Desolation of Smaug: The Aliens vs. Predator of Cinematic Tolkien

Now that Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug has been out for some two weeks, there seems to be a general consensus that it’s not only a lesser film than last year’s An Unexpected Journey, but easily the weakest of Jackson’s Middle-Earth films to date. The reasons for this vary from person to person – general bloat, extra-Tolkien-ian invention, video-game-aesthetics, action-movie clichés, overt servility as an LOTR prequel, over-reliance on CGI, etc., etc. In what follows, however, I offer my own, hopefully somewhat unique, critique of it…

One of the greatest contributory factors to the Lord of the Rings trilogy’s magic was that it took place in a world wholly other and apart from our own. Tolkien always maintained that creating Middle-Earth was a purely formal exercise for him, with no real-world implications whatsoever, but the key was that he took the formal exercise entirely seriously as such. His academic specializations in Old Norse and Anglo-Saxon history, language, and folklore provided him with the raw material to create a world so detailed – so rich in culture and tradition – as to feel real in a way that (seemingly) no previous fairy stories ever had. Paradoxically, Middle-Earth became more fantastical for seeming less so. Being given enough texture of detail to really believe that Theoden’s people would not have felt out of place in the England that Harold II ruled on the eve of the Norman invasion meant that the wizards and balrogs seemed less fantastically imaginary than they would have otherwise. Fantastical beings that seem really to exist in their own densely historicized world, rather than simply being appreciable as the Freudian projections of the author – presented sui generis and at face value – was and remains an amazing literary achievement. More than enough, for plenty of readers, to offset Tolkien’s insufferably retrograde views on most real-world matters.

It was exactly this dynamic that Jackson captured so successfully in the films. One got the sense that the locations we saw were deeply imbued with a history which we could understand and appreciate, but that is nonetheless nothing to do with our world. And it is this dynamic that Jackson loses badly in The Desolation of Smaug. In retrospect, the opening sequence gives a foretaste, although the first-time viewer won’t know it at the time. We’re back in Bree – “On the Borders of the Shire,” a subtitle helpfully reminds us – watching Thorin tramp through the streets, and arrive at the Prancing Pony.  The obvious, calculated re-tread of The Fellowship of the Ring, right down to Jackson making the same cameo as a carrot-munching hobo, doesn’t bother me. What does, with retrospect, is the way the sequence is handled. In Fellowship, the scene there was heavily stylized to underscore Frodo’s discomfiture at being away from the Shire for the first time, with the Ring already working on him, and Gandalf unaccountably not there. We got a lot of lurid, slow-motion close-ups of scruffy, bearded, hard-drinking men, all potentially gazing threateningly at Frodo. This scene would climax in one of the most vivid images of the trilogy: his slip backwards, into an overhead shot of him grabbing for the Ring in mid-air… only for it to slip onto his finger, whereby the bar of the Prancing Pony is replaced by the giant eye of Sauron declaring “I see you.” The Prancing Pony might have resembled an innocuous medieval pub in theory, but in practice the resemblance was negligible.

In Desolation of Smaug, however, Jackson goes the complete opposite route. Here, we see Gandalf meet Thorin with a mug of ale and a basic hunk of bread in front of him. Gandalf catches the attention of a passing hale and hearty waitress and says “I’ll have the same.” This is soon brought to him in the course of his tête-à-tête with Thorin. There’s really not much more to it than that. The scene is handled with ordinary film grammar – no surreal subjectivity of any kind, and certainly no ringwraiths bursting in later on. The Prancing Pony has now become, in practice, the innocuous town pub it only was in theory before.

Again, all this is not in itself a problem. The problem is that it foreshadows the course of the film from the second act on: the film’s vision of Laketown deviates too far from Middle-Earth’s fantastical side, and becomes virtually indistinguishable from a setting in our world a few centuries past. Laketown, as we see it in Desolation of Smaug, is essentially a harbour town in Georgian England, and a few minutes of screen time spent there is sufficient to totally remove the spectator from the epic fantasy realm of Middle-Earth. Far from attempting to downplay this, Jackson seems almost to have perversely embraced it. When Bard first arrives at the town gates on the Long Lake, he has to reckon with “Alfrid,” the town Master’s deputy, who is characterized as exactly the sort of hatefully officious, micro-megalomaniac, middle-management type one is occasionally unlucky enough to meet in the real world. His only concern is with stamping Bard’s paperwork, and then sneeringly informing him that he’s only registered to be carrying barrels, not fish, and thus that he’ll have to dump the latter overboard, the town’s food shortages notwithstanding. This seems so wearyingly relatable to Earth in the here and now, that the elves and orcs we saw just a few moments ago already seem less real.

This only continues when we meet the Master himself, as played by Stephen Fry. It’s seeing the interior of his house – with its canopy bed, its dark oak panelling, its framed portrait of him above the mantle – that really solidifies the film’s Georgian England connotations. Along with this, there’s Alfrid’s warning him that “the people are growing restless; there’s even talk of an election,” to which the Master can only say piffle and demand a brandy. It’s exactly the same tone one’s read or seen a thousand times before in British literature and television adaptations: the degenerated old-school squire, landowner, or aristocrat refusing to accept that his powers aren’t innate in the natural order of things, and that majority rule is anything other than absurd.

