Tag: Wes Studi

Avatar (2009)

Cameron’s monster-hit is an exciting slide of traditional story-telling, that had less cultural impact than you might expect

Director: James Cameron

Cast: Sam Worthington (Jake Sully), Zoë Saldana (Neytiri), Stephen Lang (Colonel Miles Quaritch), Sigourney Weaver (Dr Grace Augustine), Michelle Rodriguez (Trudy Chacón), Giovanni Ribisi (Parker Selfridge), Joel David Moore (Dr Norm Spellman), CCH Pounder (Mo’at), Wes Studi (Eytukan), Laz Alonzo (Tsu-tey), Dileep Rao (Dr Max Patel)

Why is Avatar so easy to mock? It’s the second biggest box office hit ever (Cameron holds slots two and three with this and Titanic:only Avengers: Endgame grossed more). But its cultural impact feels wide but not deep. As FOUR more Avatar films start to arrive from 2022, the question remains: why has no-one really talked about Avatar since 2009?

Perhaps it’s because there isn’t really much new or unique in Avatar, beyond the magic of its visuals and the magnificent showmanship of Cameron. For all the striking blue design of the aliens, their story was too reminiscent of too many other things. The script lacked punch, distinctive lines and unique characters. There was little to quote and few truly original pivotal moments that could be embraced by our cultural memory. Narratively and structurally, it’s all a little too safe, predictable and conventional.

Avatar partly became a “must see” cinematic event, because it was the film that finally nailed 3D. Maybe it is the best 3D film ever made. I don’t know, I’ve only ever seen it in 2D. To be very fair, Cameron doesn’t fill the film with crappy shots of things pointing at the camera. Instead, concentrating on telling a cracking (if predictable) story and filling the screen with beautiful, imaginative imagery that works in any dimension.

Avatar’s imagery is so striking because it’s set on the magical alien world of Pandora. In 2154, with Earth’s resources depleted, mankind has struck out into the stars – and Pandora is a rich seam of an insanely valuable mineral called unobtanium (chuckles presumably intended). Pandora is a carefully balanced biosphere, peopled by exotic animals and 10-foot, blue-skinned natives called the Na’vi. Pandora’s atmosphere is poisonous to humans, so scientists – led by Dr Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) – use Na’vi “avatars”, operated by genetically matched humans, to explore. The mission is carefully balanced between science and financial exploitation by a sinister corporation, backed by mercenary army, led by the fanatical Colonel Quaritch (Stephen Lang).

Into this magical set-up drops paraplegic ex-marine Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), taking the place of his dead scientist brother because he is a genetic match for a freshly grown Na’vi avatar. With this warrior background, Jake is welcomed by the Na’vi, becoming an ambassador to the people. But Jake’s loyalties split as he finds a purpose in Na’vi life he has long since lost on Earth – and as he falls in love with Na’vi warrior Neytiri (Zoë Saldana). When the company decide to destroy the Na’vi’s home to gain access to the rich unobtanium deposits beneath, which side will Jake back?

It’s not hard to guess. At heart, Avatar fits very neatly into a series of Dances with Wolves-esque films, in which a wounded and lost (white) soldier finds a spiritual peace and solace with a native people, eventually rising up to fight for their rights against his own people. Avatar also finds roots in The Mission, with the scientists as the missionaries fighting alongside the natives (although with much better results), the conclusion of Return of the Jedi and Cruise’s The Last Samurai. Not to mention more than a few stylistic and plot echoes from Cameron’s own Aliens (you can even hear them at several points in Horner’s score), from technology (those stomping war suits) and cocky marines lost in a world they don’t understand (except this time, we love to see them killed off).

Avatar doesn’t challenge you, presenting its humble message of environmentalism and peaceful co-existence within a familiar framework where military forces and corporations are very bad and enlightened missionaries and Indigenous people are good. It entertains because it’s told with such skill. Cameron, while never the greatest screenwriter in the world, knows how to marshal his clichés and standard narrative tricks into something exciting and involving.

It also helps that the stock characters he creates a played with such forceful engagement by the actors. Stephen Lang is a growlingly hateable racist, delighting in the prospect of genocide, while Giovanni Ribisi’s corporate boss is a snivelling opportunist who couldn’t care less about the impacts of his actions. Opposite them, Sigourney Weaver gives huge weight to a fairly standard irritated-boss-turned-mentor role as the head scientist, Sully’s bridge to learning the Na’vi way. As Sully, Sam Worthington is not the most charismatic performer but he has an earnest intensity and emotional honesty that helps us invest in his pre-Pandora misery and his growing love of his adopted home.

Cameron’s greatest achievement though is the vision he creates for the Na’vi. All are played by actors using cutting-edge (and still impressive now) motion capture. Cameron builds a whole world for these people: a language, belief system, culture and bond with the environment. Sure, it’s heavily inspired by Indigenous American culture, but it feels real. Its bought to the screen with grace and tenderness and gains a huge amount from Zoë Saldana’s committed and emotionally open performance as Neytiri. Cameron so successfully builds a bond between audience and the Na’vi that you feel your heart wrench to see mankind tear their beautiful world apart.

It’s that emotional connection Cameron successfully builds that helps make the film work. After all we’ve all seen effects stuffed films before, but they don’t all become monster hits. And if the film was a dog, all the 3D magic in the world wouldn’t have helped. Few directors have as much skill with threading emotional bonds within the epic as Cameron. He shoots Avatar with a stunning majesty, carefully placed shots and graceful, almost traditional, editing help to build a sense of magic and wonder around the awe-inspiring alien vista. Avatar has a lot of action, but it never feels like just an action film: it’s a relationship drama, inspired by the beauty of its setting, with action in it.

