The Last Bare Ender

My son, who treats anything and everything longer than it is wide as a lightsaber, has been begging me to take him to the movie The Last Airbender, so today I finally relented. It didn't look too good from the previews (the title alone is preposterous enough), and the critics skewered it. So I was figuring on just grinning and bearing it, hoping it wasn't too painful.

Oddly enough, it wasn't painful at all. Yes, the acting was amateurish; yes, the plot was slow and incoherent in spots; yes, the concept as a whole is kinda dumb. (And the directing wasn't that smooth either; you had to love the decision at one point in the film to frame the back of the Fire King's head in immense close-up and crisp focus while the rest of the shot, approximately 85% of the screen, was a distant, smudgy blur.) But the special effects were arresting, the various kingdoms convincingly realized and differentiated, and some of the action sequences--including the climactic battle of fire versus water--quite impressive. For a summertime kiddie fantasy film, it did what it was supposed to do: kept the kids entertained and the adults at least mollified.

(My only real complaint was the phony scene in which the princess of the Water Kingdom, a peripheral character with whom we have no reason to identify, sacrifices herself to restore the moon spirit her people need to defeat the Fire Nation. It was mechanical, unconvincing, emotionally flat, and utterly pointless, the kind of paint-by-numbers tear-jerking that annoys far more than it affects.)

I did notice, however, that this film is yet another in the tradition of "humans against the gods" fantasy films I identified in earlier posts, following in the train of Clash of the Titans and The Lightning Thief. In the scene just before the princess's sacrifice, when the Fire Nation general kills the fish within which the moon spirit resides (don't ask), he snarls, "We are the gods now!" It came out of nowhere; there was no indication earlier that the Fire Nation was anything but imperialistic, certainly no mention that they imagined themselves superior to the gods. But there it was. I've generally maintained that the more illogical and pointless a device like this is, the more it tells us about widespread cultural convictions and anxieties; when a film with zero obvious investment in the issue jumps on the Gods R Us bandwagon, we can safely say it's entered the cultural bloodstream.

We'll have to wait for the sequel to see if this goes anywhere (yes, the film ends on a cliffhanger, with its titular character having mastered only two of the realm's four elemental powers and the King of the Fire Nation dispatching his evil daughter to finish the novice airbender off). But whatever the future holds for this particular series, I think it's evident that something elemental is indeed going on in such films--something environmental as well, I believe. Though fewer and fewer Americans accept the reality of climate change, though the federal government has done absolutely nothing to address that issue, though we continue to live and consume as if there's nothing to be worried about, I suspect that we are deeply worried, so worried that our fears are slipping out even--or especially--in the most innocuous, fantasized, and easily ignored cultural places.

I read a couple days ago that scientists are predicting the human race will go extinct within the next century due to overpopulation, pollution, and resource depletion. We are the gods now. And we're bending the elements past the breaking point.

Faith and Fantasy

My son's persistence finally wore down my misgivings, and I took him to see Clash of the Titans today. Turns out he wasn't bothered by the violence at all; I guess the threshold is a lot higher these days. But seeing it again did give me a chance to reflect further on the film's representation of human-divine warfare or, more broadly, on the film's position regarding the sacred.

To put it simply: the film's position is that the sacred is pretty much a farce. The gods are petty, grasping, egotistical thugs; the heroes are uniformly disdainful of worship or even of common courtesy toward the immortals; and the only human in the film whom one might call religious--a street prophet who warns his people not to spurn the gods--is depicted as a wide-eyed lunatic who drags the unoffending Andromeda to the sacrificial altar and who burns his own flesh to prove his devotion to his deities. If you were looking at this film alone, you'd have to grant some validity to the Religious Right's accusation that Hollywood is openly hostile toward its audience's spiritual values.

And really, when I think of the fantasy films I know, it's hard to find one that endorses traditional Western religious values. Just to name some recent examples: Avatar locates the sacred not in the spiritually bankrupt human society but in the earth-worship of the indigenes; The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus eviscerates Christianity as so much wish-fulfillment and mumbo-jumbo while mustering considerable sympathy for the Devil; and The Lovely Bones conjures a Limbo state that's far more an expression of digital wizardry than of godly design. One of the previews before Clash pretty much summed up the dominant fantasy-film attitude toward the divine: in the remake of Nightmare on Elm Street, when one dream-stalked character whispers, "Oh, God," he's answered by Freddy Krueger's snarl: "No. Just me."

