Avatar 2: The Way of Cameron

Congratulate me! I have survived a trip to Pandora, and am only slightly water-logged. Yes, I just sat through all three hours and twelve minutes of Avatar: The Way of Water, staying awake most of that time. Never have I ever seen a movie that is both so beautiful and so unrelentingly convoluted. I noticed five people (including director James Cameron) listed in the opening credits as authors of the film’s story. This means five people helped sort out the plotline of this Avatar sequel before three of them went on to collaborate on the actual screenplay. Maybe this authorship-via-committee approach is why we’ve got a “something for everyone” storyline, crammed full of heroics, mysticism, family feelings, outside threats (from, of course, evil earthlings), and covert  ecological messages about saving our home planet.

 I’ve a hunch the writers fully expected us to re-watch the original Avatar the night before viewing this sequel. Avatar was first released, to thunderous acclaim, in 2009, and 13 years later most of us are a bit hazy about the circumstances on Pandora, aside from the fact that Jake Sully, an American military guy who’s among those invading the pristine little planet, eventually goes native. In the followup,.I was totally baffled by what Sigourney Weaver was doing on camera in that one scene, and couldn’t fathom her apparently maternal connection with one of Sully’s Na’vi children. And why does the sequel’s #1 human antagonist, the thoroughly nasty Colonel Miles Quaritch, look big and blue (like the Na’vi) throughout the action? Wikipedia explains it this way: Quaritch is “a human who led the paramilitary division of the RDA in their conflict with the Na'vi. After being killed by Neytiri in the first film, he is one of several RDA soldiers resurrected as recombinants, described as ‘avatars embedded with the memories of human[s].’”To which I can only say, “Huh?”

 But let’s focus on the film’s strengths. The Na’vi, as we discovered in the first Avatar, are fabulous beings. They’re tall, sleek, and noble. Though their anger can be fierce, they’re hardly Blue Meanies. If left to their own devices, they are peace-loving, devoted to the natural world and to one another. And they look absolutely regal (as well as rather sexy) in pretty much no clothing at all. They’re a triumph of Cameron’s use of motion capture to transform human actors into otherworldly beings.  By using the latest in technology, he can have his characters effortlessly do fabulous stunt work, while also interacting with unearthly sea creatures that boggle the viewer’s mind.

 In its undersea sections this Avatar is at its best. Cameron, it seems, is passionate about the ocean. He’s used it as backdrop for movies like The Abyss and (of course) Titanic, not to mention several documentaries.  And he’s had his personal ocean adventures, becoming in 2012 the first person ever to do a solo descent of the Mariana Trench, the deepest spot in the earth’s waters. While making Avatar: The Way of Water, he required most cast members to become adept at free diving, so that his cameras could capture their movement in the briny deep as well as on land.

 James Cameron got his start in moviemaking as a very novice art director on Roger Corman’s Battle Beyond the Stars. The goal at Corman’s New World Pictures was to make films fast and cheap, using tricks like spray-painting McDonald’s hamburger boxes silver and tacking them up to line a spaceship’s walls. Corman films are also notably short. Cameron learned a lot from Roger, but then obviously went his own way.

 

 

 

Beyond “Battle Beyond the Stars”: Roger Corman Makes His Own Cheapie “Star Wars”

The original edition of my biography of my former boss Roger Corman, which appeared in 2000, called him on its cover “the godfather of indie filmmaking.” He was then 74 years young. Yesterday, on April 5, 2021, he turned 95. And he’s still at it, producing and distributing low-budget flicks.  He’s still the godfather, but also something of an ancient mariner, plying the rough seas of today’s entertainment industry.

 I’ve just happened upon a relic of one of Roger’s most productive periods at New World Pictures. Emmy-winning film editor Allan Holzman, credited with editing the ambitious 1980 Corman space epic Battle Beyond the Stars, kept a diary throughout the five-week shoot of a film that Roger later grandly claimed was two years in the making, at the cost of $4 million. Now Allan has assembled what he calls “Celluloid Wars: Lessons Learned From Making the Movie Battle Beyond the Stars.” This as-yet-unpublished volume offers a trove of images and sketches from the film’s production period, along with such bonus features as Allan’s after-the-fact interview with SFX wizards Robert and Dennis Skotak, regarding its  cheap but nifty visuals.

 But the heart of the book is Allan’s running account of the day-to-day challenges faced by Corman minions as they struggled to do the impossible, turning out a credible “Magnificent Seven in Space” in time to beat The Empire Strikes Back into theatres. They overcame every possible obstacle: a director who’d never before worked in live-action cinema; some newbie actresses (to go along with seasoned veterans like Robert Vaughn and Richard Thomas);  a lumber-yard-turned-studio with a leaky roof; questionable equipment; and Roger’s own mercurial temperament. One personal victory for Allan came after he’d spotted a dejected young worker whose long labors on a series of front-projection slides of faraway galaxies were wasted because they’d come out too dark to be of any use. Once Allan recognized the beauty of these images, he alerted Roger that perhaps the young artist had a future in set design. So James Cameron was promptly promoted to art director, and the rest is cinema history.

 Partly I love this book because it includes so many people with whom I too have worked. It also gives a fascinating editor’s-eye view of how a production staff interacts with the Corman front office, speculating in a way I find extremely credible on why Roger prefers to surround himself with yes-women. But above all this book teaches the reader what a film editor is, and how his mind works. He describes himself unsparingly: “I’m a hermit and a voyeur.” He’s frank about how, as an AFI graduate, he worked his way into editing partly because—as a lifelong stutterer—he found in this particular job a way to sidestep his own physical challenges, as well as a chance to indulge his perfectionist instincts.  At times he reveals his frustration with the rest of crew: “They probably just think I’m an uptight asshole who can’t mellow out and give in to the fact that at New World Pictures, sloppiness is our most dependable product. Sorry for the putdown, Roger, but it’s true.” But he also makes clear his love for the exacting process of trying to spin straw into cinematic gold. He writes at one point: “I wish people would stop thinking editors just put things together by taking out the waste or tightening things up. We mold and manipulate as we wend a tale through the existing footage in such a way that the overall movement of a scene is equal to the underlying emotion.”

 Bravo, Allan. And happy birthday, Roger!