Avatar (2009, Dir: James Cameron)

James Cameron’s new film has been a long time in the making – twelve years after Titanic, his last full-length feature. All in all, it’s a gutsy remake of Dances With Wolves, only with more blue aliens and less Kevin Costner. In fact, the story is so similar to Costner’s film, that it’s tempting to think Cameron’s well had dried up when he wrote the first treatment back in 1994 (a mere four years after the release of Dances With Wolves). Titanic would have practically written itself too.

Still, once you get over the similarity to Costner’s film, Avatar is fantastic. It’s a bit like listening to Led Zeppelin – the core is ‘appropriated’ from elsewhere, but so much is brought to the table that it becomes a completely new beast.

We follow marine Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) to the alien planet of Pandora. Planet Earth has an energy crisis and the natives of Pandora are sitting on top of the solution. Worthington is excellent and just as watchable as his breakthrough role in Terminator Salvation, with the only criticism being his world-weary narration. Cameron’s choice to walk us through the exposition at the top of the film makes sense – it’s a long film as it is, and it pays to get everybody up to speed as fast as possible, but Worthington’s droll monosyllabic voice grates, echoing Harrison Ford’s narration in the original cut of Blade Runner.

The real star of the show is the special effects. Again Cameron shows us that it is he, and not George Lucas, who is pushing the envelope. In fact, the CGI is so good in Avatar, that it made me feel a bit sorry for Lucas – if the Star Wars prequels had been made with these special effects, then maybe the films wouldn’t have been as bad. Wishful thinking probably.

The visual effects in Cameron’s new film are so good, you can’t see the join. Shot using a motion picture stage six times larger than anything Hollywood has seen before, it genuinely looks like it was shot on an alien world. It definitely makes a difference to seeing Jar Jar Binks bob up and down in The Phantom Menace.

As far as 3D goes – and this is supposed to be the reason for such a long wait since Titanic – it’s not outstanding, and doesn’t offer anything we haven’t seen before in recent 3D releases. Anything moving and not completely in focus blurs much more than it would in standard 2D, and unless the object in focus is completely framed, the effect doesn’t really work.

It’s just a shame that such groundbreaking technology was wasted on such a familiar canvas. The tune might be different, but the song remains the same.

The Lovely Bones (2009, Dir: Peter Jackson)

Or The Lovely Boner, as I’m sure some film producer in Van Nuys is probably planning to call the x-rated remake...

Jackson’s latest film is a welcome step down after the excesses of King Kong. It still doesn’t hit the spot though. One reviewer has described the film as Heavenly Creatures meets Lord of The Rings, and while stylistically that’s true, it’s pretty limited to describe a film by just using the director’s earlier films (“yah, Roland Emmerich’s new film, 2012, falls somewhere between Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow” – duh!). If this film is like anything else, it’s like that crazily bad Robin Williams film about heaven (1998’s What Dreams May Come). But only just. And you can’t really compare it to any other films about serial child killers because, well, fortunately there aren’t too many of those out there.

While the other-worldly scenes in The Lovely Bones look impressive (as anything that Weta Digital touches usually does), they really jar against the early 1970’s period pieces. Maybe they remind me of my youth, but anything set in the 70’s and 80’s always looks good on the big screen. It’s probably the bad haircuts and dreadful fashions.

Speaking of bad haircuts, we’re treated to a pretty terrible one courtesy of Mark “Don’t you care about the bees?” Wahlburg. He plays the father of the murdered Suzie Salmon, and to give him his credit, isn’t as bad as he usually is. Aside from a few scenes where he falls back into his trademark ‘sniff the fart’ acting, he does a pretty good job of playing a broken father; his hobby, making ‘ships in bottles’ providing one of the more awesomely executed fantasy sequences.

Saoirse Ronan is just as watchable as she was in her few standout scenes in Atonement, and she definitely has a bright future ahead of her in film. The cast is rounded out by Rachel Weisz (sleepwalking mother), Susan Sarandon (hard-living Grandmother providing the only light relief in the film) and Stanley Tucci as the creepily realised serial killer.

The Lovely Bones really falls down (no pun intended) in the last 20 minutes. After an exciting cat and mouse sequence between Suzie’s killer and her younger sister, the ending falls flat and is simply frustrating. I’m not sure if Jackson has improved on the book (I haven’t read it) but apparently the ending was made more violent to please American test audiences. Like Saoirse Ronan’s previous film, I’d have been happy with some genuine atonement.

Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009, Dir: Wes Anderson)

I’ve been looking forward to this since the closing credits to The Darjeeling Limited. I have to admit I was sceptical at first – Anderson has such a trademark visual style, how would this translate into a stop-motion animation adaptation of a Roald Dahl children’s book? The answer is ‘very well’.

You have to bear in mind however, that this is a children’s film. There’s enough adult humour to keep people as interested as they would be in a Pixar film – but it’s a film for kids all the same. In fact, to give it very loose description I’d have to say it was somewhere close to Pixar meets Wallace & Gromit. Where Nick Park’s animation bears the thumb prints of its animators, Anderson’s team is far more precise. The animation on the human characters is sometimes better than the animals (take note, Pixar), with one very noteworthy effect being the cigarette flare on Farmer Bean’s darkened face during one the films more suspenseful sequences.

This marks the second of Anderson’s films not to be scored by Mark Mothersbaugh. You wouldn’t notice however - Alexandre Desplat’s score is very similar to what we have heard before on Rushmore, ...Tennebaums and The Life Aquatic, although not as rooted in classical as the heart of those scores. Still, we get some nice contemporary songs to give the film some pep where it needs it (The Rolling Stones’ Street Fighting Man has been long-overdue a revival) and it’s nice to get back to a fully Westernized soundtrack after the Eastern core of The Darjeeling Limited.

As for the players, with the exception of George Clooney and Merryl Streep, the film is nicely made up of ex-Anderson alumni, with Jason Schwartzman, Michael Gambon and Bill Murray all taking key roles; and Brian Cox, Owen Wilson and Willem Dafoe appearing in nice cameos.

If Anderson has done nothing more, he has created a piece of work reminiscent of the quality of such films as the Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory (1971) or golden-era Disney, with enough humour and references to keep the whole family happy. At the end of the day, it’s a cussing good film.