What are we to make of the smearing of the sacred in fantasy film? Maybe it is because Hollywood is full of atheistic, liberal elites who wish to tear down the moral fabric of the nation. Or maybe it's because fantasy, as otherworldly entertainment, has no room for the traditional belief systems most oriented toward the otherworldly; maybe fantasy, in its fulfillment of humanity's immortal desire for something beyond this mortal realm, crowds God out of the scene and off the screen. In this sense, the plot device that drives Clash of the Titans perhaps signifies an impulse deep in the history of fantasy (and fantasy film) itself: Perseus's defiance of his creator mirrors fantasy's impulse to create a world wholly of its own. And the reaction against this impulse looks back to an equally old distrust of such godlike powers of invention. The Israelites were punished for worshipping images of their own devising; the Puritans hated the stage because it jeopardized God's monopoly on the making of men. Perhaps fantasy will always find itself pitted against its society's most deeply held systems of belief. Perhaps it could not be fantasy if it did not vaunt against the gods.

Clash of the Humans

Ray Harryhausen geek that I am, I saw the remake of Clash of the Titans this morning (first day in the theaters, first show, first customer in the door). It wasn’t utterly horrible. The special effects were generally cool--I especially liked the slow build to the Kraken’s emergence--and they managed to preserve most of the creatures from the original: Medusa, of course (a snake hybrid as in Harryhausen’s conception), Pegasus (black instead of white, and fluidly animated; but then again, so was Harryhausen’s model), the giant scorpions, Charon, Calibos (though he was played by a man in makeup, with no special effects, and with a drastically different history than in the 1981 film). They even threw in Bubo (the original model, I’ve heard) for a cameo. It was too violent--a real problem for me since my six-year-old son is desperate to see it--and the actor who played Perseus, Sam Worthington, was completely unconvincing as the son of a god. But it was fun in a silly sort of way, and given how high my expectations were, I wouldn’t say the filmmakers let me down too much.

One thing, though, that I found puzzling in the film--and this takes me back to my earlier post about the Percy Jackson movie that came out a couple months ago--was its addition of a plot element that’s nowhere to be found in the original, not to mention in the mythic source materials: war between gods and mortals. I won’t go into the details (they’re too convoluted to trace anyway), but suffice it to say that the plot is set in motion by humanity’s determination to cast off divine oppression, and that the ensuing events arise in the form of the gods’ retaliation against such monumental sacrilege. This is basically the plot of the Percy Jackson movie--gods versus people--and it’s pretty close to the plot of last year’s blockbuster 2012 (divine prophecy results in end of the world) and of another movie from earlier this year, Legion (God sends angels to wipe out humanity; humanity fights back with lots of really cool guns). The tagline of Clash of the Titans is “Damn the Gods,” and that pretty accurately sums up this new genre of what we might call antideity fantasy.

I call it “antideity” and not “atheist” because, of course, it assumes the presence of a God or gods as humanity’s antagonist. And it makes you wonder: why are we so ticked off at the gods all of a sudden? What did they ever do to us? Any film that relies on this plot element automatically renders itself ridiculous: after all, the gods are gods, and by definition we mortals can’t win a war against them no matter how cool our swords or guns may be. So we must be really keen to tangle with them if we’re willing to court ridiculousness in so doing. Is it that we feel particularly aggrieved right now--that the collapse of so many world systems (economic, environmental, political, international) is making us feel as if malign, omnipotent powers are indeed toying with us? Or is it, as I suggested in my earlier post, that blaming the gods gets us off the hook? (Perseus’s adoptive human father, a shaggy, confused-looking Pete Postlethwaite, curses the gods when his fishing nets keep coming up empty. They’re coming up empty for us too, but that’s because we’ve overfished all the world’s waters.) Maybe the gods stand in for mortal enemies: our own indifferent government, the heartless corporations that run so much of our lives. Maybe, deep down, when we curse the gods we’re really cursing ourselves.

The moment everyone was waiting for--it’s almost worth the price of admission--is when Liam Neeson’s Zeus thunders to Ralph Fiennes’s Hades, “Release the Kraken!” It’s got an operatic quality to it, and also an Oppenheimer quality. For in the beast’s elemental fury against human civilization we see, as in a mirror, the truth: it is we, not the gods, who have become Death, the destroyer of worlds.