Ghostbusters II

I've actually seen like the first forty minutes of this before, but this is the first time seeing it through. Slowly but surely, I'm checking off all those wacky science fiction comedies from the 80s that I'd missed. I was surprised to find out that it had a lesser reputation than the original, when in my mind it was pretty much just as good. Obviously it's missing that spark of originality, as it doesn't bring much new to the table and is really just a rehash of the same basic plot. Nobody believes in ghosts despite the unmissable paranormal event from five years prior, but then something happens and activity spikes, business is booming until the ghostbusters are sidelined by political douches before an ancient evil, which has manipulated some weird guy who likes Sigourney Weaver into being its lackey, strikes and they are allowed to save the day. It's not Shakespeare, but it's fun while it's happening. This is where I would normally break for a second paragraph but I'm not sure I have enough left to say to justify it. What I like most about the movie is the chemistry of the main cast, as you get the sense that they like making movies together and are just having fun with the story. It doesn't really pay off the villain as well as the first film, but it's enjoyable throughout, funny pretty often and having the kind of special effects that don't look amazing but hold up pretty well for aging twenty years. It looks like things are shaping up for a third movie to come out next year. I'm not sure how much I like that idea, but I'm willing to give it a shot.

Avatar

I was in a bit of a conundrum here. James Cameron was possibly the best action director in Hollywood for about a decade, but that decade ended fifteen years ago. The only film he made since then was one I very much did not care for, and I was very unsure about Avatar based on what I'd read and seen. I went into the theater hoping it would be awesome and expecting it to be mediocre, and it ended up being somewhere in the middle, which I probably could have foreseen.

Just to get this out of the way, yes, a disproportionate amount of the film's appeal hinges on the visuals. And they are mighty impressive, both from looking at the quality of the computer effects and the effectiveness of the 3D. I haven't seen any other movies with anything more sophisticated than the blue and red glasses, so I can't honestly say how good or bad it is by modern standards. I will say that it looked pretty awesome, though the film still would have looked very nice without it. What the 3D was attempting to do was further pull you into this world Cameron created from scratch, and for better or worse it mostly succeeded. It's not really hype to say that you mostly forget you're watching something that beyond a few pieces of set in the human encampments only exists at all digitally, and you're left to focus on the story. Whether you actually like that story is a different question. But the visuals avoided gimmickry with jumping out at you for the most part, and spent a lot of time just letting you enjoy looking at it. I feel like this will hold up a lot better with time than effects laden pictures from earlier last decade, but only time will tell if that's the case.

So to answer whether the film beyond the special effects worked for me, the answer is: sorta. It's not really a great original story beyond the setting. It is very competently constructed, though. The film makes perhaps too great an attempt to justify everything, answering a lot of questions I had about the basic premise. Important elements are introduced properly before coming back later. Despite what you may think about the long running time, and it did feel a good twenty minutes too long, there is very little that happens and doesn't serve a purpose. It's not the most elegant script Cameron's ever written, but I guess it didn't have to be with his budget, and for the most part it all fits together and works to some degree.

None of the characters will impress you with their originality or uniqueness, but they're generally likable or easy to hate where required. For some reason Sam Worthington seems to be in every big action movie now, and I thought he was fine if not too remarkable. He was much more expressive in his alien form than as a human, but I thought that worked - he's becoming increasingly detached from his original life, and his whole character is driving towards being one of the natives. People have made a lot of disparaging remarks regarding the whole noble savages thing, but I don't think there's anything fundamentally wrong with how it works here. The movie's fairly funny too, providing some really nerdy laughs (the MacGuffin mineral that entirely explains the human presence on Pandora is actually called Unobtainium) as well as some much broader ones. The action sequences are sprinkled throughout, with the only major battle happening at the end, and they're all suitably exciting and well laid out. Say what you want about Cameron, the man still knows how to do this sort of thing. I don't know how excited I am for sequels, but I totally respect him for crafting an entire world and story out of whole cloth (and maybe a few bits from other stories), making an extremely expensive movie with it, and successfully selling it to the world. If I'm not mistaken it made the whole budget back worldwide in the first two weeks, and this was the third straight weekend it made about seventy million bucks in the US alone. I don't really dislike adaptations, but I do like to see original work as well, and if this means more is coming, then I'm happy.

Alien Resurrection

Joss Whedon is one of my favorite writers of speculative fiction. I haven't seen much of Jean-Pierre Jeunet's work, but he did direct Amélie, one of my favorite films of the decade. So what went wrong here? I'm not quite sure. I feel like there's the core of a solid Alien movie in here - not as good as the first two, but still passable. Cloning Ripley, while resulting in a plot development that doesn't actually make sense to me, is a fine way to bring back the character back in a new way and actually advance the time period again, unlike Alien 3 which didn't feel new. The ship of smugglers were a nifty notion, and are pretty much a prototype version of the crew in Firefly. And there are some interesting situations and disturbing scenes that work better than anything in the last movie did. It just doesn't come together into something I'd want to watch again. It might just have been that it was before Whedon really discovered his chops as a screenwriter and Jeunet figured out what kind of movies he really wanted to make. Resurrection ends up being an interesting failure.

Man, I had some momentum until that paragraph break. It was getting kind of long though, it had to be done. Um... Whedon has talked about how it wasn't necessarily changes to the script that he thinks hurt the movie, just that the overall execution of what was written on the page was totally off. And I can sort of see that. There are a lot of lines or exchanges that could have been better with a different actor or just a different way of saying them, and the movie just feels clunky, like the people in charge of different areas just were never in sync. I'm not saying the story they had would have been a good film if these problems were corrected, it's just that it compounds the problem. An awkward and unwieldy film. Some moments totally work, but most of it just doesn't, and I'm confident that the latter half of the Alien quadrilogy can be, and probably should be safely ignored in the future.

