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.
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