No doubt that’s what Cameron meant when he talked about his movie.  Hopefully he was not talking about the story.  So, will every movie in the blockbuster/space-opera genre be in 3-D with flawless CGI? Will budgets continue to push upwards of $400 million dollars?  Seems likely.  On the other hand, will Avatar go down in our collective memory the way Star Wars did?  I find that very doubtful.  Technical advances may have had a great influence at the time Star Wars came out, but that’s not why we remember it now.  After all, as soon as it was out, everybody else set out surpassing it.  Matrix made a similar leap in visual technique, but little else about the movie has lasted.

Star Wars had something else that was special, something that even George Lucas could never find again.  Though nobody could call the acting great, the relationships between the characters were inspired.  Obi-Wan is still an archetype, and Darth Vader is synonymous with ultimate bad guy.  Princess Leia was the perfect damsel in distress, who could also kick some ass.  But the key was really the hero.  Instead of just focusing on the “chosen one”, Star Wars kept balancing Luke with Han Solo.  Han Solo was fun in a way that Luke could never be.  Neo was never fun, the hero of Avatar could never catch that magic.  Nobody in the sequels had it.  Maybe it was just Harrison Ford, but I also think the character of the co-hero lifted some of the seriousness that oppresses adventure movies when the film-maker starts thinking about making art.  Lucas could be as serious as he wanted about the Force, destiny, and the themes of good and evil and fatherhood, without drowning the old-fashioned serial-movie fun, because Han Solo was always there.

It seems odd that one movie could have given the modern standard examplar of three cultural archetypes, but Star Wars did it.  Darth Vader, Obi-Wan, and Han Solo are always with us.  You can pull out any of those names and describe someone, and you’ve covered that topic.  I can’t imagine any character from Avatar will be that memorable even a year from now.

In Piranha II, you were likely to get killed by a carnivorous flying fish if:

• You are female and naked.
• You have sex unconnected to romance.
• You’re a somewhat ridiculous older woman.
• You are an ethnic side-character.

Also, if you’re ex-military, you’re instinctively evil, even when you try to be good.  if you’re a corporate person, you’re stupidly evil.

Things have gotten a lot better for naked or semi-naked women/aliens in Avatar, and only good people have sex, which is romantic as heck.  On the other hand:

• Military is still evil.
• Corporations are stupidly evil.
• Michelle Rodriguez? Dead.
• Sigourney Weaver? Dead. (well, she does get instantly recycled into a giant tree, so that’s something)

The thing started coming up the carpeted hall, but fortunately I realized that if I kept spraying water it would lose its footing.  But I needed to have enough water.  (By this time the carpet had disappeared).  There was another, side hall, and the polar bear/ice cream truck would switch over and try coming up that side, but I quickly doused that as well.  It seemed clear that I couldn’t keep this up for long, though.  The only thing for it was to run.  But I’d left some of my clothes in an obscure locker somewhere and couldn’t quite get there in…

Everything changed.  The polar bear/ice cream truck that I had been keeping at bay was now a mobster.  He had invited me, and I was waiting around for the party to get going.  I didn’t much like this mobster, and he knew it.  He had some nefarious end planned for me, yet I couldn’t seem to leave.  Partly because my keys and suit jacket were now wherever those other missing clothes were before.  The party kept filling up with other sort-of-bad people.  I decided I would not go along with whatever they wanted, and failed to applaud when the bad hair guy won some kind of contest that involved matching air canisters with bottles of some kind of liquor.  He cheated by substituting a broken drill, but because he was a known mobster friend/important person, everyone clapped anyway.  Except me.  I knew, then, that I would have kill him, or he would kill me.

My friends didn’t understand the direness of the situation.  Mostly because, apparently, they hadn’t lost their car keys and suit jacket and could just leave.  I was not only trapped, but I had trapped myself.  I did not have the spirit it took to simply walk away from something that was going really badly, and could only get worse.  It was this overwhelming feeling of being trapped and yet being a contributor to my own state that woke me up.

Sometimes dreams don’t mean anything.  But a lot of stressful dreams go back to real-life situations.  There were clues here:

Whatever badness was happening, I had accepted it

I was surrounded by certain friends

Much of the dream was spent keeping something at Bay

The only thing that matched this was an unfortunate decision to see Transformer 2: Return Of The Friggin’ Losers (ROTFL).  Sitting through this movie violated even my normal willingness to watch trash.  After all, Michael Bay KNOWS IT SUCKS.  But he’s counting his money and laughing at us as we sit through it anyway.