Beyond this, Laketown itself is far less fantastical than any other Middle-Earth environs we’ve ever seen. The piers, impromptu canals and walk-ways, the various boats, the familiarly-shaped houses – all of it as convincingly wet, icy, used, and lived-in as any LORT set – serve to remove us from a realistic fantasy world, and simply plop us back into the real world. Even if we’ve never inhabited a place quite like this ourselves, it just seems to cross a threshold of relatability such that we’d be unsurprised to find out that there really is or was exactly such a place. The fact that so many of the dwarves – Richard Armitage as Thorin and Aidan Turner as Kili especially, but Dean O’Gorman as Fili and James Nesbitt as Bofur not far behind – are cast to look more or less human, rather than like John Rhys-Davies’s Gimli in LOTR, only completes the illusion. For a relatively lengthy stretch in The Desolation of Smaug, we’ve effectively left Middle-Earth, and the looming War of the Ring, for England on the verge of the Peterloo Massacre.

And it’s here that my title comes into play. Because The Desolation of Smaug of course does not stay on this odd footing forever. Soon enough, orcs come upon Laketown, with Legolas and Tauriel behind them. And the odd effect of this is much the same as that achieved by Colin and Greg Strause’s much-reviled 2007 film Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem – the film in which the xenomorph “aliens,” so universally famous from futuristic scenarios directed by Ridley Scott and James Cameron, come to terrorize a small Washington State town in the present day. Attacking the kitchen staff at the local pizzeria, shredding teenagers in the high school swimming pool, dashing between steel girders at a construction site to pick off unwary construction workers – one is basically seeing one of filmdom’s most charismatic creatures brought into our own recognizable here and now, just to flatter our sense of our own importance. It’s a lowering of them, to be sure, but also a raising of ourselves, and thus a cheap thrill in its own way. As I’ve said, Requiem was almost universally excoriated by critics for this narrative strategy, but there was a method to its madness, and one that I sort of appreciated. It is that same method that Jackson is invoking with Desolation of Smaug.

After enough time to acclimatize to Laketown as a location more relatable to our world’s recent past than Middle-Earth as we know it, it becomes doubly shocking to see orcs start bursting in the windows nonetheless. The terrified shrieks that Bard’s children give off are less the hypothetical shrieks of the imaginary children of Rohan, and more those, by proxy, of real children in the audience. It’s one thing to see a farmstead appropriate to the Dark Ages be attacked and burned by vaguely-defined wild men of the mountains while two appropriately smudged and ragged children have to flee on horseback to Edoras and raise the alarm. It’s quite another to see crudely over-defined savage creatures burst in the window of a family home, to elicit shrieks from implausibly well-scrubbed, shampooed and conditioned children. It’s as though Jackson is already turning his Middle-Earth franchise into its own theme park, within the very confines of the filmic narrative.

And herein lies the final twist, of course. Because no sooner have the aforementioned orcs burst in and elicited said shrieks, then Legolas bursts in after them, in all his Orlando Bloom dreaminess, and slaughters all of them with nary a scratch to himself or the little kiddies. Bard’s house will likely look just familiar enough to suburban children in Auckland, Los Angeles, London, Toronto, etc. to give a scary frisson to the orcs bursting in at them, but this will then be compensated for by the sheer coolness of Legolas bursting in after them and kicking ass. It’s essentially just a much more violent version of getting to shake hands with Mickey Mouse at Disneyland, or seeing C-3PO and R2-D2 appear on The Muppet Show, or seeing the aliens go into teen-slasher mode. On the one hand, kids accept the fact that these beloved figures of popular culture exist in their own fantasy never-world – that’s an inextricable part of what makes them so beloved – but on the other hand, there’s an ineradicable part of us that wishes they could descend into a more intimately recognizable realm closer to our own, so that we can feel that much closer to them. At the most cutesy-twee level, every child knows it would be a crime beyond reckoning to wrench Pooh out of Hundred-Acre Wood, but on the other hand, what child in the world wouldn’t also dream of getting to establish Pooh in their own backyard? And at a more familiar, perverse level, what kid wouldn’t want to see their hometown, rather than Tokyo, levelled by Godzilla on his next rampage? 

Such is the logic I saw Jackson using in the Laketown segment of Desolation of Smaug. Put like this, it may sound very interesting, but in practice watching it, I found it very frustrating. Legolas’s relative invincibility was never too distracting in the LOTR trilogy, because he was only one part of a much larger cast, and his never missing with his bow, and never getting a hair out place under any circumstances, was basically just his character note. When he’s absolute and total centre stage, however, as in these parts of Desolation, his bleach-blonde pretty-boy insouciant-invincible characterization becomes insufferable very fast. One is frankly cheering for the big orc captain to get the better of him, and then seething with frustration knowing there’s no way that’s going to happen. This brings me back to the spectatorship dynamic I discussed regarding Sucker Punch once. I find it applies to Desolation more than any film I can remember seeing recently, and for exactly the same reasons as Sucker Punch. Think, they both involve dragons…

Balto: A Great Film Trapped Inside a Mediocre Movie

In a previous post, I mentioned that I found an immense amount to enjoy in Rod Lurie’s The Contender, but with the rather glaring exception that I found the titular protagonist insufferable. Its strong supporting cast, its excellent cinematography, its genuine fascination with the workings of politics, however – all these things in combination allowed me to look past Joan Allen’s sanctimonious heroine. The 1995 animated film Balto represents, for me, the polar opposite extreme. Here is a film where the overall work is badly riddled with problems, almost to the point of not being worth watching, but is ultimately redeemed by having an endlessly engaging and likeable hero.

