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.

A Monster Calls (J.A. Bayona, 2016)

Lewis MacDougall in A Monster Calls

Conor: Lewis MacDougall
Grandma: Sigourney Weaver
Mum: Felicity Jones
Dad: Toby Kebbell
The Monster (voice): Liam Neeson
Harry: James Melville
The Head Teacher: Geraldine Chaplin

Director: J.A. Bayona
Screenplay: Patrick Ness
Based on a novel by Patrick Ness from an original idea by Siobhan Dowd
Cinematography: Oscar Faura
Production design: Eugenio Caballero
Film editing: Jaume Martí, Bernat Vilaplana
Music: Fernando Velázquez

The fable of A Monster Calls is the intertwining of grief and guilt. Young Conor, mourning his mother, who died of cancer, is haunted by nightmares in which he tries and fails to save her as the earth crumbles beneath their feet. The nightmares cause him to be dysfunctional at school and in the home of his grandmother, with whom he has gone to live.  Eventually, the nightmares come to life in the shape of a giant monster yew tree that gives him parables which reveal to Conor something more terrible: that he wanted his mother to die. But the revelation also makes him aware that his wish for her death was the product of his wanting her to be released from suffering. The psychological complexity of the fable is richly imagined, but its subtlety tends to get overwhelmed by the impressive special effects -- yet another lesson that film is not always the best narrative vehicle for complex ideas.

Alien 3 (David Fincher, 1992)

Charles Dance and Sigourney Weaver in Alien 3

Ripley: Sigourney Weaver
Dillon: Charles S. Dutton
Clemens: Charles Dance
Andrews: Brian Glover
Golic: Paul McGann
Aaron: Ralph Brown
Morse: Danny Webb
Bishop/Bishop II: Lance Henriksen
Junior: Hoyt McCallany
David: Pete Postlethwaite

Director: David Fincher
Screenplay: Vincent Ward, David Giler, Walter Hill, Larry Ferguson
Cinematography: Alex Thomson
Production design: Norman Reynolds
Film editing: Terry Rawlings
Music: Elliot Goldenthal

Alien 3 may be the sourest sequel ever made, completely negating in its opening scenes what made Aliens (James Cameron, 1986) so exciting: Ripley's heroic efforts to save the lives of Newt and Hicks (as well as retrieve what remained of Bishop). When Alien 3 begins, Newt and Hicks have died, making Ripley's efforts meaningless. And as if to rub salt in her wounds, she is forced to watch an autopsy of the little girl, just to make sure the alien isn't incubating in her. Not that what follows is much more enjoyable. As I said in my comments on Aliens, what made that film and its predecessor, Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979), so entertaining was the interplay among its well-drawn characters. But there are hardly any characters besides Ripley in Alien 3. Charles S. Dutton and Charles Dance are fine actors, but Dance feels miscast as the brief potential romantic interest for Ripley, and Dutton is given little to do but deliver a homily at the cremation of Newt and Hicks and afterward to run and shout a lot as everyone fights the alien. Dutton's character, Dillon, is supposed to be the spiritual leader of a group of YY-chromosome inmates on the prison planet Ripley's escape pod crashes onto. The religious subplot feels superfluous -- it's apparently left over from an earlier version of the screenplay in which the prison was instead a monastery -- since the prisoners don't seem particularly devout; they mostly growl and leer at Ripley, the only woman on the planet, and a group of them try to rape her. This was the debut feature for David Fincher, who has since proved himself to be one of the more skilled and distinctive American directors, but making it was not a pleasant experience for him -- there were too many misfired attempts to get a workable screenplay, and the director who preceded him, Vincent Ward, was fired. It's mostly held together by Sigourney Weaver's performance and a few exciting action scenes -- though even these are marred by some confusing editing, especially the extended chase sequence through the corridors of the prison at the end. And Ripley's sacrifice -- which should have put an end to the series but didn't -- only adds to the general depression that permeates the movie.

