving the story forward, Sam Worthington comes across as more invested and relaxed. 

Stephen Lang, whose cartoonish posturing was a source of mockery in the original film, comes across better in motion capture.

It helps that the character has more dimension - Quaritch’s avatar (or recombinant, as it is called) has been loaded with the Colonel’s memories. 

That complication - of having a species-est transferred into the body of the people he hates is not as developed as I hoped it would be. 

Since he has the memories of Quaritch from hours prior to his death, Quaritch 2 (Q2 from now on) is running on the same hyper-focused hate as his prior incarnation.

He sees his new body as a tool for his goals - completing his mission and achieving vengeance. 

The complication the movie cares more about is the introduction of Quaritch’s son, Spider - a human baby who was left behind when the humans evacuated, and has grown up among the Na’vi.

Q2 is torn between lingering love for his son, and a desire to use him to get to Jake Sully.

This conflict is interesting as it is one of the few aspects of the film where it feels like Cameron is allowing subtext to breathe without highlighting it.

Q2 spends most of the movie sticking to his usual persona - possibly a safety mechanism for coping with his new status. 

It would have been cool to see more of this but then the movie would be four hours long. In a break from his bulldozing ways, Q2 uses his new status to worm his way into his son’s psyche.

Q2’s return picks up a recurring theme of Cameron’s - an implacable, unstoppable antagonist who will never stop. While essentially the same in motive and modus operandi, the world he drops into is very different.

In an inversion of his younger self in the 2009 original, Jake now has responsibilities and is obsessed with saving his family - Q2’s new attack comes with increased stakes.

 

The movie’s central theme is ‘what would you do for your family?’, and it covers every major character, including the villain.

That motivation also pushes the characters outside of the easy good-evil dynamic established in the original movie.

The biggest example is Neytiri, who is reframed as a possible antagonist in the eyes of Spider - she proves as willing as Q2 to kill for family members, and uses Spider as a hostage during the final confrontation.

In a major shift in their dynamic from the original, it is Q2 who relents in order to save his son - and Spider ends up saving him after he loses the final battle.

It is an intriguing dangling thread, one that will hopefully push for a less familiar story structure in the next movie.

While there are differences in specifics, in overview The Way of Water resembles the story structure of the first movie, down to a second act where our protagonists learn how to exist in a new culture, the reef-dwelling Metkayina clan.

This is also where the movie slows down.

Second son Lo'ak (Britain Dalton) forms a bond with a whale-like tulkun, Payakan, while Grace Augustine’s (Sigourney Weaver) mysterious Na’vi daughter Kiri (Weaver) taps into a deeper connection with ocean life forms.

There is good character stuff here - the subplot between Lo'ak and Payakan is touching - but I left wondering if there was a tighter edit of this section.

The third act follows the same dramatic bones as the original - Q2 arrives in force and it takes the entire tribe to overwhelm his force.

As far as the viewing experience, I always have trouble with 3D - I have one-short-sighted eye and it seems to screw with the effect.

The film was shot in 48 frames and I do not think the theatre I was in was formatted for that because I was getting a lot of motion smoothing, particularly in the early parts - or maybe I just got used to it.

The final act is exciting but there is a slight lack of catharsis. 

Part of it is the sense of repetition. 

Part of it is that the villain escapes to fight another day.

What makes it stand up is the focus on the kids, particularly in Lo’ak’s journey and how he finally gets his father to respect him. 

Quaritch II is still stuck with the mindset of the original, and is still willing to destroy anything in order to achieve his goals. 

His stasis feels like a comment on the difference between the Na’vi and their human foes - the humans are stuck repeating the same patterns over and over again.

His return also feels like a metaphor for the humans’ new project: a shift from a purely economic endeavour to domination - with Earth exhausted, the humans are intent on  terraforming Pandora into a new home for their species.

It is a conflation of colonial history and an inversion of the typical alien invasion story. 

The focus on the environmental impact of humans leads to the most emotionally wrenching moments in the film.

The scene where the tulkun mother and her baby are found by the tribe is horrifying - the creature’s eye has rolled into its head and is in the background of several shots. In a movie that is not that violent, it is a moment of visceral impact.

I really liked The Way of Water - I liked the ensemble, I liked the focus on a new culture and - while it feels a shade undercooked, I liked the theme that the movie is driving at.

Cameron is not a filmmaker known for subtlety and there is something weirdly rousing about how blunt the focus is on environmentalism. Is the tyrannical Hollywood filmmaker showing a softer side? 

And while family is a dominant theme in the film, the role of fathers is constantly foregrounded. I spent the movie wondering if this was Cameron’s reflections on fatherhood, and trying to break free from regimented sets of behaviour and discipline. Is this movie a moment of self-reflection from the multiple divorcee?

