There’s a lot more going on at The New TRC. Go and find out for yourselves.

-Ryan and Tom, Co-Founders of The Red Circle dot Com.

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Andy Diggle took the great Robert Kanigher’s team of misifts known as The Losers’ and re-imagined them as modern ronin amidst the War on Terror. They were betrayed by their handler the mysterious Max, who may or may not be a “George Kaplan”. Ready for revenge and the opportunity to remove their names from a secret CIA death list, the Losers regrouped to steal their lives back. As the series progressed it became clear nothing was what they thought it was and revenge was anything, but simple.

Below is the trailer for Joel Silver’s adaptation of Diggle’s series  that ran from 2003 to 2006 at Vertigo Comics.

Editor’s Note: Not to mention that once again, in some way this is another
comic project that involves Jack Kirby.

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Editor’s Note: TRC will return to normal soon, we promise (don’t hold us to that). Just 15 years from now when the technology of this world can bring to life every idea in our wild high school fantasy trapper/notebook of  ideas that we ripped directly off of famous (and trendy) sci-fi authors. Till than you will have to abide with any and every lame AVATAR thing we here at TRC can find.

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I have no words. Wish I did. So instead a quote from George Carlin: “If it’s true that our species is alone in the universe, then I’d have to say the universe aimed rather low and settled for very little.”

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In a perfect world, James Cameron’s Avatar would have died like a quiet fart in the dark night of the director’s imagination. Instead, we live in the depressingly “post-Avatar” world where late night hosts are tossed aside like so much Avatar-related promotional material, catastrophic earthquakes bring systematically oppressed island nations to their knees, and American economic policy is held together by bits of tape and chewed gum. It didn’t set in after the opening weekend numbers or even the third to be honest, but the director of Aliens is currently riding the tidal wave of a fifth straight weekend at the top of the box office right through the fabric of America and the essence of what makes film great. For all their summer-tentpole-style promotions (James Cameron’s Avatar Big Mac Meals! James Cameron’s Avatar Coke Zero Cans!), it seems like it’s the perfect storm of TV shows on hiatus, lackluster competition, stay-cations and the public’s growing interest in the new 3D movie technology that is driving Avatar towards beating James Cameron’s previous highest grossing film of all time, Titanic.

That’s right America. We have given this asshole the TWO highest grossing movies of all time. We live in a country where directors whose vision, ambition and follow through have created incredible depictions of events, true or fiction, that exceeded the limits of our very imaginations. And the guy who made your two most popular movies phoned in a script, sat on it for fifteen years to wait for technology that could make up for his lack of technique and in the meantime somehow got lucky on the world’s riskiest bet: a movie that made one of history’s most intriguing disasters into one of its most predictable movies. I think that’s why we (and I’m using “we” here because I too am guilty of buying into “event” entertainment, not because I’ve seen this abomination) support these guys. We love a gambler, win or lose. We’ll vote for the guy who bombs a country on a hunch even AFTER we’ve figured out that he was wrong. We’ll sit our fat asses down on the couch night after night to watch people humiliate themselves on American Idol auditions. We’ve somehow sustained Kenny Rogers for decades now on the shoulders of one novelty “story song.” (“Islands In The Stream” doesn’t count because that could’ve been anyone and Dolly and it would’ve been a hit. He’s the Peabo Bryson to her Roberta Flack.)

And we’ve basically just written James Cameron a blank check to make his next recycled braintrash into the the next thing we’ll slap down fifteen dollars to see in hyper-real 5-D (I skipped a D because Dreamworks will have figured out the fourth one by the time he dusts off whatever other script he finds in his high school writing assignments.) Though I can’t say I’m not disappointed in our new cultural depths, I think the film’s record setting profits make a strong and definitive argument for how to get the American economy back on track. While Barack Obama promised to revive our troubled financial system by “harness(ing) the energy and ingenuity of the American people,” his first year in office has passed and there are no new financial regulations in place. The U.S. is still hemorrhaging jobs. James Cameron has doubled half a billion dollars in five weeks inviting us to see his distinctly American mediocrity. Like many of our American heroes (and presidents), James Cameron’s success came because the American people don’t want “exceptional.” They want “middle of the road. “ They want a plot that they understand because they’ve seen it before. They would rather look at Avatar’s half-human half-puma Navi and “exotic” (read: colorful) locales because then they don’t have to think about whether life that formed from a different set of primordial oozes would look anything like any life we’ve seen. Even the film’s proper nouns lack imagination: Pandora. Unobtanium. Jake Sully.

