January 19, 2010

R.I.P., Ripley

(Beware: mild spoilers for Avatar throughout.)

So if you give a damn about the Golden Globes, you know that Avatar (or “Abadah,” as Arnold Schwarzenegger inexplicably pronounced it on the telecast) won Best Drama and James Cameron won Best Director.  His ex and director of The Hurt Locker Kathryn Bigelow took the snub gracefully, but she had to be thinking, “C’mon!  Really?!”  Avatar is now on course to take the favorite’s mantle going into the Oscars’ Best Picture race (though the outcome of the DGA Awards will tell us a lot).

You know, Avatar is a nice little movie.  Feels weird saying that about a movie that cost a bajillion and has already made two bajillion, but to me, it’s not that big of a deal.  The movie’s heart is in the right place and there are some breathtaking moments (assuming you’re watching it in IMAX 3-D), but I don’t see it as the huge “game-changer” some are making it out to be.  We’ve been watching the incremental evolution of CGI and even 3-D for years now.  Technologically, this seems less a leap forward than the next logical step.

On a script-level, what I like most about Avatar is the concept of remote piloting a superhuman alien body and the pervasive but not-quite-overdone social commentary.  I don’t think the script merited a WGA (and probable Oscar) nomination with dialogue as wooden as Titanic’s and only a few notches better than one of the later Star Wars movies.  The comparisons to Dances with Wolves (some call this “Dances with Smurfs”) have been made elsewhere, but the storyline definitely takes its cues from what you might call the “stranger in a strange land” formula.  The lone wolf gradually earns the respect of the natives in scenes laced with comic and emotional beats, falls in love with one of them and eventually fights for them against his own people.

Hey, this is a formula for a reason — it makes for an entertaining story when well executed.  And it’s well executed here.  However, if you’ve seen a few of these stories, it’s also as predictable as sunny days in So Cal.  If more effort had been put into subverting expectations as the script hit the formula’s requisite plot and character beats, I might give it an award.  But with these script nominations, it seems like they’re just loading up the bandwagon.

All the same, that’s not what really stuck in my craw.  What I liked the least about this movie was the character played by Sigourney Weaver.  This is not the great Sigourney’s finest performance.  It’s a little arch, a little one-note… like she never quite got a handle on who she was playing and whether or not there were nuances to explore in subtext.  But I think she did all right with what she had.  The issue here is the character as written.

Let’s take a look at Dr. Grace Augustine.  This chick’s like a dumbass Dian Fossey.  A smudged mimeograph copy of Sigourney’s more heroic character in Gorillas in the Mist. She wants to help the Nav’i, but she doesn’t even manage an inspired speech about how beautiful their culture is or how we have so much to learn from them, so Parker and Quaritch and the rest might think of them as more than smart blue monkeys.  No, she just kind of impotently rails and grouses and practically stomps her foot in a shockingly unpersuasive kind of way.  No wonder these guys want to bulldoze the Na’vi tree-village.  The supposed expert on their culture doesn’t even get the moving speech you’d think a character like this would have, whether it changes anyone’s minds or not (maybe she could have won over Michelle Rodriguez’s character this way, instead of that happening off-screen).

What bugs me the most is who they cast in the role, who directed this movie, and who wrote it.  I’m talking about Sigourney Weaver, James Cameron, and James Cameron.  They worked together on another little movie in 1986, maybe you’ve heard of it — Aliens?  Anyway, in that movie, which also made a lot of money, they created one of the top five feminist icons in film.  Yeah, even if you’re a women’s studies major at the University of Iowa, you probably know and love Ellen Ripley.

The character got off to a good start with Alien in ‘79 when she was written as a male character and they just swapped Sigourney in without changing a word of her dialogue.  That was quite a statement, and it dovetailed nicely with Diane Keaton’s Annie Hall (1977), who with just her funky, mannish wardrobe softened some of the bright white lines between gender roles.