Alien³

Unlike Aliens, Alien 3 doesn't do much of anything that the first movie didn't. It answers the question of how to make a single one of the creatures scary again after Ripley fought off hordes the last time: replace the marines with bald, British criminals and take away their weapons. This time, the alien bursts out of an animal instead of a person, resulting in slightly different physiology. In some ways, it's the best looking of the first three films, with superior gore effects and a good looking alien. But whenever the shot is wide enough to see the entire thing visible, it ends up being horribly composited with the rest of the picture and actually looking worse than if they just cheated more with the camera work.

This was actually David Fincher's first feature film, though unfortunately not a very good one, and thanks to disputes with the studio he's basically disowned it. It's hard to say how much of the movie's badness is the result of outside tampering and how much is it just being a bad movie. It seems more hateful than the first two. The series is known for the vast majority of its characters dying, but this one kills off three survivors from the last movie in the beginning for no real reason. The setting is weird, and the surrounding cast this time is kind of dull, with every person sort of being the same dude. Aliens expanded on the series' scope, and Alien 3 draws it back, just trying to make some money without doing much that'll make it seem worth the time. Honestly, I can't think of many reasons I shouldn't just call it awful. The ending is unexpected and pointed, thought it didn't stop them from making yet another sequel five years later. I'm gonna go think about something else now.

Aliens

It's a damn shame it took James Cameron fifteen years to finally get back to directing action films. In just a decade spanning the 80s and 90s, he made four of the best and most original such movies in that period, plus The Abyss which was okay I guess. Alien still holds up and is worth watching, but this is the movie I regret not seeing until now. I've heard of its influence on the aesthetic of many modern video games over and over, and that rang pretty true while I was watching. Aliens takes the setting and style of the first movie, and amps up the intensity and excitement tenfold. It begins with Ripley finally being discovered and awoken from her frozen state fifty seven years after the first movie, not long after her previously unmentioned daughter, that she remembers as being ten, dying an old woman. It's kind of a convenient way to add emotion to the revelation, but Cameron does a good job of carrying the motherhood thread through the rest of the story. A colony has been established on the planet where the first alien was discovered, and she goes on a mission with a unit of soldiers to try to prevent things from going to hell. You can guess whether they succeed.

The movie maintains some of the horror elements of the first film, but mostly establishes its own personality with the various wisecracking marines and the added danger of a species that is now mostly fighting on its own turf. They expand on the question of the creatures' biology, and where they all come from. The action doesn't have the specific complexity of more modern movies, but there's a real sense of chaos and danger as they basically wage war on each other. A few of the characters are somewhat annoying, but you come to regret each of their deaths and root for their triumphs. The aliens are generally pulled off better than in the first movie, with some clever filming to hide the fact that they're, you know, not real, and the final obstacle is a particularly impressive bit of practical effects work. The climactic moments are as strong as in any movie, and in the end Aliens is a great, satisfying action movie, dark but not as depressingly bleak as the rest of the series. Just watching it made me more optimistic for Avatar.

Alien

So uh... yeah. This movie. It was good, especially for its time. Around then, Star Wars was all the rage, but Alien ignores it for a view of space travel that is much more gritty and uninviting. The crew has to go into a frozen sleep because of the length of the journey, and the ship looks like it was made out of pieces of a refinery somewhere. It's kind of silly now that all of the computers lack anything close to modern interfaces (and even sillier that the sequels don't change it, I understand wanting to be consistent, but with the time passing between the movies there's plenty of justification for an upgrade), but it does contribute to the atmosphere. The movie is a slow burn, as plenty of time passes just establishing the crew and mission before anything goes wrong, and even when it does, it takes its time getting really bad.

There aren't many people left who don't know how the alien gets on the ship, although the entire sequence of events remain interesting and disturbing to watch. I can't say I got the same thrill when I knew exactly what was going to happen at certain points, but I still appreciated the craft at work. As I've said before, Ridley Scott is a man who knows how to shoot a scene. Once the alien gets loose in the ship it becomes more of a standard horror movie, with fake-out jump scares, bad decisions (Hey I know there's a monster on the ship trying to pick us off one by one but we just decided to go make you find the cat by yourself), and brief glimpses of the killer as it makes quick work of the people on board. The only disappointment was the alien itself. They went through great pains to make it not appear to be a man in a suit, but it's totally a man in a suit, and most of the kills are too quick and confusing to totally appreciate what's happening. By the end it's just Sigourney Weaver who remains, and she has a chance to creep around in her underwear for a bit before destroying the creature and the ship, and going back to sleep intact for a sequel. Scott originally wanted to kill her off in the end I think, but her character of Ripley is the one common thread through the series (besides the aliens obviously), and at least for a while it seems to have been a good decision.

Ghostbusters

Don't flip out, I've seen most of this movie before in bits and pieces, this is just the first time I've sat down and watched the whole thing through. It's pretty good!

Um... I'm not really sure what to say. It's about a few professors who are fired from their school and decide to start a new business using their recent research on paranormal activity to battle and contain ghostly disturbances. Little do they know that this massive increase in spiritual phenomena is the result of the imminent, apocalyptic return of an ancient Sumerian god involving a client one of them has the hots for and her twerp of an across-the-hall neighbor.

I think that was a pretty good summary. Ghostbusters is a combination of pretty funny comedy and pretty entertaining 80's special effects-laden action. The script by Harold Ramis and Dan Aykroyd is loaded with tons of great lines, including ones that have leaked into popular culture and I didn't even know they deserved credit for, and along with Bill Murray and Ernie Hudson they all make for a fun, likable crew. Rick Moranis is funny as always, and Sigourney Weaver is just the girl the movie needed. All in all it's just a well constructed, well executed idea.