Iron Man 2

The film begins with an introduction to Ivan Vanko (Mickey Rourke, sporting his hair, gold teeth, and body makeup from The Wrestler) who apparently is the world’s ugliest and most psychotic physicist, comforting his dying father Anton. He then spends the opening credits creating some new technology from stolen Stark blueprints. Hmmm….

We cut to Tony Stark (the ever-fabulous but a bit tired looking Robert Downey Jr) who is losing the fight against palladium, which powers his tiny arc reactor embedded in his chest but is also poisoning him. Stark is also battling the politicians who want his Iron Man technology to fuel US military might. As the embattled Stark slowly hands his empire over to Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) under the supervision of Stark Industries hottie Natalie Rushman (Scarlett Johansson), he discovers that Vanko has developed a new weapon based on the arc reactor technology.

In a deadly encounter in Monaco, Vanko is captured, but is immediately intercepted by Stark competitor Justin Hammer (the scene chewing, wonderful Sam Rockwell), whose military contracts have all been put on hold. Thinking Vanko is his ace in the hole Hammer hires him to complete a series of Iron Man drones for the military, apparently without supervision, allowing Vanko to manufacture a more advanced version of his own technological revenge against Tony Stark for some vague dishonor served to Anton Vanko by Tony’s father Hank.

Meanwhile, Lt. James Rhodes (Don Cheadle), seeing Stark’s self-destructive behavior, beats up Tony and steals the War Machine suit, bringing it back to the military for weaponizing. Enter Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), who reveals Rushman as Agent Romanoff, tells Tony his father really loved him, and convinces Tony to keep looking for a cure to his palladium problem.

Blah blah blah. We’re only halfway through the movie and it feels like a thousand different threads, unskillfully woven together. Theroux clearly is outmatched by the demands of the studio, who must have told him, “Make it bigger, make it more.” Yes, it’s more, and yes it’s bigger, but somehow it misses the salient connection, the sense of togetherness and neat compactness that the first one enjoyed.

The action scenes are riveting, if moderately unbelievable (Vanko’s whiplash thingy is cute, but it wouldn’t be much of a match for a sniper bullet, ya dig?). The talky exposition scenes are long and often reveal less about the characters and more about the awful danger screenwriters face when the need to reveal information trumps the need to, I dunno, tell a good story.

Favreau’s direction here is actually effortless on screen, and is one of the reasons the movie is as fun as it is, considering all the script’s flaws. There is a steady hand at the helm, and Favreau knows how to punch up an action scene without losing all semblance of order through a blur of quick cuts. We actually see fight scenes and the flying suits and innumerable projectiles flying through the Las Vegas (edit: I remember a Stratosphere-esque building and what with all the plotlines, kinda forgot the Stark Expo occurred in Flushing, NY) air (how did millions not die in the finale?) are satisfying to see.

Downey Jr. is appropriately Stark-ish, but isn’t given much more depth than he had in Iron Man to make his character more interesting to watch. Also, Theroux gives him the palladium poison as a kind of mirror to Stark’s narcissism and ego, but hamfistedly introduces S.H.I.E.L.D as holding the answer to the energy problem. Where were you, Nick Fury, six months ago? The deus ex machina suitcase containing the answer to Stark’s physiological and psychological daddy issues is just weak.

While there is so much to be enjoyed in the film, and it’s not unsatisfying to watch, knowing how good it might have been in the hands of someone more disciplined at the keyboard brings the experience down a notch.

Since I’ve already written one Avatar review while I was sober, I decided to take a crack at part two of my “Defense Against Religious Environmentalism” (DARE) writeup whilst under the influence of at least half (if not more) of a bottle of fantastic Malbec from Argentina. If I can stumble through with a modicum of my original thesis under wraps, I’ll consider it a good week.

I’ve discussed the logical and consistency errors that mounted in my mind as I was watching Avatar, as well as rudimentary philosophical issues I had with it upon reflection. My inclination is to throw in a few snarky comments to ease you into part 2, and the angel of my better nature has signaled to me, permitting one or two in this transmission. So wait for it. And read on.

It’s already been discussed elsewhere that Cameron’s screenplay falls neatly into the “White Savior Movie” (hereby designated as WSM) dilemma that seems to trap Hollywood (dare I say, liberal Hollywood?) from time to time. From Dances With Wolves to Pocahontas to To Kill a Mockingbird, Hollywood and progressive literates in general have tended to romanticize the somewhat staid and antiquated social position of the white man as both villain and hero of his own intrusive story. The mythos, as it’s been presented in popular entertainment and even lauded literary works, is that of a hungry, ambitious, and ultimately destructive race (the Whites) who invade, plunder, and overwhelm the simpler (yes) but nobler natives of North America/The Southern Courtroom/Pandora, who by themselves are incapable of rousing their own salvation. But the incursion of a curious White into the midst of the strange and beautiful foreigners (to him) renders a transformation, by which the White learns, sympathizes with, and eventually converts–goes Na’vi, if you will–and in so doing, is able to carry the day against his own people. By joining with the savages, the White (and it’s usually a white Man) achieves heroic status and salves his own colonial conscience.

