Something Alien Yet So Familiar

Something Alien Yet So Familiar

By Prospero Pulma Jr.

Marrying cutting-edge CGI technology with an engaging plot populated by likable characters is tall order in filmmaking. The current rule is for blockbusters to dazzle the audiences with over-the-top special effects that will distract them from flimsy plots and one-dimensional characters and for art films to bust their patrons' intellect when they ponder on their plots and the protagonists' motives such that watching a Cannes winner is comparable to studying a semester of Plato and Aristotle.

An exception to the parade of lowbrow CGI-heavy films and highbrow low-tech philosophical film fest winners (definitely not the Metro Manila Film Festival) is James Cameron's Avatar because it initially overwhelms the senses, well at least the eyes and ears, by taking moviegoers on the wildest safari adventure on the silver or IMAX screen, complete with very, very exotic flora, fauna, and natives, before it leaves the audience with questions about man’s insatiable greed.

Avatar begins with Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) heading to Pandora, an extrasolar moon that is largely habitable except for its toxic air, as a last-minute replacement for his twin brother who killed himself before embarking on a vital and expensive exploration project. A wheelchair-bound Marine who has few prospects outside of the military, he bites the offer of taking his brother's place, hoping that the end of one life will be the beginning of another.

On Pandora, Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) reluctantly accepts Jake into her team that is studying the moon's flora and fauna, as well as forging cordial relations between the Na'vi and the Sky People, the Na'vi's name for humans, upon the orders of Parker Selfridge (Giovanni Ribissi), the local honcho of Resources Development Administration that is mining for Unobtanium. Jake links up with his Avatar, a human-Na'vi hybrid controlled by an operator, and he thoroughly enjoys the freedom of moving independently again.

On his first trip with the researchers, he is separated from the group when a herbivorous Titanotheres and a carnivorous Thanator attack him. Jake escapes from the Thanator but battles Viperwolves in the forest. Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), a Na'vi hunter princess, rescues him and rebukes him for being a baby, but takes him to her clan, the Omaticayan, after she receives omens from their diety, Eyra.

The Na'vi are naturally hostile to Jake but Mo'at (CCH Pounder), Neytiri's mother and apparently a priestess, charges Neytiri with teaching Jake the Na'vi's life. As Jake learns more of the Na'vi's culture, particularly their immense respect for nature, he begins to wonder if Unobtanium was worth destroying Pandora's ecosystem, especially the Omaticayan's Hometree that sits on the moon’s largest Unobtanium deposit.

Back in the base, Grace envies him for going further than she had been, and Col. Quatrich (Stephene Lang , the security chief who recruited Jake into a covert recon operation in exchange for sponsoring his spine surgery, presses Jake for new information. Jakes, battered inside by his budding love for Neytiri and her home, wavers in his mission, expressing his growing affinity to Pandora by stating in his video log, “Out here is the real world...in here is the dream.”

Jake finally casts his fate with the Na’vi when he attacks a mining vehicle. Col. Quatrich arrests Jake and launches an operation to drive the natives out of their home. With Parker Selfridge’s permission, Jake and Grace last attempt to convince the Na’vi to leave the Hometree fails. Many Na’vi die when they fight back, and this time, Grace and Norm Spellman (Joel Moore) join Jake in the stockade. Trudy Chacon (Michelle Rodriguez) breaks them out of prison but Grace is fatally wounded in their escape.

Jake, in Avatar form, returns to the Na’vi mounted on a tamed Toruk, a feared and revered flying predator. Neytiri accepts him back and Tsu’ tey (Laz Alonso) allows him to speak. Jake rallies the Omaticayan and inspires other Na’vi tribes to join him for the final battle.

In the battle, the RDA forces nearly rout the Na’vi until Eyra, whom Jake pleaded to help them, unleashes the Titanotheres, Thanator, Viperwolves, and banshee on them and annihilates Col. Quaritch’s army. After a savage fight, Col. Quaritch, in an AMP suit, kills Neytiri’s Thanator and pins her underneath the animal. Jake arrives and fights the Colonel but it is Neytiri who kills him with arrows.

With the exception of Jake and a few others who volunteered to remain, Parker Selfridge and the other survivors are sent back to Earth. Jake finally decides to remain in his Avatar form permanently through a ritual that will transfer his consciousness to his Avatar body, the same ceremony that failed to save Grace.
Running approximately three hours, Avatar may feel like an overly stretched science fiction flick, but the passage of time is barely noticed as one watches Jake evolve from a Marine who signed in to earn money for his rehab, very much like the mercenaries he despised in the beginning of the film, to someone who truly cares for people, not people, but aliens to the point that he is willing to abandon his earthly body and become a Na’vi.