Simply put, I like Balto enormously as a character. This is actually rather rare for me. As I mentioned in another previous post, I often find the heroic leads in Hollywood movies unrelatable at best, or outright hateful at worst. For one to actually win me over completely is unusual, but even a cursory look at its qualities will reveal that Balto is a very unusual film. It was the final feature  produced by Amblimation – the spin-off company of Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment, devoted purely to animation. The inordinate influence of the Spielberg imprimatur on 1980s pop culture has always been well-understood, but people tend to remember things like Poltergeist and The Goonies more readily than An American Tail and The Land Before Time. The latter films, however, may be more radically important, since Hollywood animation had for so long been the near-monopoly of Walt Disney Studios. By lending his immense name recognition to animated films that would break this mould, Spielberg helped expand the conceptual boundaries of what could be done with animation in the mainstream. Balto would be the penultimate project of this expansion, and its problems are those of a production which is testing the boundaries whereby an “animated film” becomes simply a film that is realized via animation.

Balto’s creators seem to have wanted to make an animated film that would be a completely de-Disney-fied, straightforward epic drama, but nonetheless panicked that audiences used to Disney films weren’t ready for such an endeavour. Unwilling to give up their serious ambitions, however, they hedged their bets by salting in an inordinate amount of cartoonish humour, of a buffoonish kind even lower than Disney’s usual tenor, in the hopes that they would leaven each other, and the final film would gel. In the event, however, this calculation failed miserably, and we are left with a movie that is partly a rare masterpiece, and partly a disposable Saturday morning cartoon. Probably the chief reason I ultimately emphasize the former, however, is that the characterization of its hero resides in the first column.

Beyond being excellently animated, about which more later, Balto is very compelling as a character. A wolf-husky hybrid, he lives on the outskirts of Nome in the hull of a wrecked ship – outside of society but still looking in. He sees the achievement and camaraderie of the sled dog teams, and the affection that the humans have for their dogs – especially the young girl Rosy, whose fiery-red husky “Jenna” he’s secretly in love with – and longs to be part of it all. His lupine blood, however, means that this society spurns him, even though his inordinate strength and speed means there’s so much he could do for it. One brilliant scene has him slinking off dejectedly to his ship, only to see a pack of wolves passing on a nearby ridge. They pause expectantly, evidently recognizing him as one of their own and inviting him to join them, but he can’t bring himself to abandon human society totally – even his own pitiful and peripheral place in it. The film’s narrative soon offers a way to cut this Gordian knot, however, when an outbreak of diphtheria means that an isolated Nome stands in need of a saviour. Balto may never have been able to be accepted, but he now has the chance to vault beyond acceptance and become revered. The severity of the threat to Nome is emphasized by a number of shots of impassable pack ice and blizzard conditions, more hyperrealistic than almost anything Disney has ever done, and a haunting shot of the local carpenter building a number of child-sized coffins. 

All this is obviously deep stuff indeed to throw at preteens, and so the film engages in what amounts to a campaign of wilful vandalism against itself. In addition to a comic sidekick – a goose named “Boris” with a heavy Russian accent – Balto is flanked by a pair of polar bears named Muk and Luk who are also ostracized from their kind because they can’t swim. Jenna, meanwhile, is given two friends named “Dixie” and “Sylvie,” who speak like Manhattan Jewish socialites. And the film’s ridiculously exaggerated villain “Steele” – the current head sled dog – is given a trio of flunkies named “Nikki,” “Kaltag,” and “Star,” who have a running shtick whereby Star effusively babbles until Kaltag shuts him up by punching him. It’s the sort of gag that works well enough in TV cartoons, but woefully undermines Balto’s best cinematic qualities.

And there are plenty of those. The film’s single greatest moment comes at the 57-minute mark, after Balto's initial attempts to lead the dogsled team seem to have failed, and he and the diptheria antitoxin have been swept off a cliff. The first image we see is of Balto shoving his head up out of the snowdrift he’s been buried in. Following that, there’s an amazing four-second shot of him pulling himself back up above ground, incredibly strongly backlit in a heroic low-angle framing. After this, however, he lies down in apparent defeat, muttering “Rosy” as he lays his paw across his snout. A cut out to a medium-long shot here reveals the film’s technically hybrid nature, inasmuch as Balto himself is still drawn with pencil and ink, but the blizzard that’s raging unforgivingly around him has obviously had a lot of help from CGI. Faced with the contrast, I still feel nostalgic for the analogue side of the equation, in spite of all the amazing things digital animation can do.

Cutting back into a close-up of Balto’s face, we hear a magical-sounding sparkling noise from offscreen. As he looks up for its source, the camera pulls back and reveals the paws of a great, mystical white wolf standing frame left, which Balto acknowledges with a look of plaintive uncertainty. It’s a great animated-acting moment from our hero, which is followed by a reverse-angle cut to a full-on majestic push-in/tilt-up shot, causing the white wolf to tower over the frame – and thus Balto, and thus us the spectators – just as he flings back his head and lets out a big, dramatic howl. Cutting back to reverse angle, we find ourselves looking over the white wolf’s shoulder, and down at Balto, who now has another brilliant acting moment, turning his head aside totally cowed and ashamed. So subtly nuanced is the animation here that, cutting in to a close-up of Balto turning away, we can really sense that this isn’t from fear so much as his own life-long inability to so totally embody his own lupine identity, the way this noble creature does. It’s an utterly Biblical “pained look away”/“I am not worthy” moment – the sort that’s de rigeur for all epic heroes.

