Sons of Loki

I’d withdrawn the last of my JASSO for this month, so I thought I’d have one last jaunt before school starts again on Monday. I thought about a trip to Mount Takao, the first bit of nature you hit when you reach the edge of Tokyo which I’d gone to back in 2007, but then I thought I could go watch Jimmy Cameron’s new movie Avatar and the thought of trekking to Fuchu and watching a flick seemed rather more appealing than spending two hours hiking a mountain in the cold with no breakfast and little sleep, so I booked my tickets online (can you believe there’s no IMAX cinemas in Tokyo?) at Toho Cinema in Fuchu (excellent English support from them, so top marks), got a nice centre-back seat, and headed kino-wards at 12:30.

I’d vaguely heard about Avatar last year as the movie that was supposed to change filmmaking forever or something, but I think everyone assumed it wouldn’t live up to the hype. I was surprised, then, when Mark Kermode enjoyed it, and then I started seeing the results on Twitter and Facebook, people saying how incredible it was, so I thought I’d better catch it.

Now, 3D films have been around for a year or so now, but this is the first one I’d seen (disregarding stuff like IMAX and theme park shows), so I was interested in how the 3D effect worked over a proper, 140 minute feature film. And – well, it’s a gimmick, like everyone says. I think it works well in a blockbuster like Avatar, though, where the focus is mainly visual.

I am, at heart, a SF geek, and Avatar captured me right away with its depiction of how stuff might look in the future; there’s a beautiful opening scene of everyone getting out of their cryostasis pods and floating in zero-g. I thought the facemasks were a nice touch, too; spacesuits are so 20th century. Even the spaceship was better designed than most sci-fi hulks (based on a weird but realistic design, and the geek in me squirmed that the radiator panels were glowing red with dissipated heat, something that real spaceships would do but no one has ever put in a film before).

But Avatar is a movie in two worlds; the action-packed space marines with their cool toys and gunships and grenade launchers, and the peaceful, tree-hugger Na’vi. And the 12-year old WH40K fan in me loved the Marines and all their bombastic splendour, which I know is wrong, but I just can’t help but get excited about giant mecha battlesuits on the big screen. It’s a strange guilt.

It reminded me of Cameron’s Aliens, in fact, right down to the no-nonsense spunky female dropship pilot. (And indeed, who’s to say that the sketchily-defined, morally-dubious Company doesn’t grow up to become Weyland-Yutani, that the Marines don’t become Colonial, and that Sigourney Weaver’s character in the film doesn’t have a oddly-reminiscent granddaughter called Ellen? I smell prequel) And while everyone knows Aliens was all about Vietnam, Avatar is clearly about Iraq. Big business wants a valuable resource that happens to be buried underneath all these hapless villagers. If you provoke them, they’ll start a war, and you can roll in and grab the spoils… One of the characters basically says this half-way through. It’s hardly subtle, but it’s something to chew on.

So? I loved it. It created a world. It looks stunning; some of the best CG ever committed to digital celluloid. It’s got a little more depth than most blockbusters. It’s a fun watch. It’s a classic. Okay, so it’s not great in the sense of Citizen Kane great or Godfather great, but it’s a solidly good movie.

My main problem was the Na’vi. They’re a little lame. The only original aspect of them is that cool brain-link thing, and even that is the old telepathic talks-to-the-animals thing. They’re basically Space Indians, or Noble Savage Aliens, and I thought they were a little lazily thought-out. Why would alien beings use bows and arrows ? Why would they wear bikinis? Why would they kiss to express love? (Hell, many human cultures don’t do that.)

They’re such a big part of the film, it depresses me that we get the same old brave warriors and mighty chief shit. Alien cultures can be fantastically weird; like Niven’s Puppeteers, who have scientifically proven that they have no soul and hence for whom cowardice, not martyrdom, is the noblest virtue; or, I don’t know, a certain alien species Cameron may be familiar with, which reproduces by jumping on your face and laying a foetus in your chest. I mean, just an idea off the top of my head; the moon Pandora is in orbit around a massive Jupiter-like gas giant. Which means that every time a Na’vi looks at the night sky, there is a gigantic broiling sphere of cloud staring down at them and taking up half the sky, and all its children circle around it changing phases. If I were Na’vi, I’d worship the huge thing in the sky, not a tree, but I digress.

Anyway, I promised myself that after this treat I’d finish the damn sakubun, so I found a nearby branch of Starbucks and chilled out (literally – there was no room inside so I had to sit outside in the cold until a seat opened up in the warm). I spoke a little Japanese to the barista, was reminded of Sully’s struggles with the Na’vi tongue, then sat down and ploughed through the sakubun. I put in a few cool phrases I’d noted down from Planetes, and I suddenly realised I was enjoying Japanese again. The simple joy of writing is the same in any language, of stringing together the right words in the right order to get your point across. Strange.