Mining well-worn ideas isn’t the end of the equation though. Washington hasn’t stopped doing that. What they lack is James Cameron’s magically unceasing sense of self-importance. The kind of mind that writes an eighty page treatment and then abandons it because he honestly believes that he’s ahead of his own time has to be coupled with the will to revive and create it fifteen years later on a reportedly almost half-billion dollar scale. Finally, when the moment comes and the big reveal occurs, you’ve got to keep up a strong front regardless of how many holes your idea has. Remind your angry elitist friends that the nifty idea and the technology make up for the flimsy plot and crude execution. (I say “crude execution” because no matter how realistic everyone claims Pandora looks, it will never make most rational people care if the Na’vi will save their planet the way one could care if William Wallace will defeat the English at Stirling or if Tom Hanks will ever find Private Ryan or run with leg braces on. Also, Americans generally don’t care about planets. Or races other than their own. Sorry, Slumdog Millionaire, it just wasn’t gonna happen no matter how many Oscars you won. You too, Spike Lee.

Which brings me to the end of this rambling mess. James Cameron’s Avatar already won the Golden Globe for Best Picture, a prize that these inbred third cousin to the Oscars had to share with a slightly more heartening success story, the relatively amusing 2009 box office smash, The Hangover. James Cameron was named the “Best Director” by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. Allow that to sink in. Now remember that genuinely beautiful, moving and provocative films like Inglorious Basterds, Moon and The Fantastic Mr. Fox were released this year. Films that engaged audiences with their depth of imagination and creative vision and were all relative box office flops. The American people have spoken time and again. We’re so desperate for simplicity and escapism that we’ll flock in droves to every intellectually bankrupt 3D movie (or Tea Party) because it allows the viewer to focus on the shiny objects and never consider its obligatory morality. We’ve just given James Cameron the two highest grossing movies of all time. Let’s just declare “film” dead, give him another Oscar and hope the band knows how to play whichever songs the Black Eyed Peas have won Grammys for while America tries to rearrange its deckchairs.

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WHEN I was in tenth grade, I won a $250 gift card to Best Buy through a city essay contest. The awarding of the prize was held in the morning, and before my dad drove me back to school, I made him take me straight to Best Buy so that I could spend every dollar. This, of course, was in an age when “recession” and “Suze Orman” were not ingrained in the area of my brain where everyday decisions concerning the satisfaction of wants are made. Were I to stumble upon a windfall like a $250 gift card to Best Buy today, or even a $20 gift card to Chili’s that someone bought for me at CVS along with his cough drops, I would deliberate prudently as to how I could optimize the return on those dollars.

This prize, it turned out, became the seed money for what is now my unwieldy DVD collection. I bought about fifteen movies that day—movies that, to a mind exposed only to American cinema of the 1990s and later, were the greatest of all time: American History X. Requiem for a Dream. Dumb and Dumber. Jerry Maguire, once my number one pick. I did venture a little out of this territory to get The Graduate and also Citizen Kane, which I’d seen once on VHS after it topped the American Film Institute’s first “100 Movies” list. These films, along with the bare-bones Annie Hall that I’d previously bought at a Suncoast store for almost thirty dollars, formed the cornerstone of a library that I would drag with me each time I moved to a new place.