Another reverse angle cut shows Balto’s face now facing the frame, the white wolf now behind him. Thus, we see the wolf turn away in disappointment and seem to leave, but at that very moment, Balto’s eyes suddenly focus… And a cut to his point-of-view reveals that the medicine has landed, intact, right behind him! We then cut back to a new framing of his dismayed face looking upward, at what looks like an impossibly high cliff face. At this point, Boris’s voice cuts in on the soundtrack, repeating his previous admonition that “a dog cannot make this journey alone, but maybe a wolf can.” If nothing else, this moment demonstrates that, as superfluous as the Muk/Luk/Dixie/Sylvie/Nikki/Kaltag/Star constellation of characters may be, Boris’s presence in the film is justified, inasmuch as every epic story needs its clown-sage character to offset the hero. And with the following cut, Balto does indeed move into unequivocally heroic mode, as a close-up shows his features smoothly shift from plaintive/sorrowful to iconically steely and determined (the screenshot above left doesn’t do it justice), sharply turning and facing into the blizzard defiantly, rather than defeatedly like just a moment ago.

With the next cut, we see that the white wolf has seemingly gone, but has left a trail of wolfy pawprints behind. In the familiar image of the MCU composition from earlier, we see Balto extend one of his own paws and place it in the print… and it fits perfectly. Balto has found his own kind in the great and noble creature we’ve just seen, and with this epiphany, he raises up his own head and lets out a huge, dramatic howl of his own. At this point, the “camera movement” really goes all-out, circling him 180° so that in an unbroken take, we can see the white wolf reappear and join him in his howl. This done, we then cut to a long shot of the two of them in profile, heroically twinned. All throughout this scene, meanwhile, James Horner’s epically powerful score has forbidden the viewer a single second’s possibility of dismissing things as “just a cartoon.”

I first saw this scene in the theatre in the summer of 1995, when I was nine years old, and it made such a vivid and indelible impression on me that from just that one showing that I never forgot it over the following sixteen years. Finally revisiting the film for the first time in spring of 2011, at the age of twenty-five, I was humbled to find it still worked as potently as before. Gratifyingly, someone’s uploaded the scene in its entirety on YouTube here, and the fact that it’s been viewed over 200,000 times there gives some indication of how potent a moment it is.

For whatever strange reason, this bit always puts me in mind of a plot point from The Lives of Others, where we see Dreyman coming face-to-face with the fake nationalist-propaganda play that Weisler has written to cover for him. The excerpt we hear consists of boilerplate heroism such as “Lenin is very tired, but he resolves to continue on with his revolutionary plans…” We’re supposed to condescendingly roll our eyes at the crude socialist realism earnestness of it, and its tone-deafness to any irony or nuance. And yet this great moment from Balto shows that there are always moments in dramatic art where this sort of full-bore, un-self-conscious heroism not only works, but is the only possible choice. Substitute “Balto” for “Lenin,” and “rescue effort” for “revolutionary plans,” and you pretty much have the dramaturgy of this scene. And anybody who could remain wholly unaffected by it, or dismiss it as unsophisticated, is likely the sort of glib poseur and/or hateful philistine I would never wish to have to interact with. It’s probably not a coincidence, incidentally, that The Lives of Others was one of William F. Buckley’s all-time favourite films…

The rest of the film continues in the vein of this scene, with Balto dragging the medicine up to the top of the cliff, being definitively invested with the honour and authority of head dog, and successfully leading the team across the many treacherous obstacles presented by the Alaskan wilderness. Alas, it’s not long before the film’s misconceived cartoon elements begin to work against it again. A sequence where the team has to escape a raging avalanche of snow is intense and gripping, but is undercut by the avalanche’s having been started by Star’s sneezing. Likewise, the cutaways to Steele holding court back in town, spinning his own egomaniacal, false version of events does the film few favours.

My chief take-away from Balto today basically boils down to “a great film trapped inside a mediocre movie.” The profusion of cartoonish supporting characters detracts from what works perfectly well as a straightforward epic drama, and a live-action bookend device seems to somehow trivialize even that. It’s a testament to how well the film’s better elements work, though, that in spite of its commercial failure in theatres, it would go on to become an acknowledged classic on home video. The final vindication of it in this regard would come in the early 2000s, when Universal would release not one but two direct-to-video sequels.  These films – Balto II: Wolf Quest and Balto III: Wings of Change – would mercifully dispense with the live-action bookending, and reign in the comic-supporting-character quotient dramatically. Their chief raison d’etre lay simply in giving Balto more to do as a character, whether it be trying to be a good father to his and Jenna’s six pups, encountering a new wolf pack with which he may have a history, coming out of head-dog retirement to lead a mail run, or being a hero again in rescuing a crashed pilot. It’s a gratifying example of a studio recognizing they’re onto a good thing, and going further with it.

Abendland

Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s 2011 documentary Abendland first came to my attention when a friend and colleague chanced to see it, and was so struck with it as to configure her upcoming course to emphasize it. This is always an interesting scenario for expanding your own interests: seeing something surge to canonical status with someone you like and respect, and thus finding yourself challenged to find a comparably deep reaction to it in yourself. What follows is my attempt in this direction…

Abendland consists of some twenty short looks into various scenes of everyday life in the northern countries of Western Europe, unified by the fact that they all take place at night – what used to be called “after hours.” However, beyond seeing a lot of janitor staff at work, the film’s key revelation is how many jobs – such as mail processing, factory work, and political bickering – now go on seemingly 24 hours a day in modern Europe.

All of the short segments are filmed in a chilly, detached style of long takes and distances, with framings that disallow much empathy or identification human with the human subjects. In this, it immediately recalled to my mind two other films made in a similarly reserved German spirit: Geyrhalter’s previous documentary Our Daily Bread (2005), and Michael Haneke’s Code Unknown (2000). The former film is equally poker-faced in style, and the latter speaks to some of the same moral anxieties of Europe today.