Jake’s physical helplessness against the RDA thugs contrasts with his task of carrying the weight of two worlds on his shoulders, one world stripped of its natural beauty but still hungry for resources and the other still virginal because of the Na’vi’s immense respect for their home. Given with the nearly impossible task of preventing war from erupting between man and the Na’vi as the former lusts for Unobtanium as a Thanator lusts for its prey and the latter determined to fight war machines with arrows in defense of their home, Jake must choose between his loyalty to his race and its boundless greed or follow his human nature that dictates compassion for the weak.

For all the Titanotheres, Thanators, Viperwolves, banshees, Toruk, and a host of exotic flora paraded by James Cameroon that elevated Avatar to the Mt. Olympus of science fiction filmmaking, the film is strangely familiar. Just imagine Pandora to be some still pristine but resource-rich spot on Earth, the Na’vi as the locals, the RDA as a soulless corporate entity, and Jake Sully as the corporate henchman who switches sides, and you will see that Avatar feels more like a documentary than a sci-fi flick.

Salvation for a Machine by Prospero Pulma Jr.

Salvation for a Machine
By Prospero Pulma Jr.

Terminator Salvation, the latest chapter in the saga about autonomous, intelligent, and well, killer machines and post-Armageddon humans furiously resisting annihilation, begins with a John Connor showing that he is not the same person who barely fought off the machines sent to kill him in the three earlier installments of the Terminator franchise. He jumps from a chopper and promptly dispatches a disabled machine with several shots to the head. Yes, the boy is fully grownup, armed to the teeth meaning he can shot back at Skynet’s high-tech foot soldiers, and, for the first time, can send other people to do the killing, er, destroying machines, for himself. But he is not yet the heavily hyped future leader of humans who survived Skynet’s opening salvos in its war to exterminate humanity. He is somewhere in the middle of the organizational chart and his command covers an area conveniently located south of Skynet Central.

A few minutes into the film, the attention is on Christian Bale, who plays the adult John Connor. His order to his A-10 Thunderbolts to protect civilians from Hunter-Killer Terminators hunting a teenage Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin) brings him close to a mysterious figure who changes his view of his expected future, not to mention add excitement to the plot. Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington) only remembers being in a lethal injection chamber and donating his body to Cyberdyne for research. Marcus tags along with Blair Williams (Moon Bloodgood), one of the Thunderbolt pilots, back to John’s base. The first clue about his real nature comes when a magnetic landmine, designed against anything metallic like Terminators, maims him. John becomes baffled about their unexpected discovery that Marcus has functioning organs, including a wildly beating heart, infused in his Terminator’s body, something that he did not pick from listening to his mother’s tapes.

John, naturally, is extremely hateful and suspicious of Terminators so he decides to cut up Marcus to study him. Unlike in death row where he had no trump card, Marcus’ knowledge of Kyle Reese’s whereabouts saves his hide, and he offers to assist John in rescuing Kyle before a major offensive by the Resistance levels the Skynet complex that houses the young Kyle and other captives. In Skynet, Marcus discovers that, despite his sincere intention to help John, he is merely obeying his programming to lure John and Kyle into a trap. His human nature overrides Skynet’s commands. He defects to the Resistance and rescues John and Kyle but at a high cost as John sustained a mortal wound inflicted by the original Terminator, the T-800. Marcus offers to donate his heart to John, redeeming himself for the crime that sent him to death row.

Terminator Salvation fits neatly with the three earlier Terminator chapters. As a prequel, it depicts the future after the nuclear holocaust initiated by Skynet, before Kyle Reese was sent back to protect a young Sarah Connor and a still-to-be-conceived John Connor. Proof of it is its retention of a pregnant Kate Connor (Bryce Dallas Howard), a character played by Claire Danes in Terminator: Rise of the Machines. However, it veered away from the three earlier installments over its choice of a thinking and feeling Terminator. Marcus Wright, a death row inmate turned by Cyberdyne into an advanced model of a deep-penetration Terminator, displays a wide range of emotions, from great shock from awakening to a world in shambles, confusion about the gap in his memory, and enormous disbelief over the discovery of his true nature. Sam Worthington handles his acting task well up to the point that the audience believes that the story is about a convict seeking redemption and not about humans fighting a war for self-preservation. Had the script given him a more complex role, Christian Bale would have brought his renowned thespic skills to the screen. However, his talent still shone through like in his solo radio broadcast and his John Connor character would have become completely forgettable if it was given to an average actor.

In Terminator Salvation, John Connor did not expect to encounter Terminators as advanced as Marcus Wright, with a metal endoskeleton and a very human heart that sought redemption, a killer who grabbed his only chance of self-cleansing by sacrificing himself.