But what makes Ripley an even better character in the second movie — James Cameron’s movie — is that she gracefully embodies the best parts of BOTH male and female archetypes, in her own feminine way.  Ripley is the kind of person who can handle whatever the situation calls for.  Cameron’s superb screenplay also explores a surrogate mother / daughter relationship in remarkable depth for a roller coaster movie, including the challenge of explaining to a child that there may not be a Santa Claus, but there ARE monsters in this world and we must reconcile ourselves with that fact.  Ripley’s muted romance with Michael Biehn’s character, Hicks, springs entirely from mutual respect rather than lust.  And yet, you have the feeling that if these two had a few hours alone without any creatures trying to kill them, things might get pretty hot.  (Don’t get me started on the studio’s asinine decision to kill Hicks and Newt in between this movie and the next one, rendering their inspirational struggle to survive Aliens meaningless.)

Anyway, we all know that Ripley kicked open a door for Lara Croft, Sidney Bristow, The Bride and a host of other badass female characters.  After Ripley, the masses seemed to realize they were bored with the “love interest” stereotype who might be introduced as tough but ended up being led around by the hand while things blew up around them.  And sure, Zoe Saldana’s Neytiri is a respectable warrior in Avatar. But the point is not that Ripley could take a punch.  She was not just tough, she was tough-minded.

The fact that Dr. Grace Augustine is older than Ripley and a scientist should mean nothing.  Knowing that force is not an option, why doesn’t she scheme against her adversaries and undermine them in other ways?  She and her team have total access to the facility and could even use their avatar bodies to sabotage the operation (if they don’t stick their faces in a security camera, like protagonist Jake Sully does at one point).  We see that the military is monitoring Jake’s video diaries, but there’s no indication that they are watching avatar feeds (especially not when Augustine moves their lab into the field).  If she really believes that genocide is brewing and all these company men are unreasonable, why draw attention to yourself by bitching about it?  She should be expertly playing both sides of the fence — like any thinking person would — and secretly doing everything she can to save these people.  Look at Shosanna in Inglourious Basterds for a great example of a double agent in action.

Instead, Cameron seems to be quite intentionally painting the military and the scientists as opposite sides of the same worthless coin.  It’s just that the big brains are feckless and not actively harmful.  In this movie, I guess we need one hero, this soldier with a heart, to solve everything just by being THAT badass.  Because other than being the setup for a later payoff, Augustine has little impact on the plot.

In many ways, Avatar resembles District Nine, another big sci-fi hit from last year.  In that film, the hero starts out clueless and insensitive to an alien race before “going native” (albeit in a different way) and seeing things more literally from their point of view.  Like Avatar, there’s a robotic exoskeleton / battle-suit.  But District Nine posits that while one person can do a little bit of good, he can’t ride in on a white horse and save humanity from itself.

Paradoxically, I don’t think it’s any more cynical than Avatar.  Aliens ended with a human being in a super-suit, Ripley, doing battle with an alien for the lives of the innocent.  Avatar reverses that equation.  This time, the human is the threat to the innocent and Ripley is nowhere to be found.  The movie presents a much more bleak assessment of the human race.

Hey, I can understand the decision to make Sam Worthington’s character the hero here and give Sigourney Weaver more of an emeritus role.  Cameron and Weaver are not obligated to pay homage to Ripley when they work together or separately.  But when I consider Weaver’s character here, I can’t help thinking that the world of Avatar is somehow less evolved, less inspiring, and less real than the world of Aliens. Maybe that’s because our civilization has been heading in the wrong direction, and Cameron knows it.  Or maybe it’s just because he had too many balls in the air with this movie to worry about the legacy of a character from another one.

I can’t help but wonder what would happen if, instead of being found by that deep salvage team, Ripley’s escape pod had crash-landed on Pandora?  It wouldn’t be long before she taught this “Dr. Grace Augustine” how to handle corporate sleazebags and military morons.  Hell, why stop there?  This could be like The Incredible Hulk TV series all over again.  Because she doesn’t have anyone left alive from her old life, Ripley just keeps bouncing around the galaxy, waking up in different civilizations where she has to get up to speed on their version of the future and solve their problems for them.  Because that Ripley was a problem-solver, man.

I miss ya, Rip.