The film’s overriding theme is that modern Europe – at least in the more northerly countries such as Germany, the United Kingdom, Holland, Switzerland, the Czech Republic, etc. – has become one big surveillance state, sustained mostly on the back of immigrants. For all non-immigrants, this amounts, essentially, to a blandly benign dystopia where there’s cradle-to-grave health care and plenty of opportunities to carouse and debauch, but nothing much more spiritually fulfilling than that. And here my problems with the film begin. It’s an inarguable fact that the northern European social context we are seeing does provide its citizens with more of a social safety net than North America. For all that neo-liberal reformism has been chipping away at it all for a long time, these economies are still a lot more tolerant of subsidies, welfare spending, make-work programs, and other forms of government intervention which the United States has never and will never see, and which in Canada seem totally in retreat before a Conservative government which wishes to turn it into the 51^st American state. In a certain sense then, Geyrhalter is expressing the frustration that comes from chafing against the bars of what is, undeniably, a fairly civilized and humane prison. He can hardly claim that the societies at issue here are like the US in abandoning their to citizens to the naked caprices of the market, with no provision for unemployment assistance or decent healthcare.

A film like this, then, must make these virtues into faults, drawing on that old bogeyman of the “nanny state” that tries to oversee every aspect of your life from cradle to grave. The latter, incidentally, is brought home to one directly in a segment which takes place in a crematorium, with the staff going about their duties in a typically detached and mechanical way. We see a whole room full of generically identical coffins, out of which one or two are rolled, to be taken to a thoroughly non-descript incinerator, after which the ashes are decanted – by a machine that looks like it belongs in a bottling plant – into a thoroughly unremarkable metal container, and placed on a shelf alongside dozens of others like it. Again, this is a behind-the-scenes look at something that we all know about in the abstract, but very few of us have ever actually seen in operation. It can hardly fail to arouse in the spectator a feeling “at the end of it all, that’s all the distinction I have to expect?”

It’s probably due to this sort of thing that the various depictions of health care in action don’t signify as positively as they deserve. We see, at various points in the film, a hospital room given over to the isolated care of an infant with severe birth defects, a team of paramedics going through their paces with speed and efficiency, and an orderly at a senior’s hospital looking in on his patients during the night. In addition, we see some operators for a hotline for people experiencing acute emotional stress or trauma. Objectively, all this should be much more uplifting than it is, but it’s all been inflected with the emphasis on surveillance and inclusion/exclusion which is the film’s real, primary concern. All these infants, seniors, and emergency cases, we are emotionally cued to infer, are being looked after in the same way that a jail takes responsibility for inmates; or more appropriately, that a mining town must care for its packhorses and donkeys – so that they can keep giving their labour. In the meantime, the immigrants and refugees we see throughout are denied even this dubious honour – excluded from the nanny state that the insiders so take for granted as to register the kind of dissatisfaction represented by this film.

The really telling point, for me, is that the film refuses to show any instances of people actually enjoying themselves. There are three segments in the film that would have allowed for this, and Geyrhalter undermines all of them. First, we see Oktoberfest in Munich in full swing – the ultimate socially sanctioned occasion for Dionysian excess. Even people who don’t usually carouse are almost expected to here. And because this is another example of modern Europeans simply acting like dutiful sheep, Geyrhalter undermines the occasion by taking us behind the scenes again. We see that dozens of roast chickens are being served to soak up all the endless steins of beer being downed – and the fact is soon hammered home as we’re shown the industrial stainless-steel kitchen where they’re all turning on spits; and then a long dolly with a (black) waitress desperately trying to make her way through the crowd to the right table; then the man at the keg, rapidly filling stein after stein with a robotic disdain, as though he never wants to see another in his whole life; and finally an insanely overworked pair of plongeurs, who have to keep shoving all the emptied plates into the dishwasher without a second’s respite. I defy anyone to go to Oktoberfest in quite the same innocent spirit for a while after seeing this…

And yet this segment seems nonetheless like an especially petty moment on Geyrhalter’s part – tantamount to saying that because there are some service personnel for whom Oktoberfest is no fun at all, neither should it be for anyone else. The second unpleasurable segment, however, doesn’t allow this. It takes place in a sort of sex spa in the Czech Republic, where rooms decorated with kitschy “nature” or “Oriental” furnishings can be rented for all manner of assignations. Certainly this is nowhere near as mainstream as Oktoberfest, so whatever people come here have clearly done some homework and sought the place out rather than simply going with the flow. Geyrhalter still disallows any vicarious pleasurable identification with the place, though. Firstly, in his simple choice of framing – making one couple look totally impersonal and mechanistic – and secondly, by reminding us that the surveillance state is now so omnipresent that it reaches in even here. We are shown one bikini-clad girl, who seems to be waiting for someone, being filmed by a tripod-mounted camcorder, which is in turn playing back simultaneously on the room’s TV screen. We have no idea why this is the case, but perhaps Geyrhalter is suggesting that it’s not important. In today’s world, after all, we’re almost always being filmed and played back on general principles anyway.

The third of these deliberately unpleasurable sequences is also the very last one of the film. We’re shown the packed venue of a huge rock concert from an omniscient, God’s-eye-view POV, and then cut down into the crowd to simply dolly forward for the next few minutes. In the course of this, we find ourselves surrounded on all sides by stoned kids who all seem to have their own ways of responding to the camera. Unlike the previous two segments, there is nothing aggressively undercutting our potential vicarious pleasure here, nor anything unnervingly cryptic or esoteric. There’s just a nagging sense that these kids seem a bit more blithely narcotized than one would like to think of as the norm for this kind of event. They seem simply to be going through the motions of what society expects of them – just as completely as their elders elsewhere in the film. And judging from the way they completely offer themselves up to the camera’s gaze, they are so completely habituated to the surveillance state that it’s not going to be getting any less intrusive any time soon.