From 2002 to the middle of 2007, I only purchased movies that I truly enjoyed and wanted to be able to watch at will, like Being John Malkovich, the two Kill Bills, and Boogie Nights. This, I assume, was the most common intention when a consumer in the first half of this past decade bought a DVD: to own a certified classic, whether in his eyes or those of the international film community; a childhood memory, the repackaging of some indelible coming-of-age theater experience; or maybe a warm and fuzzy favorite, or a puzzle that had to be revisited. In short, DVDs were not meant to be watched once, and they surely weren’t meant to sit shrink-wrapped in a pile on a random side table at home with their $9.99 price tags intact.

But something happened in the middle of the decade, perhaps as early as 2002 for some people—but for me it was 2007, as I started my first full-time job and lived in my own place: home movies became ridiculously affordable. Consumers could blind-buy new releases, watch them once, and not worry about the inventorial consequences. A DVD is light, compact; its digital content degrades infinitesimally compared to the tape of a videocassette. It is a beautiful product, sure to be a cherished relic of the ’00s. No longer did you have to be a cinephile collecting Criterion laserdiscs to boast a decent film library. Digitizing home video has democratized film education in the same way that digitizing the production, post-production, and distribution of film (with flash-memory HD camcorders, video editing suites, and YouTube, respectively) has democratized filmmaking. Quentin Tarantino and some of his contemporaries famously learned their craft by watching myriad films on VHS, but it’s clear that our present technology makes it even easier today. Thanks to digital media, we can all learn film, and we can all make film.

After my final exams in 2007, I was looking for something to do in the downtime before commencement. Not one to participate in pub crawls, I found, on sale on Amazon, Fellini’s Amarcord and Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander (the former an excellent reissue; the latter a sumptuous box set for less than thirty dollars!), and my world thenceforth was never the same. In a mere two and a half years, I blind-bought so many classic films through Amazon sales that I bloated my modest Jerry Maguire collection tenfold. I have amassed an inventory so large that a queue of movies was implicitly formed; I will be halfway to retirement before I can find the time to wade through all of them. And that’s assuming I stop collecting DVDs now.

I DID not expect that cessation to occur so soon, but it mostly has. With my very late adoption of Netflix two months ago, there has been another epochal shift in how I watch movies, in what it means personally to collect. At first, I bought the movies I loved. I would pop in my first DVD, Annie Hall, just to hear Diane Keaton sing “Seems Like Old Times” over the wistful final sequence. During the next phase of DVD buying, I acquired movies that I thought were canonical, significant enough to have to be referenced. Imagine the delight to my fledgling-moviegoer mind when I watched Raging Bull and found out that Paul Thomas Anderson had paid homage to its final scene in his own last shot of Boogie Nights. Equipped with my movie arsenal, I could compare “I’m the boss” to “I’m a star” immediately. But the Netflix paradigm goes further for me. I don’t have to reconstruct the film canon in my apartment. I don’t need the physical media cluttering my shelves to make straightforward comparisons. Furthermore, the ability to stream movies obviates the need to even insert a disc into a player, let alone to buy a disc. Netflix is there to collapse my DVD library into a virtual presence, a dynamic list of titles, a collection of bytes.

Need to catch up on the films of Michael Haneke or Jacques Audiard? Rent them all! Aching for a season-four marathon of Punky Brewster? Not a problem! (No, there’s nothing wrong with Punky Brewster. TV on DVD is a marvel unto itself. There’s an episode of The X-Files called “Triangle” that I’ve been dying to see since its first air date in 1998; TV on DVD and Netflix make it possible.)

The digitization of media extends beyond my favorite realm of film. Advances in digital music collapsed a CD and record collection into a pocket-sized iPod filled with mp3 files: long gone are vacations encumbered by a flipbook of CDs, a disc player, and enough AA batteries for a hurricane preparedness kit. The Amazon Kindle and other e-readers are poised to try the same for books and print media. But there are portentous implications and difficult questions that come with all this digitization. It’s still hard for me to imagine the obsolescence of the tangible book, the extinction of dust jackets and deckle edges, the fading magnetism of a well-designed trade paperback. But if we ever get there, what can adequately succeed the first edition/first printing of a book, a form of media that has survived so much longer than the DVD will? Will it mean anything to have a Kindle edition of Philip Roth’s latest novel downloaded on release day versus ten years after? I have been buying Pynchon first printings on the chance that my grandchildren will inherit them and think I’m cool. My coolness won’t be on display with an undifferentiated e-book.