I cannot say I feel passionately about it - the cliffhanger ending means the dramatic threads feel incomplete. Despite its spectacle, and its extraterrestrial trappings, The Way of Water is more concerned with people and the way in which they interact with each other, and their environment.

A respectable return from Cameron, one that will be overwhelmed by the hype of expectation.

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Avatar

Good Night, and Good Luck (George Clooney, 2005)

Based on the real-life story, Good Night, and Good Luck covers the standoff between journalist Edward Roscoe Murrow and the staff of CBS, against Senator Joesph McCarthy, as he carried out his anti-communist witch-hunts in the fifties.

Back in 2005, this movie was huge.

Not in terms of box office, but in Oscar season '05, Good Night, and Good Luck was one of the most prestigious.

Coming in the middle of the Bush administration, as the Iraq war entered its third disastrous year, it is easy to see why it took the cultural zeitgeist:

a story of crusading journalists who faced off against a powerful politician and did not blink.

The idea of political witch-hunts, the fear they engender, and the detrimental effect of commercial imperatives on news media, were relevant then, and it remains relevant now - although the explosion of social media and its effect on the general public's understanding of reality can make it feel as archaic as the film's period setting was in 2005.

Good Night... is a fine movie, and a major step up from his debut.

Confessions of a Dangerous Mind is the work of a new filmmaker keen to experiment, and a movie star who has the clout to pick out a unique script that he is not quite capable of converting into a satisfying film.

With Good Night..., it feels like Clooney (who also co-wrote the screenplay with frequent collaborator Grant Heslov) is on a surer footing.

Perhaps his debut was a lesson - Clooney may not have the chameleon-like talent of Steven Soderbergh or the auteurist specificity of the Coen Brothers, but he can handle a sturdy story like Murrow's - a real-life drama based around an evergreen issue.

Once again, Clooney bases his film around a great character actor. David Strathairn's understated, forceful performance is perfectly calibrated to the tenor of the film. As he did in the previous role, Clooney takes a small role as Murrow's producer Fred W. Friendly, while the rest of the cast is stacked with reliable talents like Patricia Clarkson, Jeff Daniels, Ray Wise, and Robert Downey jr.

In the spirt of his subject, Clooney adopts a simple, understated visual style which is more concerned with close-ups of faces and the vulnerability of a tiny human body in a wide, steady shot. 

Most of the film is made up of men in small rooms arguing over tactics and strategy for developing angles on stories, and working out what is important to convey to the audience. This is unpretentious, concise storytelling in a style that does not overshadow its substance. 

Good Night, and Good Luck might have been a bit inflated at the time of its release - and given false promise for Clooney as a director -  but on its own terms it is a solid drama.

The soundtrack by Dianne Reeves is terrific as well.

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Confessions of a Dangerous Mind

Dark of the Sun (Jack Cardiff, 1968)

Curry (Rod Taylor) and Ruffo (Jim Brown) are mercenaries hired by the Congolese government.

Their latest job involves taking a train deep into the interior to rescue a small village of Europeans and locals - and a massive consignment of diamonds - before rebel forces reach them.

Based on a novel by Jack Higgins, who in turn was inspired by the Congo Crisis of the Sixties, Dark of the Sun is a grim action drama.

It boasts some great set pieces, but the film wants to have its cake and eat it - muscular action adventure soaked in the violence and cynicism of a real conflict. 

Most of the characters are a bunch of cynics motivated by money, and the villains show no compunction about killing anyone who gets in their way.

Even the casting seems to be an indicator - not only do you have Jim Brown, hot off of the radical men-on-a-mission epic The Dirty Dozen, but in a neat reversal there is Kenneth More, the sturdy anchor of fifties war movies, as a drunken surgeon who has to be bribed with liquor in order to join the operation.

Martin Scorsese counts it as one of his guilty pleasures, describing it as ‘cruel’.

Cruel is the operative word.

This movie is violent - it is not as explicit or gore-y as later war films, but there is a blunt, matter-of-factness to the film’s brutality which is more disturbing. The film came out in 1968 and you can feel the fraying of the censorship regimes of the time.

There are several scenes showing the cruelty of the mercenaries and the rebels - the film’s eventual villain Henlein (Peter Carsten) is introduced wearing a swastika from his Wehrmacht days, and shortly after murders two small children because he believes they are spies.

There is also the train escape sequence, where the end carriage is decoupled by an explosion and rolls back down the hill into the hands of the rebels.

The massacre of the passengers is mostly implied but we are shown bodies strewn about the carriage. When Curry and Ruffo sneak back into the village, the rebels are shown carousing, torturing and assaulting the surviving civilians.

The film’s chief failure is a limitation of perspective - while Brown’s Ruffo - a local man who has returned home - offers a degree of context, the movie’s focus is on Curry and the emotional toll the war takes on him.

 

And Ruffo’s death is ultimately about Curry.