Perhaps the real heart-and-soul moment of the film is its tenth segment, which takes place in a BBC studio from which a newscast is being broadcast. We see a pair of immaculately dressed and manicured anchors going through their lines flawlessly, after which the camera cuts away from them to another feed, and they… look utterly bored and disengaged. Here they are, in jobs which put them at the very centre-nexus of the Surveillance state, with dozens of cameras and broadcasts immediately around them, beaming out their image which is meant to inform and enlighten, and they nonetheless seem no more honored by the fact than if they were in an anonymous cubicle processing data. Again, if Geyrhalter is unable to posit the Europe of today as evil, he can at least make it appear thoroughly banal.

Films like Abendland create their meanings, or at least implications, by arbitrarily transitioning us from one thing to another, without doing much of anything to give us context or a clear sense of relation. As a result, whatever linkages we draw between all the disparate footage is purely our own interpretive work, and thus not really verifiable or falsifiable. Theoretically, a filmmaker can just string together one bit of footage after another, after another, ad nauseum, and still claim that it’s a legitimate work of film art because it creates this Rorscharch effect in its spectators, provoking interpretation. And as my preceding remarks hopefully show, it does work on a certain level, but I’m just acutely aware of how easily this sort of filmmaking can lend itself to abuse. I have heard of a Brit named Anthony Scott who, in 1968, created a 48-hour work called The Longest Most Meaningless Movie in the World, which simply spliced together one thing after another – TV commercials, blank leader, found footage, outtakes from other films, etc. – and left its meaning to be determined by any soul brave enough to try watching it. Abendland of course is not like this, but willfully denuding a documentary of context in the name of a cryptic aesthetic is the first step down that road.

Against this, one of my favourite devices ever in a work of documentary was the way, in Planet Earth, that things would transition from shots taken from orbiting satellites, which could see the curvature of the entire planet; to shots taken from high-level aircraft, which could encompass a landscape for hundreds of kilometres; to more intimate overhead shots, which could pick out the salient or representative part of this environment. This created a sort of staggered omniscience that made it very easy to fully, viscerally grasp that the close-up observations we would see were part of a much larger, organically integrated whole.

Abendland featured a promotional image that seemed to promise the same (see left), but the actual film itself contained no such thing. Beyond this, I think the thing I liked least about the film was its denial of any transcendent exuberance of experience, and with it, any reason we should ultimately care about the moral issues it raises regarding omnipresent surveillance and exploited immigrants. If life isn’t there to be lived anyway, what does it matter how unjust it is? As mentioned before, all the film’s potential contacts with Dionysian revelry were coldly undercut in one way or the other. In one particularly telling moment, during the BBC studio sequence we overhear some excerpts from a story about Emma Watson attending some fashion gala affair. Everything of course remains as impassive as ever. At that moment, even though I’ve always despised Watson for mangling Hermione onscreen, I actually yearned for the camera to cut to that feed and show her air-headedly flouncing up the red carpet. It would at least have been a sign of life, of some kind of vitality, in a film which had seemingly made it a point of principle to suppress any such thing.

Geyrhalter’s previous film Our Daily Bread – a similarly cool and clinical look at the assembly-line conditions of ultra-modern European slaughterhouses – was fascinating because it challenged our visceral gut reactions. Part of us is appalled by the perfectly systematized killing, but we have to remind ourselves “well where do we think our food comes from? And without mass mechanization like this, how else is there going to be enough to fill tens of thousands of stores across the continent?” Here, however, it seems like Geyrhalter has given free rein to his own visceral sense of how things are in modern Europe – repugnance at omnipresent surveillance, pathos for exploited and/or ignored immigrants – but never bothered to challenge himself about it. The result is an interesting, but ultimately less enlightening work.

Battle for Terra

At first glance, the story of Aristomenis Tsirbas’s film Battle for Terra sounds like an inspiring one. A young Canadian artist, who majored in film production at Concordia U, creates a modest little seven-minute sci-fi short called Terra (which can be viewed on YouTube here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qElXt6_b9k), shows it around, and is offered the chance by a small studio to expand it into a low-budget feature. Tsirbas uses his precious resources carefully, and ends up with an 85-minute film that looks much more epic and expensive than it really was. It premiers at TIFF in 2007, makes the rounds of the festival circuit throughout 2008 and early 2009 (Tribeca, Seattle, Austin Fantastic Fest, Sci-Fi London, San Francisco), and is finally given a worldwide release in May ’09, at which point Roger Ebert praises it as a “bewitching” effort which creates a “brightly coloured wonderland.” The film ends up grossing some $6.1 million worldwide.

The only drawback to this uplifting-sounding story is that, when you actually sit down and watch it, Battle for Terra is a monumentally disappointing piece of storytelling. You can't for the life of you say that you wish there were more films like this, or that it’s a shame more people didn’t see it, or that it didn’t make more of a market breakthrough. In the last analysis, it’s a mercy that there aren’t more films like this, and there’s damn good reason that it wasn’t more popular and commercially viable than it was. And yet writing this nonetheless leaves me with the sense of having kicked a cute puppy that didn’t deserve it. It all comes down to the fact that Battle for Terra is very good indeed at the things I care most about in films, and horrifically bad at the things that I’m less concerned with, but nonetheless can’t ignore. A look into the actual film will illustrate what I mean...