For the music industry, in which the transition started long ago, circa Napster days, we might wonder what has become of the conception of the album as a cohesive musical whole. But sadly the album has been dying for a while, as the current business model revolves exclusively around producing a hit single. Look at a list of the number-one singles in any of the past few years and grasp the shrewd efficiency of making money this way: I find it hard to believe that it actually took more than twelve minutes to concoct “3” or “Right Round.” And nowadays the album—that antiquated, lofty notion—can be retooled with “deluxe” or “platinum” editions after the fact to promote a new single not in the original studio release. So what remains of the integrity of the album? Do we really need an upgrade, upgrade of I Am…Sasha Fierce just so that somebody can cash in on her slapdash Lady Gaga remix? Picture Bob Dylan releasing Blonde on Blonde – Deluxe Edition just because he had visions of Rihanna that he wanted to add as a bonus track.

AT THE beginning of the decade, we are on the precipice of what may be an extraordinary expansion of our digital media. Already corporations are coming to grips with the financial ramifications. Warner Bros. recently struck a deal with Netflix to delay the rental availability of its titles by one month. How that will increase the revenues from their home video sales, I don’t know. I don’t really need to watch The Hangover the day it appears on Blockbuster and Best Buy shelves. I think distributors simply need to stop worrying and love what is actually an astonishing innovation, and a boon to anyone who loves film. It is an inexorable transition.

There will always be the theater to enjoy that communal moviegoing experience, which Manohla Dargis described recently in regards to Avatar. (I’m proud, for instance, to have screened Antichrist at the Chicago Film Festival, just to have shared in the “experience” of genital mutilation.) And there will also be physical media like Blu-ray or its successors for those who cannot accept anything less than the highest quality at home, unless we can develop the technology to affordably stream the huge amounts of data contained on these discs, too. Incidentally, I am still collecting Criterion DVDs and Blu-rays, which are lovely anyway, “Watch Instantly” be damned.

But my dream is that, by 2020, I will have the option to stream all of my home movies. Film lovers around the world would be able to access some global digital repository to watch The African Queen or Pather Panchali or the restored Metropolis at three in the morning if they wish. We will have made a copy of the corpus of film history from museums, universities, studio vaults, and art houses and pasted it into our homes.

For more of Joel’s writing go to his blog Canny Management.

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First time I [finished watching Avatar] and got that strange depressed feeling. That forced me to go to the cinema the next day. Again I got that feeling, even got it after the 3rd time. Now i think I’m an addict of this depression, and i like it, it kinda makes me a better person, or something like that. That’s why I’m here, writing. – KalaKuival, posted on Avatar-Forums.com

I want to preface all this by telling you that I am not going to make fun of these people, or make fun of Avatar. If people are depressed, they need to find the best way out of that depression. If that happens to be writing about it on a message board, so be it. What is a little confusing to me is that cinema as a storytelling device has been around for over 100 years. I had assumed we all knew that movies were fake by now.

As much as it pains me, people typically pay to see movies for escapism. Nothing in their lives looks and sounds like it does in the cinemas, and they’ll pay some money to forget that they have a presentation in a couple of days, or that they just had a really irate customer. It’s a constructive way of memory loss, just like alcohol. But, once again, it’s not real. How many times have your parents or friends had to remind you “it’s only a movie,” when things get a little intense on-screen?