Aliens (James Cameron, 1986)

Carrie Henn, Michael Biehn, Sigourney Weaver, Bill Paxton, Paul Reiser, Jenette Goldstein in Aliens

Ripley: Sigourney Weaver
Newt: Carrie Henn
Hicks: Michael Biehn
Burke: Paul Reiser
Bishop: Lance Henriksen
Hudson: Bill Paxton
Gorman: William Hope
Vasquez: Jenette Goldstein
Apone: Al Matthews

Director: James Cameron
Screenplay: James Cameron, David Giler, Walter Hill
Cinematography: Adrian Biddle
Production design: Peter Lamont
Film editing: Ray Lovejoy
Music: James Horner

Before James Cameron become "king of the world" and infatuated with the possibilities of CGI, he made this exciting sequel to Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979), which is not only a superb movie on its own but also one of the few sequels whose creator has actually studied what made the first film so satisfying. In this case, characters. Just observe the still above and compare it with the one I chose from Alien in which the crew of the Nostromo gathered around the infected Kane. In the one from the sequel we see Newt, Hicks, Ripley, Hudson, Burke, and Vasquez gathered around a schematic to plot out a way of dealing with the alien threat. And if you remember the film at all, you can immediately recall what made these characters so appealing -- or in the case of Burke, so appalling. Aliens could have been your standard shoot-'em-up in space, with lots of mindless action. In fact, it starts out that way, with an obnoxiously gung-ho crew of space marines blustering about how they're going to kick some extraterrestrial ass. But as the cast is whittled down by the monsters, we get to know the seven survivors -- Bishop, the android so mistrusted by Ripley, is missing from the picture -- and to feel a genuine concern about their fates. Moreover, because Cameron hasn't yet fallen under the spell of CGI, what takes place looks and feels real -- there's a tactility about the sets that computers have yet to learn how to supply. Action movies don't come any better than Alien and Aliens. 

Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979)

Sigourney Weaver, Harry Dean Stanton, Yaphet Kotto, John Hurt, Tom Skerritt, Veronica Cartwright, and Ian Holm in Alien

Ripley: Sigourney Weaver
Dallas: Tom Skerritt
Lambert: Veronica Cartwright
Brett: Harry Dean Stanton
Kane: John Hurt
Ash: Ian Holm
Parker: Yaphet Kotto

Director: Ridley Scott
Screenplay: Dan O'Bannon, Ronald Shusett
Cinematography: Derek Van Lint
Production design: Michael Seymour
Music: Jerry Goldsmith

Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) posited that extraterrestrial beings might not be bent on world domination or worse, but instead were just looking to be friendly neighbors. Spielberg went on to reinforce that idea in 1982 with E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. It was a kind of reversal of the treatment of space creatures in 1950s sci-fi films, born of Cold War paranoia. But although the Spielbergian vision informed several other successful films, including John Carpenter's Starman (1984), the truth is that when it comes to movies, paranoia is fun.  No movie established that more clearly than Alien, whose huge success launched a whole new era of shockers from outer space, including Carpenter's The Thing (1982). Almost 40 years later, Alien still holds up, while the Spielberg films are looking a bit sappy. Is that a commentary on the movies themselves, or on us? Alien benefits from near-perfect casting and from outstandingly creepy design, making the most of the work of H.R. Giger on the alien and its environment and of Carlo Rambaldi (who had also created the benign aliens of Close Encounters and E.T.) on animating the creature. While it's true that time has not been entirely kind to some parts of the design -- such as the cathode ray tube monitors for the ship's computers, which would definitely be outmoded in 2037 when the film is set  -- everything else has become sci-fi standard, including the depiction of the Nostromo as an aging tub of a ship whose maintenance crew, Brett and Parker, gripe about being paid less than the management staff. Scott doesn't labor over the implicit critique of corporate capitalism that will become more prominent in the sequels, but it's nice to see it there.