For the first three minutes or so, we find ourselves moving through the infinite vastness of space – passing nebulae, pulsars, asteroid fields, and vast oceans of luminous gas before finally seeing a solid planet hovering in the distance. As we dramatically approach it, a sun suddenly emerges from behind the curvature of the sphere, blinding us with its sudden intensity – at which point we cut down to the surface of the planet. In this single edit, we go from the cosmically vast to the intimately small, reframing to a close-up of some small alien creatures which look, essentially, like dark green rodents, except that they have wings which are at once silken and bumblebee-like, and give them hummingbird-style powers of hovering in flight. Against the background of a vast open horizon, they’re darting around some green stalks – which we initially take to be some kind of flora, only to see them retract animatedly a moment later. As the camera pulls out, we see that they are in fact a tongue-like proboscis on giant alien creatures which resemble whales, also with the power of flight. Here the camera begins to pan, and reveals that these sky-whales fill the same evolutionary niche as cows, as one of the planet’s sentient inhabitants emerges from under it carrying a pail. The Terrans, by the way, are a fascinating feat of imagination, resembling some kind of fish in their gray pallor, large glassy eyes, and small mouths. They move not through any kind of tactile locomotion involving legs, but by simply undulating through the air like mer-people. The net effect bears no resemblance to cute cartoon aliens who are simply humans with green skin and antennae.

At any rate, the camera pans following the one with the pail, who is revealed to be undulating back towards a Terran city, which is another amazing feat of creativity. It’s made entirely on the principle of organic spires, which resemble either a creeper system with no tree inside, or a cluster of vines which have grown up vertically and solidified. These spire-systems, in turn, are capped with giant mushroom-like domes which will evoke Super Mario 64 for long-time gamers. The Terran’s dwellings, in turn, are chambers hollowed out of the stems of these giant spires, and public places are giant, circular formations extending out of them, creating the visual impression of an open-air Greek theatre. We soon refocus on one of these which evidently functions as a classroom, cut from what we immediately assume to be a teacher taking attendance, to an empty seat... and then another cut takes us into a spectacularly energetic sequence up in the sky, with our young heroine “Mala” (voiced by Evan Rachel Wood) racing through the sky on a sort of mechanized sky-glider. 

Mala is an incomparably more energetic and daring flyer than the hapless friend “Sen” (voiced by Justin Long) she’s gotten to join her, at one point terrifying him by diving beneath the ocean-like cloud floor, and then zooming back up right in front of him, with a flock of pterosaur-like manta-ray creatures slipstreaming in her wake. Then a moment later, one of those sky-whale-cows emerges from beneath the clouds, and she pulls level directly above its blow-hole to caress its hide. Soon they arrive at an imposing mountain, at the foot of which there’s a chasm filled with sharp, jagged spikes. This leads to a reverse wind-tunnel, which sucks in any unwary gliders to be slashed apart on the spiky walls of its interior (if nothing else, this image is the most blatant vagina dentate imagery I’ve ever seen in a movie; it makes Alien look positively innocent). Mala is nearly sucked in, but narrowly escapes. Heading home to the spire-city, they fly parallel to a vast border of herma-style pillars jutting above the clouds, topped by sculptures of stern-faced elder Terrans, holding up their hands to warn gliders away.  Just as they’re arriving, however, the human ark pulls into orbit around Terra, causing a total noonday eclipse... 

All of the aforementioned images and plot points will reappear throughout the rest of the film, but the reason this introductory sequence works so brilliantly for me is that everything about it is accomplished without a single line of expository dialogue. We immediately know that Mala is the missing girl from earlier, playing truant in order to have some adrenaline-pumping fun, because of the cut from the empty chair to her. Likewise, we can follow the course of the ensuing glider action simply on the strength of context, and the way all the physics and physiology of Terra seem to be internally coherent. To have paused the action and had Mala “explain” things to Sen that both of them would already know, for the benefit of the most clueless members of the audience, would have been a travesty, and it’s a travesty Tsirbas avoids. 

This speaks to my most deeply-held conviction about cinema: that dialogue is an essentially unnecessary hold-over from the theatre, and that cinematic storytelling is truest to itself when it works by a graphic logic of visual inference, rather than having characters spell things out for us verbally. Also, I love how these opening sequences attempt to convey a totally different world than ours, with its own distinct landscapes, ecosystem, and aesthetics. All too often, when confronted with the total visual and imaginative freedom which animation offers, filmmakers will reveal their own imaginative paucity by offering what essentially amounts to a copy of our planet, with only a few jokey or superficial differences. Another animated film, Planet 51, which deals with similar alien-planet-visited-by-humans subject matter, illustrates the point in fine style. It creates an alien society which is no more than a Pleasantville-style vision of the 1950s suburbia, except that the cars are flying saucers, the dog is patterned after the Alien xenomorphs, and it rains rocks rather than water. Pretty feeble stuff to fill a film with when you could have done absolutely anything.

In light of all this, it’s a nasty shock when, eleven minutes in, we get Battle for Terra’s first scene fully devoted to the exchange of dialogue between characters. It immediately becomes clear that, as great a visual imagination as he has, Tsirbas has no clue whatsoever how to write dialogue. The script for the scene plays out thus:

MALA (tentatively): So... think it’s a god? It could be one of those large rocks, the kind that fall from the sky from time to time?

MALA’S FATHER (uninterestedly): It will be what the elders tell us it is.

MALA (earnestly): I bet I could see what it is. I bet I could make something to help me look closer!

MALA’S FATHER (firmly): Mala, you know that’s forbidden.

MALA (incredulously): But why? It wouldn’t hurt anybody.

MALA’S FATHER (dourly): Inventions that are not approved by the Elders are against our teachings.