There is one argument that this is actually a great movie.  It’s a great read, but it doesn’t require anyone to see the actual movie.  There’s another argument that this movie will doom future civilizations.  (Also a great read, but it does contain an inaccuracy about why someone went to the wrong theater).  But I think there’s a worse fate in store for us now.  We have willingly given up our money for something we knew would be bad, for something that turned out to be far worse than we imagined.  Now we will wait in our little cubbyholes while vast sums are dedicated to the making of Transformers 3.

It does steal from some good movies.  The opening scene is an obvious reworking of the Outlaw Jose Wales.  Several scenes evoke 2001, and Solaris is also hanging over the whole thing.  The downside is, as several internet commentors pointed out, the Star Trek holodeck.  Almost every holodeck episodes was bad.  The pure invention of the holodeck was an acknowledgement that the writers were running out of ideas.  But, if virtual reality was introduced a different way, somehow making sense in the story, it worked even in Star Trek.  One of the best episodes had Kirk, Spock, McCoy and a couple others trapped in a replay of the OK corral.  Except they were on the losing side, and they knew it.

The thing about Virtuality is that it doesn’t work as a movie.  Most of the time is spent introducing characters, then introducing a couple plot elements, and staggering around one decision, which we always knew.  But it didn’t end, not really.  The official story is that it was written as a pilot, but Fox nixed the deal and aired it as a stand-alone.  But it’s not a stand-alone, even a Fox exec knows that.  Fox may be evil, but they specialize in satisfying television audiences.  This did not.

My theory is that Fox knows people will want more.  They want to buy the show, but to make it a success, they want to be pressured into it.  Create a fan-base, a buzz, a demanding group of outsiders.  They’re willing to be the bad guys, so that we can force them to do something in a way that makes them another pile of money.  And if it doesn’t work, they aren’t out much, just a Friday night movie that did okay.

I went to see Star Trek, for the second time, at the AMC Hoffman in Alexandria.  We went there because we wanted to see the movie on an Imax screen.  Sadly, the AMC Hoffman offers Fake Imax.  Now, it wasn’t a complete rip-off.  Fake Imax still looks better than the digital projection screen we’d seen it on the first time.  But it was a long ways from being a real Imax experience.

The movie itself holds up magnificently.  There is one long section, beginning from Kirk’s exit from the Enterprise, and going at least until he meets Scotty, that is just painfully bad.  A mish-mash of un-motivated action, stunning coincidence, and exceptionally bad physics/astronomy, I just had to bite my tongue and wait it out.  When the movie gets it’s feet back underneath it, the awesomeness returns.

At some point, when a shoot-out in strip club is the obvious next scene, there are, for no apparent reason, strippers shooting automatic weapons.  It’s not the last time strippers show up to a firefight, and no explanation is given.  You don’t need one in a movie like this.

This is the kind of movie where you can take a living head out of the tank of fluid in which it was living, and drop kick into the pool.  It makes perfect sense.  And, when Chilios calls the doctor and finds out that one way he can re-charge the internal battery that is powering his temporary artificial heart is by rubbing up against someone else, you think: of course.  Of course that would be it.

The movie may not be a great movie, not in terms of storytelling anyway.  But it is art.  There are so many moments here, like being trapped in a police car by protesting porn stars.  These are the moments I can talk about.  But the greatest scene, for me, was the completely incomprehensible shift to classic Japanese monster movie.  No reason, it’s just that they could, and it works.

Two final words: Chicken and Broccoli.

But 30 minutes in, I turned to one friend and said: “Did we accidentally walk into ‘He’s not that into you?’” Because, up to that point, the movie was trying to establish characters and relationships, none of which were deeper than the shallowest made-for-tv emotion-fest. Actually, most of those are probably better. Liam Neeson plays a retired agent (CIA?) who LOVES his daughter. But DOESN’T understand her. His ex-wife left him BECAUSE HE PUT HIS COUNTRY FIRST. And she married a nicer, wealthier man who can give his daughter a horse for her birthday. If these people had ever seen a single “we separated because you did your duty” scene in any other movie, they should have just referenced it. Instead, they sort of walked through the stock quotes and stock feelings, piling cliche’ onto cliche’. And, while action movies are often cliche’-ridden, there were way to many relationship cliche’s and no action cliche’s. We get plenty of those later, of course, but why wait?

If the movie had achieved any kind of depth or quality, then a long build-up wouldn’t bother me. But sitting through tired scenes from old cop movies wasn’t building, it was just delaying.