So why now? Certainly Avatar has the best special effects ever put to screen, but what about the movies that feature real people in real environments? I’ve never heard of a Star Wars related phenomenon. Nor even a Star Trek. Do people get depressed that there are no Evil Dead deadites running around for them to go all Ash on? Fans of those series seem to celebrate their fandom – collecting toys and memorabilia, making their own costumes and props. They take the experience they had in the theater and translate it into a positive, albeit possibly unhealthy, lifestyle. Movies, especially gigantic blockbusters, are supposed to have a positive effect on the audience. Apparently there is a subsection of Avatar fans that need genuine counseling because the imaginary world presented in the film remains that way upon their exit.

How do 75 pages of posts about the hardships of living life outside of that planet moon crop up in less than two weeks? Maybe it’s a little harder to dress up as a Na’vi than it is to rush out and buy a lightsaber, but the same principle applies. Unless Avatar is the first movie ever seen by this group of people, I am at a loss as to why its revelation as a fictional universe is so gutwrenching. Films can transport you. But, a film like Avatar, lush in its presentation, lousy in its characterization, seems an odd choice to get all wrapped up in. Having a breakdown because a movie is fake is like throwing a tantrum about how your kid doesn’t actually become an orange when he puts on the costume for the school play. Haven’t we progressed just a little in the century that movies have been around? It’s understandable that the first audience to see a moving train coming at them inside a cinematheque might be a little terrified. We live in an era of mass communication and content from cell phones, television, YouTube, and movies in the theater and the home. LARPing was supposed to be the cure for all of this.

I’m certainly not the biggest advocate of professional therapy. I can see how it’s helpful, and I can see how having an educated point of view can pinpoint the problems and make things a little easier to get a grip on.  At the same time, why pay for the things your friends give you for free? And why take the time to sit with someone and talk about changes instead of making the changes from your own desire? Yeah, yeah. It’s a lot harder than it sounds. Trust me, I know.

…It’s unfortunate that we live in a world where, just by pulling a trigger or making a corporate decision, one single greedy human being can wipe out the hard works of love of many people. But this is why we need to stop focusing on money and start focusing on our environment. Because we have the intelligence to kill ourselves, but not the wisdom to stop it. What will our money buy, when everything that is worth having is destroyed? The only way you can fill the emptiness you feel after this movie, is to jump on the leonopteryx. – Neytiri, posted on Avatar-Forums.com

But the thing that slaps me around the most is this post. Essentially, it’s every self-help mantra ever assembled, clothed in references to people, animals, and places that are set in that universe. It’s a good thought to tell people to get out and do stuff, but why the reliance on the movie’s characters? If you are feeling bad, the best way to overcome is to change something about either yourself or the situation. How is it possible that people can be affected by what is almost directly a Joel Osteen quote but with “Let Jesus In” replaced with “Jump on the leonopteryx.” I should also make it known that this specific task is one of the easiest things that Jake Sully does in the movie. He has a harder time shooting a bow, riding a horse, and bonding with one of the tiny dragons than mastering the most powerful being in the sky. It’d be nice if the people using the movie as a motivator actually watched it.

Overcoming depression and making a change is a lot more difficult than falling off one animal and onto another. It seems that these are people that truly need help, even if the cause for the depression is a little on the ridiculous side. There is a lot of work to be done on the Earth in general. If they were (and I don’t know how) clued into the environmental issues plaguing the planet solely by this movie, then part of that post-partem recovery could be spent volunteering at green charities. Who cares if you’re doing it because some fictional bink told you to? This is a measurable difference being made, and the filmmakers would be much more proud of their fans and their film for affecting a change.

I am aware that films are a cultural force. They truly move people, and in the best scenarios, they can change the world for the better. But, after 100 years of narrative storytelling, the last thing they should cause is a fit of depression over their fakeness. You are a lucky human if your saddest hour comes when you realize that you will never be able to ride a direhorse. Be depressed that the situations so hamfistedly portrayed in Avatar are actually happening, for real, on the planet. Be depressed that there are people starving because they were born the wrong color, and a couple thousand miles too far East. Be depressed that blatant corporate greed only leads to bailouts.