To its credit, the film is not completely limited - after Curry murders the Nazi, he is greeted by Kataki (Bloke Modisane), a Congolese soldier who is the one other Black character with a speaking part.

He is disturbed by Curry and rejects him - he offers a monologue on how Curry has turned into a monster.

Shamed, Curry court-martials himself and hands over command.

It is a muted, downbeat conclusion that fits the tone, but it rings a bit hollow. The film is suitably cynical about the West’s true intentions in Africa, but it is limited in how it expresses that cinematically.

Aside from Ruffo and Kataki - who is introduced late in the piece - the actual inhabitants of this country are props (refugees) or obstacles (the rebels). It is a pity that racism limits the movie because it is striving for something more profound, it does not quite achieve its goals.

If all of these elements make the film sound unappetizing, it is understandable. 

While its social leanings are shaky, as an action film, Dark of the Sun is on a firmer footing. It is almost great.

 

The fight with a chainsaw is unique, and the sneak attack on the village features plenty of stunt work and squibs.

The best sequence in the film is the build-up to the Simbas’ attack, as Curry and the others are forced to wait while the clock on the safe holding the diamonds ticks towards zero (it will not open until the timer is finished).

The final fight - staged against a river and waterfall - is striking for how it steps away from classic continuity to a more disjunctive, expressionistic style. Hero and villain wrestle each other through distinctly different backdrops, jump-cutting from scenario to scenario as their struggle becomes more elemental and frenzied.

When Curry finally kills Heinlen, its catharsis is curdled by its violence - the Nazi is pathetic, whimpering as Curry stabs him repeatedly with Ruffo’s knife. 

Problematic and probably too dark for its escapist trappings, Dark of the Sun feels closer to a drive-in movie of the same period, mixing familiar genre elements with a dollop of social commentary and a seasoning of excess.

Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (George Clooney, 2002)

Confessions of a Dangerous Mind tells the maybe-true story of Chuck Barris (Sam Rockwell), a TV producer, songwriter and game show host who also claimed to have had a second life as a CIA assassin.

I like George Clooney. 

Aside from the qualities which make up his star persona, there is an integrity and a willingness to experiment which always makes him interesting.

He became a star relatively late, and he is more interested in progressing his career through judicious choices - mid to low budgets, substantive subjects with real-life issues as the focus.

Aside from a few big budget ventures - Batman and Robin, Tomorrowland - he has stuck to that lane, and had some decent critical and commercial success. 

Alongside his acting career, Clooney has also made the jump to directing his own projects.

His debut, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, came on the heels of Clooney’s purple patch, a clutch of movies which cemented his star status at the turn of the millennium, with Three Kings, The Perfect Storm and Ocean’s Eleven.

In the years since, Clooney has directed eight other films, and - as of this writing - has a new project in the offing. 

It is safe to say that, in overview, the results of Clooney’s second career have been variable, but after two decades he has amassed a body of work which is all over the map, in terms of genre, style and success.

While I had not watched all of his films, I was intrigued by their variety and thought it would make for an interesting long-term project to watch them all.

Based on a script by Charlie Kaufman, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind sounds like a typical Clooney career decision:

Kaufman was the screenwriter of the moment off the success of Being John Malkovich, and so picking one of his other projects made sense. Kaufman also disowned the film after he was shut out of the production and other scribes were brought in for rewrites.

The finished film is an oddity. I cannot say it was enjoyable - despite the all-star cast and its various stylistic flourishes, the movie is kind of a bore.

Thankfully, the film hangs together thanks to the lead performance from Sam Rockwell as Barris.

It is a more character-focused performance, less concerned with crafting or establishing a star persona. Barris is not a sympathetic character, and Rockwell shows a willingness to lean into his sleazier side, showing the needy, flawed manchild behind the (fantasy) globe-trotting superspy.

Outside of his performance, the film is a collection of impressive aesthetic decisions - from changing filmstock, lighting and visual styles to signal different decades, to blending separate sets within the same frame, to frames of empty space.

The film is a prime example of a debut filmmaker anxious to try out as many visual tricks as possible.

Kudos to Clooney - with its shifting time periods, narrative perspectives and shaky sense of reality,  Confessions is the right project in principle for this approach.

But at a certain point, I started to get frustrated with how busy the direction was - what is this in service of? What are we supposed to take from Barris’s descent into paranoia and depression?

And the tone is weirdly off - there are scenes and performances which feel aimed toward satire, but then there are other scenes where it feels like we are being ground into Barris’s deepest recesses. When it is meant to be funny, it is too sombre, and when it aims for pathos it is too cartoonish.

At the end of it all, I was getting the sneaking suspicion that the movie had no idea what it wanted to be about.

There is a cynical edge to the final coda, but it feels like an ellipsis rather than the exclamation point the film thinks it is.

An interesting albeit flawed debut, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind is probably better taken as a piece in the careers of its writer and director than as a film in its own right.