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.
Showing posts with label The Lightning Thief. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Lightning Thief. Show all posts
Monday, August 2, 2010
Saturday, March 6, 2010
Ye Gods!
I saw the first Percy Jackson movie with my daughter today (she's a big fan, and we've been reading the books together, having completed the Harry Potter series last year). For those who haven't heard of it, the conceit behind the Percy Jackson series is that the gods of Olympus are very much alive and well; they've settled in America (for some reason having to do with their affinity for freedom or world dominance or something like that); and they've continued to parent half-blood children like young Percy, son of Poseidon and a mortal woman. In the first book, The Lightning Thief, Percy discovers his lineage and embarks on a quest to find the lightning bolt Zeus believes he's stolen. If he doesn't return it to Zeus by the summer solstice, immortal warfare will ensue and the world as we know it will probably cease to exist.
The book isn't bad, rather hip and arch and American, very unlike the stolidly British HP series. The author, Rick Riordan, is a somewhat better stylist than J. K. Rowling; he says more with less. And Percy, though he's essentially a demigod version of Harry--an abandoned, lonely child who discovers he's actually the most important person in an alternative world he hadn't known existed--is an appealing character, his pre-teen angst convincingly drawn and his quest to find his godly father and vanished mother emotionally resonant.
The movie wasn't half bad either--my daughter scored it a 7 on a scale of 1 to 10, and that's about where I'd have put it too--though of course it weeded out much of the interesting plot and character development in favor of strangely unconvincing CG monsters and frenetic car chases. Its deepest problem was that there was no real sense of urgency to Percy's quest; though we were told that divine warfare would decimate the planet, the most the movie could muster to suggest this threat was a bizarre storm cloud that slowly expanded till it covered most of North America. Maybe it's just me, but big dark computer-generated clouds don't exactly give me the heebie-jeebies.
Watching that cloud, though, I did wonder why the Olympian gods are back this year--not only in The Lightning Thief but in the soon-to-be-released remake of the 1981 Ray Harryhausen classic Clash of the Titans. Maybe it's no more than the perpetual fascination of these timeless myths, which I devoured as hungrily as any child from age 7 to 14. Or maybe it's our equally perpetual need for otherworldly explanations to the troubles of our own time; maybe that looming stormcloud signifies our anxieties concerning such god-sized problems as the economic crash, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the collapse of our planet's climate.
Fantasy, as I've argued in other posts, points both toward and away from the cultural crises of its time; it tells us what we're worried about while simultaneously telling us there's no need to worry. So instead of global warming we get warring godheads. Instead of war in this world we get the war of the worlds. Instead of corporate thieves we get lightning thieves. It's a handy trick; it may even be a necessary one. Who can face the realities of life without a little fantasy? Who can resist calling on the gods, beseeching their aid, cursing them for our fate?
In the myth of Perseus, the hero defeats Medusa by watching her reflection in his shield, thus avoiding direct contact with her petrifying gaze. Fantasy is like that: it shows us the horrors of the real world as if in a mirror, and in so doing places us at a safe distance from them. But in doing so, of course, it also gets them backward.
The book isn't bad, rather hip and arch and American, very unlike the stolidly British HP series. The author, Rick Riordan, is a somewhat better stylist than J. K. Rowling; he says more with less. And Percy, though he's essentially a demigod version of Harry--an abandoned, lonely child who discovers he's actually the most important person in an alternative world he hadn't known existed--is an appealing character, his pre-teen angst convincingly drawn and his quest to find his godly father and vanished mother emotionally resonant.
The movie wasn't half bad either--my daughter scored it a 7 on a scale of 1 to 10, and that's about where I'd have put it too--though of course it weeded out much of the interesting plot and character development in favor of strangely unconvincing CG monsters and frenetic car chases. Its deepest problem was that there was no real sense of urgency to Percy's quest; though we were told that divine warfare would decimate the planet, the most the movie could muster to suggest this threat was a bizarre storm cloud that slowly expanded till it covered most of North America. Maybe it's just me, but big dark computer-generated clouds don't exactly give me the heebie-jeebies.
Watching that cloud, though, I did wonder why the Olympian gods are back this year--not only in The Lightning Thief but in the soon-to-be-released remake of the 1981 Ray Harryhausen classic Clash of the Titans. Maybe it's no more than the perpetual fascination of these timeless myths, which I devoured as hungrily as any child from age 7 to 14. Or maybe it's our equally perpetual need for otherworldly explanations to the troubles of our own time; maybe that looming stormcloud signifies our anxieties concerning such god-sized problems as the economic crash, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the collapse of our planet's climate.
Fantasy, as I've argued in other posts, points both toward and away from the cultural crises of its time; it tells us what we're worried about while simultaneously telling us there's no need to worry. So instead of global warming we get warring godheads. Instead of war in this world we get the war of the worlds. Instead of corporate thieves we get lightning thieves. It's a handy trick; it may even be a necessary one. Who can face the realities of life without a little fantasy? Who can resist calling on the gods, beseeching their aid, cursing them for our fate?
In the myth of Perseus, the hero defeats Medusa by watching her reflection in his shield, thus avoiding direct contact with her petrifying gaze. Fantasy is like that: it shows us the horrors of the real world as if in a mirror, and in so doing places us at a safe distance from them. But in doing so, of course, it also gets them backward.
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