And then, fight against it. If Avatar could actually have a positive effect on the real, physical world through all of this sulking-cum-compassion, I may even like the film a little more.

The messageboard  in question can be found here.

Wonder why the image associated with this post has nothing to do with the content or message in the Comments Section.

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Song: Carbon Leaf – “Maybe Today“

Year: 2001

Link: ♫ http://twt.fm/358417

About: Ok, let me tell you a little story. The year was 2003. I was a resident of Findlay, Ohio, attending college. The city is quite small and full of life. The local college radio station (88.3 WLFC) consistently played a variety of music that barely reached the edge of town. I was regularly driving a 1998 Chevy S-10 truck at the time. I didn’t own an iPod (they were just blowing up at that point), so on the passenger seat of my tiny little truck, I always kept this cd case that held 250 cd’s (which I had packed full). It was insanely inconvenient because it was really heavy and always got in the way. One day it was raining pretty hard, and I had begun to get frustrated with my cd case. It was hard to sort through cd’s while driving. I came up to a stop light and quickly had to hit the brakes to avoid another car. My cd case flew out of the seat and landed on the floor of my truck. Angered, I gave up on trying to find something to listen to. I then turned the radio on to 88.3 WLFC and heard the very beginning of “Maybe Today“. It was incredible. I kept saying to myself, “I didn’t know Eve 6 was this good!” Turns out they’re not (I mean no disrespect). I had only ever heard a couple of Eve 6 songs at that point, so naturally I made an honest mistake. Anyway, after the song ended I kept waiting to hear the DJ announce who the band was, and what the song was called, but it never happened! The university would have a computer generated playlist consistently spin tracks throughout the day until the actual DJ showed up in the evening to host their show. I was furious, so right when I got home I started searching through Eve 6’s entire collection of music online in order to find this song… and I obviously couldn’t. I was heartbroken. Months later I ended up DJ’ing for the same station on Wednesday nights (good times). Right when I started, I was determined to figure out where this song came from. Low and behold, one day, I found it. CARBON LEAF! I had actually never heard of them, and was surprised. I ended up going out to the store that day to buy this album (Echo Echo), and instantly fell in love. A few months later they ended up releasing their Indian Summer album, which is when I became an official hardcore fan. As for the song itself, literally just listen to it. It’s calming, intricate, mellow, and tasteful. I’m sure you’ll enjoy it. It actually sits easily in my list of favorite songs of all time. I’d go into more detail, but the story behind this song is what’s most fun.

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As the New Year begins we will get into more heightened discussion of sequential monthlies. And by 2011, you will be sick of Grant Morrison. For now a tease with an upcoming comic book adaption from the mad creator Mark Millar; a man I love to hate.

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By Ryan Brlecic

Earth, 14 years later…

What do Roger Dean, Steve Perry (not that Steve Perry), Tom Yeates, Anne Mcaffrey, Robert A. Heinlen, Roger Zelany (Euclid, OH represent), Ed Zwick, Ronny James Dio (yes that DIO) and Poul Anderson have in common? James Cameron owes them all money. Poul Anderson especially, just ask Harlan Ellison. Ed Zwick comes in a close second, as Cameron just mined the last 14 years of that auteur’s career of documenting white guilt. Major Tom, Get me Ed Zwick on the phone. I want to let him know that James Cameron just made the most expensive and expansive Zwickian film ever. This could be likened to Marc Forster’s turn last year in which he made the best damn Roger Moore Bond film ever.

Few will point out that the biggest lifting Cameron did was from his own portfolio. Avatar in more ways then one is the culmination of his entire career. The uptown girl love story of Titanic, the power loader of Aliens, the save her from her destiny shtick, breather masks straight out of The Abyss, Skynet even updated the Hunter Killers as Samson Choppers and get your grunt to work a secret mission a la Kyle Reese. Most importantly, do not forget scientists are always altruistic and benevolent versus the corporate profit-minded pursuits of the military industrial complex.