MALA (histrionically): Then maybe our teachings are wrong!

MALA’S FATHER (sternly): Mala! Go to your room. Right now.

MALA: sighs exasperatedly and undulates off.

And believe it or not, virtually all of the dialogue in the remainder of the film will also be this bad. The trust Tsirbas shows in his audience to understand the dynamics of the planet Terra, without having them literally spelled out, is the total inverse of how he seems not to trust his audience to grasp a single point of motivation, emotion, or sensibility without having it bashed over their head in the most hysterical degree possible.

In short order, the plot has fighters from the human ark descend upon the Terran city and use a glowing green tractor-beam weapon to abduct a number of people, including Mala’s father. Mala uses her glider to bait one of the fighters toward the spiky wind tunnel from earlier, and successfully causes it to be sucked in and spat out mangled the other side, and crash in the realm cordoned off by the stern herms. The pilot, a “Lt. James Stanton” (voiced by Luke Wilson), having survived, she takes him back home in hopes of finding a way to save her father. The plot has now officially started, and although the film will still contain a number of great sequences after this, it will never recapture the sheer sublimity of its opening sequence. Among the visual treats left to come is a scene where Jim, seeing a squad of fighters cruise past Mala’s window looking for him, bursts out of the oxygen chamber she’s built for him, leans out her door several hundred feet up the spire, and waves to the fighters. In a few seconds he passes out in the Terran atmosphere and falls, causing Mala to have to undulate straight downwards at speed in order to catch him before he’s impaled on one of those spiky protrusions of the Terran surface. The entire descent from the immense height to a bare inch away from doom is covered with a suspenseful editing tempo worthy of a much bigger Hollywood film. But achievements like this are consistently undercut by the film’s screenplay. A nadir is reached when we get back onto the human ark and meet “General Hemmer” (voiced by Brian Cox), a standard issue “warmongering monster” character who is intent on genocidally terraforming Terra to be suitable for human habitation (shades of General Zod in Man of Steel a few years later; their spider-like terraforming modules even look similar). A few token “good council members” on the ark take obvious exception, but are rhetorically cowed by the tyrannical Hemmer. 

And this really gets to the root of my beef with Battle for Terra. I have never been a fan of the tendency, especially in films aimed chiefly at children, to have some kind of authority figure take up the screen for extended periods and hold forth wrongly and unjustly about how things are or what’s going to happen, and the film offer them no contradiction, whether by another character refuting them, or some sort of incident undermining them. It’s the stupidest conceit of old-fashioned melodrama: assuming that the spectator will go into some of exaggerated emotive swoon and think “oh, that’s so wrong!” and thus be proportionally more joyful and gratified when everything is eventually put right at the end. This dynamic has never had this effect on me, however. My feeling is that if someone/thing is hateful to listen to, it’s perverse to grant it every narrative privilege, and include more of it than is absolutely necessary for storytelling purposes. D.W. Griffith’s 1920 film Way Down East is the purest example of this I’ve ever seen – nothing but a solid two hours of Lillian Gish being pilloried, abused, and rejected for a fault (having an illegitimate baby) of which she is really innocent. And of course she’s so doleful and milksop-ish a heroine that she never thinks of speaking up for herself rather than meekly submitting to all this. One of the reasons that I’ve often disliked Michael Haneke’s films is that he uses this sort of thing deliberately, in a dour Protestant attempt to disrupt the pleasurable aspect of movie-watching, and prompt people to reflect on social injustice/the human condition/original sin/whatever. Funny Games, especially, is way down there with Way Down East as one of my most hated and abominated films of all time, for exactly this reason.

Battle for Terra isn’t quite in this league of awfulness in its writing, but it’s pretty damn close. The film’s most unforgivable element is the character of “Stewart Stanton,” Jim’s younger brother, voiced by Chris Evans. He’s one of those aggressively stupid and incurious people who make it almost a badge of honour never to think for themselves, and most of his dialogue to his brother is passive-aggressive stuff like “we need to know we can trust you” and “I’d feel a lot better if I knew you had my back.” And yet the movie still seems to expect us to sympathize with him as the human hero’s kid brother, and treat his words as having some moral weight.

Eventually, the film culminates in a Star Wars-style aerial battle – the Terran Elders having some starfighters mothballed from their civilization’s older, war-like days (that was what was behind the herm-barrier, you see). Again, this sequence is an extremely accomplished work of kinetic spectacle, with Tsirbas showing the same eye for angle and editing as in the introductory sequence. Unlike then, however, the spectacle is now inextricably tied to wrapping up the screenplay, which in this film is bad news... One knows, of course, that the giant spindly atmosphere processor will be destroyed, and Hemmer along with it, and that the Terrans will survive, so one’s chief interest in this sequence is the formal one of how this outcome is to be reached. Tsirbas takes perhaps the most incompetent route getting there humanly possible, having Jim spend endless minutes in a crisis of conscience, with both Mala and Stewart in danger and his loyalties thus “dramatically/tortuously” in conflict, before finally making a kamikaze run against the processor and taking it out along with himself. The contemptible little squit Stewart thus survives to become “enlightened” at last, and Mala has ultimately had nothing to do except be the innocent waif in distress.

For the life of me, I can't remember another film in which I’ve seen more evident creativity be more comprehensively undercut. It’s on the one hand tragic for a film so innovative to be relegated to little-seen obscurity, and on the other hand entirely just, because the script deserves nothing better. Tsirbas certainly isn't a martyr, but one can't help but wonder, after a screening of Battle for Terra, whether one has just seen the rudiments of a masterpiece that just failed to cohere. At the very least, not many films leave you wondering this...