That Avatar is, almost worshipfully, a model White Savior movie, may not need to be pointed out. One thing needs to be said, however. WSM and books are, typically, and ultimately, about the individual white man’s moral salvation. By joining with the savage, he himself is redeemed from the destructive pattern of his white, oppressor race. In that sense, WSM are doubly insensitive and doubly clueless–by turning the hero inward, WSM manage to make even the nobility of the savage a minor role in its own film–co-opting that in favor of the individual’s rise to awareness. The White Man thus manages to make his own story more important than that of the nobler race he has chosen to join. Even white colonial guilt is no match for the self-centered nature of the creator of the guilt-ridden story.

That aside, we should examine the exact relationship between Jake Sully (White Savior) and his adoptive brethren, the Na’vi. Much like Davy Crocket or John Smith, Jake learns to live within the Na’vi community while simultaneously maintaining his separate and distinct human identity. This is a classic identification problem–empathy with one’s fellow being is a difficult task without actually walking in the shoes of that fellow. Thankfully, Jake Sully gets to have his cake and eat it too, a situation exploited by both Colonel Miles Quaritch and by Dr. Grace Augustine, who are both interested in how the Na’vi think and act.

The interesting parallel I find between Jake’s training to become a Na’vi warrior and James Cameron’s wielding of technology is that neither demonstrate a true awakening of self. I’ll tackle Cameron first. With Avatar, James Cameron, a noted techno-buff and tinkerer, developed or introduced a number of innovative filmmaking tricks and techniques which no doubt will be utilized in more and more films in coming years. Likewise, Jake Sully spends three months developing and learning Na’vi skills–hunting, running, balance, fighting, as well as the more intimate issues–communing with the cattle-like beasts of Pandora through the creepy mind-control tendrils. Three months. Jake is so good in his proxy role of human-as-Na’vi that he is able to displace the native-born warrior Tsu’tey, who understandably takes a dislike to Jake, especially after Jake-as-Na’vi manages to bed Neytiri, the beautiful princess and Tsu’tey’s rightful bride (how patriarchal and quaint, Mr. Cameron!).

Cameron’s wielding of technology to achieve his master vision of this utopian conquistatador making ultimate contact with an alien race of advanced intelligence took significantly longer than three months, but its effect is nearly as schizophrenic as Sully’s bi-polar existence as human and alien. On the one hand, Cameron pits a race of technologically inferior aliens deeply in tune with their biological station battling to save their voodoo-computer-planetoid against the corporate, militarily (and by extension, technologically) advanced humans. And on the other, he gives us his fantastic vision by utilizing… technologically advanced filmmaking techniques and a lot of money (maybe he sold an unobtanium mine).

Oddly, while the humans have advanced so far as to achieve multi-light year space travel and successful cryogenics and hypersleep technology, they apparently didn’t advance much in the way of mining developments. I suppose to get the shiny rocks one must dig, but one guesses there should have been advances in the methodology. Even today, there are quite efficient and economic ways at getting to precious ores and natural resources we crave here on earth. One hundred and forty years from now, I have a difficult time imagining that our primary approach is still just “blow it up.” An opening shot in the film shows an advanced ship or space station of enormous scale deploying a solar sail, presumably used for propulsion, and the thought occurred that if human beings have this kind of technology, is there even a so-called energy crisis, as the token Republican tool Parker Selfridge (Giovanni Ribisi) calls it? We see the disparity between Cameron’s techno-vision of future-world making and his philosophy–he conveniently allows for growth in certain areas (space travel) but not in another (mining) in order to make his bloody Fern Gully work.

But of course, technology isn’t really the problem in Avatar. Rather, it’s humankind’s inherent greed and bloodlust that Cameron wants to showcase. And showcase it he does. Explosions, bombs, laser-precise missiles, ships that can turn on a dime, and infantry-men who seem to have been born for a shaved head and single-track killer mind; Cameron makes sure we see every pixel of gleaming, computer-generated mayhem and massacre–in fact, he was so obsessed at us being able to watch his opus that he filmed the entire thing with two cameras, so we could see it in three dimensions, as if the flat version didn’t provide the obsessive fidelity to his philosophic interests that Cameron demanded.

