1961: The Guns of Navarone

Ah, splendid! The WW2 film about a rugged band of colourful characters on an all-important mission to destroy two of the Nazis' most powerful weapons on the greek island of Navarone is just what Hollywood blockbuster cinema is supposed to be: An epic featuring interesting locations, suspense, lots of silent-loud contrasts between the scenes and a cast of actors that are stars for a reason. (8)

2005: Batman Begins

Does what it says on the label - childhood and death of parents, education, development of gadgets, etc. - in a thoroughly professional/predictable way. Too long, although not by as much as The Dark Knight, the visual acumen of which it lacks. I haven't used my stopwatch, but got the impression this might well win a competition for similarity of scenes' length in blockbuster movies. (6.5)

2009: Avatar (in 3-D)

The main thing most people are going to watch this for is the new 3-D technology and this works really well. I didn't find it as impressive as I thought I would (presumably because I've seen a lot of 3-D in the real world), but it looks realistic and is quite a bit of fun to behold.

Apart from that it is really not a good movie. Early on, we learn that the humans/Americans (often the same thing in this kind of movies) are on that planet because there's a precious resource to harvest (some stone). If in the process of getting it you have to kill some of the natives, so be it. But throwing bombs on their heads is maybe not the most clever way of making the natives voluntarily letting us harvest their planet, someone opines. Hmm, is it just me or is the screenwriter trying to make a comment on recent US foreign policy? (In general, the dialogues all sound like they were written by a fourteen-year-old boy, which may or may not be a deliberate choice by Cameron.)

The natives, however, aren't all that much like Afghans. Burqas? No, sir! Just think of the first five clichés that come to mind when I say "noble savage" and you know everything about them. They are so in touch with nature that while an animal the throat of which they've just slashed is bleeding to death, they inform it that its life-energy will be preserved. They keep a straight face, too. And their trees? They're not just trees; under the surface, all of their roots are interconnected and the memories of dead natives are stored there. (Regrettably, this is not referred to as the greenternet.) Cameron has really taken this whole Gaia idea in. And he lets it out!

But at least he has taken something in from the nonscreen world. A rare case. Almost all of the scenes seem second-hand. She at first wants to kill him and is furious when she is ordered to spend time with him. Hmmm, wonder whether they'll end up together? Like that. All of the time.

The screenplay also has structural problems, or, to put it differently, it doesn't have a single twist in it - you can predict the way the story will go after about ten minutes. Come to think of it, I thought that there would be a twist (concerning one specific character) that did not happen. On the other hand, between the two of us Heidi and I exactly predicted what would happen to the Sigourney Weaver character.

But let's not be picky about such things: Where the movie's really got to shine is the visuals. Well, I already mentioned the 3-D and the film's got some really nice shots of valleys, etc. But: The natives (and hence the avatars, which or who are designed to resemble them) look crap. So do the sort-of-horses. So do the sort-of-dinosaurs. In fact, every nonhuman animal in this film looks shite. (The plants look o.k.) What's worse: The film is basically set in two places; the military base and the forests. The military base is shot is shot in grey and blue. The forest is shot in green and blue. After half an hour I found myself longing for red, yellow and brown. And it's a long film.

I'm giving the movie 5/10 because the 3-D thing, as I may have mentioned, works really well. I strongly advise you, however, to see it in 2-D, irrespective of the size of the screen.

1972: Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes (Aguirre, the Wrath of God)

Werner Herzog's widely acclaimed film about a 16th century expedition into the Southern American jungle looks like some hippie commune happened upon a bunch of costumes and a camera and decided to make a movie because "everybody can do it".

Klaus Kinski, in the title role, does his wild-eyed Kinski routine, overshadowing in the process the rest of the cast who seem to be on a mission to demonstrate that acting's actually hard.

The editing is poor. The results of the complete post-production sound overdub range from the o.k. to the ridiculous.

All aspects of the camerawork are done really badly. As for choices of frames and camera movement, nothing in particular seemed to motivate the former except for the desire to show the person that's speaking most of the time and the latter makes you remember that it's not easy to hold a camera still when you have one leg in the river, the other on an uneven stone and nothing to stabilize the camera. The lighting and colours? Well, you can see everything alright.

The complete absence of a narrative arc, the lack of motivation for some scenes (during one I got the impression that the actor was wondering when it would be over so he could finally scratch his arse) and the quality of the dialogues might lead the naive observer to believe that they just made the story up as they went along, but no:

Herzog wrote the screenplay "in a frenzy", and completed it in only two and a half days. Much of the script was written during a 200-mile (320 km) bus trip with Herzog's football team. During the bus trip, his teammates got drunk after winning a game and one of them subsequently vomited on several pages of Herzog's manuscript, which he immediately tossed out the window. Herzog claims he can't remember what he wrote on these pages.^[3]

The screenplay was shot as written, with some minor differences.

When people say that something's "so bad that it's good", they usually mean that a work of art is unintentionally funny, and indeed I had to laugh when I watched some of the death scenes, which seem like reenactments of something out of The Simpsons. But what kept me watching was the fascination with the yawning gap between the film's renown and the real thing. Incredible. (2)