Everyone copies…er homages just ask Quentin Tarantino. However, like QT, some do it in style and make it their own. It is true Virginia, it has all been done before; and lately remade for posterity sake. Existence is just our reality of trying to find new menial ways of retelling everything Plato, Shakespeare, Wilde, and porn movies have already shown us.

Which brings me back to Avatar, a truly beautiful to behold amusement park labeled a film. The story however is one of the most pathetically executed in recent film history. Said that, moving the fuck on. But what did I say?

Before considering this another trite lambasting of James Cameron’s brilliant eco-friendly social conscious masterpiece (said with dripping sarcasm), wait. TRC has skewered the film’s concept pre-release with Cory Maidens. Masterfully reviewed the film in a piece by Tom Nix this past Saturday. Now I am here to analyze just what Cameron has done with the last 14 years and what it means for the rest of us.

Being a pupil of visual communication I will get a glaring nit pick of my own out of the way. Who spends a decade plus on a film only to garnish it’s title treatment with a Microsoft standard font, which is then fucking stretched for effect? (your welcome Jes!) The use and application of the Papyrus typeface screamed vocational school graphic design graduate.

Q: What does 14 years of R/D (and Micosoft standard fonts) at a supposed rate of
$500 million dollars buy you ?

A: McDonald’s Happy Meal toy

Like Marlow’s Congolese adventure to retrieve Kurtz, we follow Cameron to Pandora. A planet populated by a race of thundercats that can interface with just about any living organism in a totally non-homo erotic fashion. There immersed in the lush abundant green which we all forsake for progress and the pursuit of imperialism back on earth, we find the true god of the Na’vi. James Cameron’s biggest achievement with Avatar is a literal creation of an entire planet via obsessive compulsive detail. This milestone however works against him, because in the end Pandora felt like a hollow earth.

Technical achievement aside the film itself lacks any depth or soul. As Dr. Ian Malcolm once said, “The lack of humility before nature that’s being displayed here, uh… staggers me.” I fear that I am remiss in my rush to tie Cameron’s Avatar experiment to Kurtz’s horror; his heart of darkness. His achievement bares more resemblance to Shelley’s Doctor Frankenstein. He was so driven to create something never seen he never asked himself why. It leaves Pandora feeling as fake as a back lot main street.

It is well documented that Cameron is driven by advancements and pushing the limits. He is a bastard child of the silver age of Sci-Fi novels and film. He comes from an age where they once informed you to duck under your desk to avoid nuclear devastation. Refers to Organized religion as mere tribal chants. He was born wanting more. He only did Aliens because he called an agent’s bluff. He was stabbed in the face after LSD laced Chowder incident on the set of Titanic and survived drowning on The Abyss. There is no question this man is the real deal.

…And when Schwarzenegger and Tom Arnold took off on a tour of DC monuments, leaving the set, they returned to find Cameron standing in the middle of the road, arms crossed, like a Terminator ready to total their vehicle. Cameron lunged in the passenger door and got in Arnie’s face, shouting “Do you want Paul Verhoeven to direct the rest of this  fucking shit? You do that shit again and that’s what’s gonna happen.”

There is huge divide between technical book smarts and gut level instincts in bringing characters to life on screen. His film career is filled with beautiful surface level epics. He is what Roland Emmerich wishes he could grow up to be. Cameron excels in his niche, machining the unreal into technical existence. The buck however stops there. Cameron lacks the ability to add depth to his creations like that of his peers Ridley Scott (director of the only Alien film) and Guillermo Del Torro. Both of which still give you visual punch, thought out down to the last molecule, but also the feel of depth that gives their creations reality.

His visual constructs be it ships, mech suits and tree houses are beautifully realized shells, but lack a feel that anything is going on inside. Did this movie improve visual effects? Absolutely. Admittedly I found myself remembering if this was how I felt during the T-Rex chase in Jurassic Park? However unlike Jurassic Park there seemed to be no connection past the visual. This was due partially to lack of character. Yes even creatures of Pandorian forests can and should posses some form of character traits. The dinosaurs in Jurassic Park had individualistic character traits that made them more fully realized. This is why you’re so drawn to Zoe Saldana’s portrayal (and only her portrayal) of her character as she gave her shell a soul. Her performance truly defined the concept of acting out through an avatar.