And philosophically, Avatar runs into real headaches. Theologically, it’s all over the place. The Tree of Souls, where all the Na’vi commune with each other and the dear departed dead ancestors, seems to be a spiritual entity. Indeed, the Na’vi synthesize a communal sense of belonging to, if not outright worship of, an entity called Eywa, the “All Mother,” which is variously a tree spirit and the embodiment of all the energy of all living things in one construct. But as Dr. Augustine points out, it’s also like a computer network, a data center or cloud computing cluster where the Na’vi go to process. Is it spirituality or just an Internet forum for Pandorans? I’ll grant you a phosphorescent tree is better than a cubicle any day of the week (except for Casual Fridays, maybe), but let’s define the terms before we start with the mumbo jumbo. The Na’vi communicate with each tree, each living creature on the planet, and indeed, with the planet itself, via their neural connecting tails. Being the master race (apparently), they are able to control other Pandoran creatures with their minds.

In the end, it’s the Na’vi’s ability–or rather, the one human avatar–who is able to tap into the planetary network, harness the resources, and lead the fight against the predatory humans. So, is Pandora a spiritual place? And what is its relation to Earth, as Cameron would have us gather from the film? The self-sustaining Na’vi rely on intimate symbiosis with Pandora for survival, and if Avatar is remotely Green, as it seems to be, the call would seem to be for humans to adopt a more connective, conservative role with nature. Yet the Na’vi, with their mind-tendrils, seem specifically adapted for a more naturalistic existence. Indeed, if it weren’t for the mind relationship they have with the beasts they control, the Na’vi seem likely doomed as a species, or at least destined for evolutionary marginalization.

In the end Jake, as a human being, ultimately rejects his humanity and joins his mind with his avatar’s body to forever stay with the Na’vi. Humans, with their non-tendril polluting presence, are sent away, presumably to a dying and broken Earth, while Jake, reborn, gets to stay on Pandora. Is all this just evolutionary penis-envy? Humans, lacking in stature and spiritual symbiosis, are sent packing while the big blue forest dwellers maintain their pleasant, indolent lives. Notably, the reformed human gets the hot girl alien warrior while his one-time rival has to suck it up and hope one of the cheerleaders is available.

The critiques of Avatar upon contemporary Western life, especially or perhaps exclusively for the United States, tend to lapse into caricature, weakening Cameron’s evident enthusiasm for a more Eastern approach to existence. What might have been a truly delicate blend of characters with depth and emotion instead are stereotypically one-sided. Cameron’s apparent interest in Taoist philosophy, and a potentially pantheistic spiritual theme is lost without an underlying foundation. By excluding humans from the natural world (even that of Pandora), Cameron seems to indicate that humans are actually separate, distinct, and outside the realm of nature, and therefore acceptable to destroy (at least if they invade your homeland). At the very least, Avatar represents Western Man’s inability to reconcile his existence with his behavior. As Ross Douthat writes, “We pine for what we’ve left behind, and divinizing the natural world is an obvious way to express unease about our hyper-technological society. The threat of global warming, meanwhile, has lent the cult of Nature qualities that every successful religion needs — a crusading spirit, a rigorous set of ‘thou shalt nots,” and a piping-hot apocalypse.”

But the fetishizing and spiritualizing of Nature has its consequences. We want to worship Nature, but Nature is violent, “red in tooth and claw”–even life on Pandora has its dangers–and the closer we get to Nature, the closer we are to our own mortality, and indeed, the mortality of other beings. So the double-edged sword that Cameron wields clumsily is this: get back to Nature in its bloody harmony, or you will be destroyed.

And here I was thinking the Na’vi just needed to open a few casinos.

But when it comes to Space Marines who just killed Gaia, f*** ‘em.

At least, that’s how it works in James Cameron’s warped, simplistic, Greenist fantasy. The man knows how to spend money, and he spends it wisely amping up the effects and kludging out the notoriously problematic 3D. What you can’t spend money on, but doesn’t come free, is the ability to write a decent script, one that balances the need for a mainline movie-fare plot with some level of moral ambiguity, rich character development (not caricature regurgitation), and delicate thematic foundations. Here’s an idea: how about making your villain a guy who is simply trying to make the world a better place, but manages to screw over the world in the process, as opposed to making him 100% asshole without a shred of redeeming characteristics or sympathetic reasoning?

In case you haven’t seen Avatar yet, the aforementioned piehole villain is what Cameron ended up slashing his budget on, and his presence in the film severs a necessary artery of willing disbelief. We gave Cameron the benefit of the doubt, allowed him to shuttle an endless (and meaningless) spiritual mumbo jumbo onto our plate in exchange for some truly revolutionary graphics, mo-cap work, and a barrage of visual spectacle. So far, okay. Then, on top of the moral preening, we are presented with a cast of characters who, to the man, with the very slight exception of the hero, are one-dimensional, wrapped not in their own packaging but in Cameron’s. He commits the mortal movie sin of making his characters say, act, and believe exactly as he does, or to behave in ways Cameron believes and wants us to believe are morally reprehensible.

