The Dark Crystal
This was a film I had seen when I was much younger, so a certain nostalgia might have colored my reception of the film a bit. That being said, this movie delighted me more than any film has in several years. The film's "delights" were accomplished through the supreme detail and sheer amount of life that was built into every frame. The film uses puppetry, animatronics and other pre-CGI effects to build its world. The fact that no digital imaging was used is what I believe lent to this sense of life. Every creature, every environment was built in the real world and operated by human hands. Though there isn't a single human in the movie, the movie feels so much more "human" than the two other, more recent films I saw. The scene that particularly stood out and delighted me was one in which the two main characters find themselves in a swamp, filled with every kind of bizarre creature imaginable. Especially wonderful are the half-plant, half-animal organisms. The matte paintings in this film (traditional glass, not digital) are also exceedingly beautiful.
Avatar
I went into this movie with moderate expectations and was blown away, not only by the visual effects, but by the characters and the story. I had heard from reviews that the dialogue wasn't great and that the plot was derivative and dull. While the plot was certainly derivative it was anything but dull. The way the story unfolded was incredibly engaging, and the characters were so arresting that the dialogue was hardly noticeable on its own. The digital Na'vi creatures were so fully realized and so closely tied to the performances of their actors, that it took only a few minutes for me to forget that they were computerized creations. The world, like that of The Dark Crystal, was realized so fully and beautifully it became the central character to me. I also appreciated the general attempt at being scientifically accurate with the technology and the overall nature of the planet. The pacing of this movie was perfect—there wasn't a single point that I felt lagged. There are very, very few films that have accomplished such perfect pacing. I had expected that Avatar, with all its digital effects, might feel cold, but it didn't at all.
A.I.
This much overlooked film by Steven Spielberg, based on a story by Stanley Kubrick, creates a world less fully realized that those of The Dark Crystal and Avatar, but a world much more closely tied to our own (so that such a realization is unnecessary). The story is the absolute focus of this film, following an artificially created boy in his quest to become real. It is closely tied to the Pinocchio story and its simultaneous tragedy and hope is handled beautifully by Spielberg. Haley Joel Osment, the actor who plays the boy, delivers the best performance I've ever seen by a child actor. The film is dense in its thematic content, much more so than The Dark Crystal or Avatar, but it remains a "feeling" movie. The love of the artificial boy for his human mother is something that we are aware is part of his programming, but at the same time we know it goes beyond programming and is truly "real". This love story is ultimately what holds the film together and makes it successful. Of course, it helps that Spielberg truly is a master filmmaker and stages the performances of nearly every sequence with great artistry. The beginning of the film, which takes place entirely in a domestic household setting, feels like no other domestically located sequence I've ever seen. To me, this portion of the film is utterly captivating. The end of the film, in which highly advanced cybernetic beings find the artificial boy after thousands of years, is also fascinating, though there are a few things that I find weaken the sequence. The very end, though, which slips into a kind of dream, is beautifully realized and intensely emotional.
No comments:
Post a Comment