Avatar (James Cameron, 2009)

Sigourney Weaver in Avatar

Jake Sully: Sam Worthington
Neytiri: Zoe Saldana
Dr. Grace Augustine: Sigourney Weaver
Col. Miles Quaritch: Stephen Lang
Trudy Chacón: Michelle Rodriguez
Parker Selfridge: Giovanni Ribisi
Norm Spellman: Joel David Moore
Moat: CCH Pounder
Eytukan: Wes Studi
Dr. Max Patel: Dileep Rao

Director: James Cameron
Screenplay: James Cameron
Cinematography: Mauro Fiore
Production design: Rick Carter, Martin Stromberg
Film editing: James Cameron, John Refoua, Stephen E. Rivkin
Music: James Horner

When it first appeared, James Cameron's Avatar was as much an event as a movie. People flocked to see its groundbreaking 3D and motion-capture CGI effects and to marvel at its colorful creation of a distant world. Even most of the critics raved, caught off-guard yet again by Cameron's expensive audacity, as they had been with Titanic in 1997. But as with Titanic, the passing of time has taken some of the glamour off of the film. Cameron had certainly excelled his contemporaries as a technological innovator, but 3D is beginning to become passé (as it did in its first insurgence in the 1950s) and motion-capture has become a standard technique. So it's possible to concentrate on Avatar as movie, and thus to find it wanting. For one thing, it's shamelessly derivative. The central plot, of a soldier "going native," is that of Kevin Costner's Dances With Wolves (1990). The Na'vi belief in the mystical unity of all things is identical to the Force from the Star Wars movies. And the gung-ho Marines and villainous representatives of the military-industrial complex are borrowed by Cameron from his own Aliens (1986). Even the Na'vi, with their elongated torsos, big eyes, flat noses, and long round tails, remind me oddly of the Pink Panther. Except blue. The characters are stock: Sigourney Weaver is again playing the tough, adversary whom the exploitative bad guys underestimate. Sam Worthington's Jake Sully is the white man savior of the native peoples. And Stephen Lang's bull-headed Col. Quaritch is the hissable villain with no apparent redeeming qualities. Cameron even calls the material being sought by the earthlings in the movie "unobtanium," a variant spelling of the impossible substance that has been called "unobtainium" by engineers since the 1950s. The Marvel Studios screenwriters at least have the wit to call their minerals "adamantium"  and "vibranium." But maybe that's quibbling: Avatar remains an influential and extremely watchable movie, even if it's predictable and overlong -- cuts of the film range from 162 to 178 minutes.

Hacksaw Ridge (Mel Gibson, 2016)

Andrew Garfield in Hacksaw Ridge

Desmond Doss: Andrew Garfield
Sgt. Howell: Vince Vaughn
Capt. Jack Glover: Sam Worthington
Smitty Ryker: Luke Bracey
Tom Doss: Hugo Weaving
Dorothy Schutte: Teresa Palmer
Bertha Doss: Rachel Griffiths
Lt. Manville: Ryan Corr
Col. Stelzer: Richard Roxburgh
Milt "Hollywood" Zane: Luke Pegler

Director: Mel Gibson
Screenplay: Robert Schenkkan, Andrew Knight
Cinematography: Simon Duggan
Production design: Barry Robison
Film editing: John Gilbert
Music: Rupert Gregson-Williams

Hacksaw Ridge doesn't shy away from biopic or war-movie clichés, it embraces them: There's on the one hand the familiar bullying sergeant, and on the other the typical shy romance. But it succeeds in being a well-made action movie, after spending a little too much time on the shy romance and other bits of Appalachian backgrounding for the character of Desmond Doss, a real person who was both a conscientious objector and a Medal of Honor winner for his heroism as a medic during the Battle of Okinawa. To play Doss, the movie needed the equivalent of a young James Stewart or Gary Cooper, and found him in Garfield, who received a best actor Oscar nomination. The movie also provided a measure of redemption for its director, Mel Gibson, who had been persona non grata in Hollywood after a 2006 drunk-driving arrest in which he made antisemitic remarks to the arresting officer, a capper on a string of homophobic and extreme right-wing statements he had reportedly made over the years. He was nominated for best director for Hacksaw Ridge, and the film was also up for best picture and for film editing and two sound awards. It won for film editing and sound mixing. Gibson remains something of a problematic figure in the industry, and has yet to find a followup in his would-be comeback. Hacksaw Ridge demonstrates some of his known flaws, such as his violent delight in mayhem and bloodshed, and it's a bit heavy-handed in its endorsement of Doss's simple (not to say simple-minded) faith, but it provides some very old-fashioned movie gratifications.