Liam Neeson can never be entirely bad. But he tried so hard to be the clueless dad that he almost comes across as stupid. Then he goes nuts and destroys Paris, which was okay. But the over-the-top action could have been done just as well in a Vin Diesel movie. When you put better actors in place, you expect things to make more sense. Bullets are supposed to hit things, possibly even go through a couch, or car door, as they would in real life. But no, the action direction here is competent, but from the bullets-hit-everything-but-the-hero school.

Then there’s the utter lack of originality. Hang guy from pipe, guy breaks pipe. Of course pipe is filled with steam. I can’t recall one scene that I haven’t seen somewhere else.  Unlike, say, Jesus Christ, Vampire Hunter, in which almost every scene was both stupid and original.  There’s something to be said for that.

This movie is mildly defensible, I suppose.  It goes through the summer fun roller-coaster fairly quickly, after that long first 30 minutes.  But it’s a waste of Liam Neeson.

For the first hour or so, things weren’t looking so good.  There’s nothing more overdone than the nice-smart-shy guy versus the good-looking-bully over the beautiful-but-confused girl.  This movie was definitely falling into that triangle.  Also, true love conquers all?  Seriously?  But as the story went on, I started to really like the kids.  The framing is a bit contrived, bordering on deliberately arty.  But the character was compelling enough that I didn’t feel the flaws during the movie itself.  By the end, I admit I’d had a good time.

I’ve seen far better movies this year, including The Dark Knight.  But also indepenents like Hamlet 2.  So I don’t know how this rose quite as high as it did, but it’s still an enjoyable evening.

The latest Bond movie, for instance.  We walked out of the theater, to a nearby restaurant, without anyone commenting.  Once seated, I said “I’ll open with a bid of ‘Awesome!’”  My snarkiest friend said she’d open with “pretty good.”  We turned to another friend who seemed to be resisting the urge to say anything.  Finally, “I did not like it,” he said.  He did not enjoy it in the least.

Talking about it, I realized I had seen many flaws, but had buried them while watching.  The plot runs on, there is an inconsistency in how the scenes are shot.  Some are over the top bids to be great art, and much of the action is too close up, like the Bourne Identity but without the intensity.  There is at least one character who is a complete throw-away.

But I had enjoyed it, hadn’t I?  I love the story between Bond and M.  The story started in Casino Royale, is carried forward here, and promises much more.  So I’m still loving the new Bond series.  Maybe that’s it.  Perhaps, even though this was not a good stand-alone movie, it still gave me the pleasure of being part of the ongoing story.  Like an average episode in a great television series, it still keeps you moving towards the next.

It could be awesome.  But the actual movie has none of those features.  You might think you saw them in the trailer.  Maybe you heard a quote about “The Devil building his army” and “Max Payne is looking for things God wants hidden.”  You probably saw images of winged Valkryie and fiery skies.  Those things are said, and the images do occur, but they don’t have the meaning you’d hope.  The quotes are just one guy’s ramblings, a guy who is entirely tangental to any part of the story.  The images?  Well, apparently they aren’t meant to be taken literally.

There was still some promise.  The apparent bad guy seemed to have some kind of superhuman strength and resistence.  Maybe Max Payne shot him six times.  Maybe not.  My friend leans over and says: “promise me this is going to get better.”  Sure, I assure her.  But then the wheels started falling off.  Max Payne is only tortured in the most cliched sense.  There isn’t so much one evil bad guy as several sort of bad people doing apparently random bad things.  Some of them are highly improbable.  The rules fail to be applied consistently.  We thought someone was invulnerable, but he dies from a single shot.  The Valkyrie show up at odd times, but seem to signify nothing.

The central theme?  Nothing supernatural, or gripping, or high-tech.  It’s a concept that’s been used in a hundred lower-budget movies: somebody’s experimenting with something to make soldiers more soldiery.  Naturally, something goes wrong.  But this particular experiment is even dumber than most.  Instead of making soldiers stronger, smarter, or able to take punishment, it just makes them “feel” invulnerable.  And it only works on like 1%.  Don’t we have drugs like that?  Crack?  Cocaine?  Meth?  Even alcohol has been known to make idiots braver.  And more idiotic.  This version doesn’t seem much better, except for being blue.

I thought I had lowered my expectations.  But I guess I really had something I was looking for out of this movie.  Given the trailers, I think my hopes were somewhat justified.  But like Epic movie, where the jokes were actually funnier in the trailer than in the context of the movie, the scenes from Max Payne were better without the context of the movie.