Disregarding the flawed premise that Cameron actually has a valid, or even discussion-worthy philosophy underpinning his writing sins, we must face the inexorable truth: his characters are simply uninteresting.

To catch up you up, Avatar is about a crippled Marine, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), who is enlisted by two wings of a distant future bureaucracy, military and scientific, to embody, via mind-link technology, to a DNA-replicated, lab-grown alien body. The alien is of the Na’vi race, a twelve-foot tall blue oddly-beautiful clan of forest-dwellers who reside on Pandora, a planet rich with phosphorescent plant-life, huge trees, and prehistoric-animals. The scientists, including Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver), want him to join the Na’vi, learn their ways, and attempt a peaceful negotiation with them, with the end goal being acquisition rights to a mineral of unimaginable value (with the unlikely name unobtanium, as in, unobtainable on Earth 1). It just so happens the Na’vi’s treehouse is growing over Pandora’s largest lode of unobtanium, and where the scientists are looking for a diplomatic solution, the military, headed by the psychotic Major Assman (Stephen Lang), just wants to blow it up and take it by force.

Sully learns the way of the Na’vi, who commune directly with every living being on the planet via twisting tendrils in their tails, don’t trust the Sky People, but they accept Jake into their clan and he grows more and more sexually confused as he falls in love with a pretty girl Na’vi named Neytiri (Zoe Saldana).

When negotiations break down and the Major Asshat starts bulldozing everything in sight, Jake flips sides–choosing to fight with the Na’vi, leading the gentle forest-dwellers against the might of the US military.

You get the idea.

The list of ridiculous, I-wish-this-were-parody features Cameron built into Avatar made the viewing of, and subsequent mulling over, a puzzling adventure, one in which I found myself reverting back and forth from mesmerized interest in the visuals to perplexed amusement at the obvious and simplistic views presented as some kind of Gaia-canon.

The Na’vi are intelligent, perhaps even more so than humans. Yet they eschew technology and development in favor of spiritual connection with the planet. Their weapons are sticks and arrows, their main transportation is either by running, flying on the backs of bird-creatures, or riding on the backs of horse-creatures. They possess tribal instincts, with a hierarchy of patrimonial civic leaders headed by a matronly spiritual leader. They are, in other words, Native Americans.

Yet just like the Ewoks on Endor, they manage to fight and defeat a planet-busting military-industrial complex, a war machine of impeccable efficiency with mechanized death squads, impenetrable armor-plated tanks, superfly hovercraft, and deadly weaponry–and they do so with sticks, arrows, and pteradactyls.

Color me skeptical.

Comparisons to current military presence in Afghanistan and Iraq don’t hold up under scrutiny. Next to Major Hat-Of-Ass and his offensive, the US military looks like a bunch of Greenpeace activists writing the next Port Huron statement. The military of Cameron’s digital dream is bent on one thing–conquest, and follows no rule except one: Rule Pandora. Apparently, committees and Congressional hearings and military tribunals don’t exist in the future.

Given the Na’vi’s lack of technological development, and the butt-whupping they receive before Jake Sully rallies them all to jihad–I mean, totally respectable fight against the oppressors–they must gather all the beasts and fellow Na’vi from the four corners of Pandora to help. While I suspect Pandora is a smaller planet than our Earth, it surely must take more than a half a day to travel all the way around. But apparently, not only do they manage this incredible feat, they do so without transportation technology. They don’t even have Greyhound.

See, in Cameron’s world, if you are human, you’re either barely worthy of contempt, or you’re just plain psychotic, dangerous, and worthy of death. If you’re a Pandoran savage, on the other hand, you’re inherently noble (even if you are a vicious, needy savage). The myth of the noble Indian really, really, really didn’t need Cameron’s belabored update.

In Cameron’s world, it’s okay to kill something, but only if you use a bow and arrow and a knife and are a twelve-foot tall alien. In Cameron’s world, slavery and military subjugation is wrong, unless you are biologically connected to and can control other living beings with your tail. Then it’s okay. In Cameron’s world, there’s only one branch of the military, only one fighting force, and only one person who controls every aspect of its deployment and personally supervises unmitigated, unilateral slaughter. And his name is Major Ass-for-a-Face.

In Cameron’s world, science and observation leads to understanding and respect for other races and species. In Cameron’s world, primitive tree-huggers defeat star-traveling, atom-smashing, gun-toting butt-munchers. In Cameron’s world, there’s only one Unobtanium deposit, and it’s under a f***ing sacred tree.

I think you get the point.

Edit: It struck me that perhaps I was being too hard on Cameron. After all, no one really expects subtlety and nuance from a man who spends $300 million to make what boils down to a creature feature. But then I have to ask, after plunking down $12.50 to help him recoup his costs, is it too much to want at least a fraction of genuinely original, thought-provoking movie sci-fi from one of the acknowledged craftsmen of the genre?

The answer is no, it’s not.