This all just serves to work against the film that gestated for so long. Cameron should have had more then enough time, considering that he is an extremely disciplined and focus creator to finish the cup. It is nigh inexcusable that he seemingly abandoned the pursuit of an actual story to wrap his pixel mesh of technical wizardy over. Peter Jackson learned this with his similar laze fair wielding of the visuals in King Kong. Just because you have the know how doesn’t mean you know how. Spielberg in turn could easily have had raptors mindlessly burst into a kitchen and end the scene.  Instead he choose to have them pause and act through their eyes conveying that they were thinking all the while making you forget they didn’t really exist. I never forgot that Pandora or it’s inhabitants did not really exist, just that they looked pretty.

Another reason for the departure in believability was due to the simple fact that it is harder to play God then we think; even with WETA archangels. Even the pitiful story aside and the fact that I am almost completely ambivalent to anything James Cameron does. His development of a new way to film in 3D utilized as a tool and not just a gimmick; undeniably useful in the right hands. This however is not the harbinger of a new age in cinema. I may be alone in this observation, but I never once bought the Na’vi as an fully realized race of people.

It almost fell to the “Incredible Hulk Conundrum”. How do you make the audience believe in a eight foot green man? We strangely feel it easier to believe something totally devoid of humanoid characteristics. This is the downfall of the Na’vi  – the least believable thing in the film. They are essentially blue people with cat features. At quick glimpses they seem as nothing but disfigured or distorted humans. Not having more visual comparison of human physiology to Na’vi causes you to not appreciate their advantages. An example of this handled well is District 9, released earlier this year (Sharlto for the Oscar). The director had initially intended on the aliens being more humanoid in outward appearance. Neill Blomkamp’s decision to change to what amounts to large talking prawns eliminated that hurdle of familiarity. It forced his film’s viewers to realize the individual characters his “prawns” portrayed.

Cameron seemingly stereotyped right out of National Geographic, enlarged by five feet, and painted on a blue a mash-up of tribal cultures. Past surface level info about their culture and ways the Na’vi people felt as generic as Giovanni Ribisi’s acting. If you are going to create your own world and work on it for a decade, one would think that you would spend more time ironing out the details of your main inhabitants. Thus reducing his personal Herculean attempt to fully transport you. He however failed far less then Peter Jackson’s display of self-indulgent style over substance.

A man who views himself as his own god, failed in his attempt to fully create life. This has always been the unfortunate truth of Cameron’s career. His films look great, but he is just an above average director. Like De Palma, Craven, Friedkin and Howard the list goes on. We too often raise men like James Cameron up on a pedestal for doing something merely above average because we are to afraid or unwillingly in our examination of it past the surface. After fourteen years in the jungle, Cameron should have brought us more. Instead we are delivered a package without a gift on the inside, just in time for Christmas.

What this means for the rest of us is being written as I type. Watching the news feeds for the Monday recap I saw the spin doctors at work. Avatar received a paltry $73 million stateside. Making one wonder if this was all for naught? This movie is rumored to have cost $500 million dollars to produce. If it barely ekes out that in return, there is the very real possibility that Cameron’s achievements with Avatar on the technical side will collect dust. Studios can make their money back for far less and with far less. In this case Prometheus failed in bringing them fire. Unfortunately for us if Avatar proves a success expect more of the same (it was planned as a trilogy after all).

Ultimately Avatar lived up to being a shell for one to inhabit. However the bond never connected with its intended host, the audience. In the off chance that it did the affair was brief, no longer then two and a half hours. It was a site to behold and an amusement park on screen, but the one thing it was not was a film.

Editor’s Note: James Cameron proved that Thundercats can be live action!

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