More people have mocked Avatar with comparisons to the visually and thematically similar Fern Gully: The Last Rainforest than have actually seen Fern Gully. Narratively it does little new or unique and offers very little surprises. But its visuals are stunning and Cameron’s superb direction knows how to engage you. Clichés last because they carry a sort of truth: Avatar uses these truths to help you invest in a gripping, if conventional, story. But it’s also why its impact over time has been so slight – there aren’t any new ideas for viewers to tie themselves to and almost nothing that stands out as a unique cultural reference point – even if the conventional plot helped make it a short-term monster hit. But it’s also why it still makes for enjoyable rewatching.

Heat (1995)

De Niro is packing Heat

Director: Michael Mann

Cast: Al Pacino (Lt Vincent Hanna), Robert De Niro (Neil McCauley), Val Kilmer (Chris Shiherlis), Jon Voight (Nate), Tom Sizemore (Michael Cheritto), Diane Venora (Justine Hanna), Amy Brenneman (Eady), Ashley Judd (Charlene Shiherlis), Mykelti Williamson (Sgt Drucker), Wes Studi (Detective Sammy Casals), Ted Levine (Detective Mike Bosko), Dennis Haysbert (Donald Breedan), William Fichtner (Roger van Zandt), Natalie Portman (Lauren Gustafson), Tom Noonan (Kelso), Kevin Gage (Waingro), Hank Azaria (Alan Marciano), Danny Trejo (Trejo), Xander Berkeley (Ralph)

In the mid-90s, Heat was the cinematic event of the year. De Niro! Pacino! Together! In one scene! The two acting heavyweights – wildly proclaimed and popular since the 1970s – had of course made The Godfather Part II together but had shared no scenes. Here, however, we’d see them both at the same time riffing off each other. The great thing is that there is so much more to Heat than just that one scene. Heat is a sort of poetic cops and robbers flick, part stunning action adventure, part profound exploration of the internal souls of men chasing down leads, both good and bad.

Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro) is a skilled career criminal who lives his life with a monastic self-denial, saying you can have nothing in your life “that you cannot walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you spot the heat around the corner”. Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino) is a bombastic, egotistical, workaholic detective with a self-destructive family life. Naturally, these two men find themselves on opposite sides, as McCauley plans his next job and Hanna works to stop him. But the men, with their similar codes dedicated to their chosen career, find that they have an increasing mutual respect – not that that will stop either of them “putting the other one down” if push comes to shove.

Heat is the pinnacle of Michael Mann’s career, and his most triumphant exploration of the conflicted, complex, masculine personalities at the heart of the high-adrenalin worlds of crime and police work. Mann has a gift for giving the simple rush and tumble of cops and robbers a sort of epic poetry, like a metropolitan Beowulf, and he achieves this again here. Heat is a film that throbs with meaning, it’s cool blue lensing and chilly, modern architecture serving as a perfect counterpoint to the cool, professional and focused personalities of its characters.

Heat also goes the extra mile by building this playground confrontation into a mythic battle of wills, a battle of principles and ways of living that seem separated only by a few degrees. Mann invests this with such sweep, such grandiosity (without pomposity), such scale that it becomes a sort of modern epic, a film where intense meaning can be mined by the viewer from every scene. Whether there is in fact any meaning there – avoid listening to Mann’s commentary which drills down so many of his elliptical character beats and open-ended scenes into the dullest, most predictable tropes that he had in mind while filming – is another issue, but Mann’s trick as always with his best work is to make something really quite small and everyday seem like a grand, timeless epic.

It all boils down to that famous coffee shop scene, where De Niro and Pacino for a few magic moments come together. It’s a scene that explicitly asks us to see cop and criminal and understand that there is in many ways very little to choose between them. It hinges on the gentle competitiveness of the actors, and the way they subtly play off each other. It also plays on our own histories of these two actors, of decades of seeing them as two sides of the same coin, both carrying so much cultural baggage for a string of iconic roles that saw them rule Hollywood for over a decade. It’s the sort of scene given extra investment, where you sense the mutual respect of the actors fuelling the strange bond that powers the scene.

It’s also the one scene of the film that Pacino underplays in. The rest of the film he goes way bigger, powering through each scene with an explosion of shouting and drama. It’s a performance ripe for parody, with more than an edge of ham, but it just about works. Pacino turns Hanna (hilariously the character shares a name with a BBC political journalist of the 1980s) into the purest form of adrenalin junkie, a larger-than-life personality who tears through people and cases with a focused determination that allows no room for a personal life. De Niro downplays far more by contrast, apeing a sort of 1940s noir cool, a monkish insularity that prevents anyone from getting close to him, mixed with a laser-guided determination to do whatever it takes to make his score.

Mann’s film throws these two characters into a series of stunning set pieces with the bank robbery at the centre (“the one last score” that McCauley can’t pass up no matter the danger). The robbery – and the shoot out that follows it – is a triumph of action cinema, brilliantly shot and edited. The gun play is stunning, with Andy McNab having served as a consultant for the actors on the use of automatic weapons. The scene rips through the screen, spewing bullets all over the place in a ruthless, no-onlooker-spared rampage that also really pushes the limits of effective sound design. That’s just the highlight of several scenes that – with guns or otherwise – hum with tension, danger and excitement.

Mann also has enough room in this film though to skilfully establish a number of supporting characters with compelling story lines of their own. Val Kilmer is a tad wooden as McCauley’s number two, but his storyline of troubled marriage is mined for unexpecting pathos (thanks also to Ashley Judd’s fine work as his wife). Kevin Gage is very good as a psychopathic criminal unwisely brought on board to fill a slot in an early robbery. Dennis Haysbert has his own tragic plotline as a criminal trying to turn straight. Diane Venora is excellent as Hanna’s neglected wife, as is Portman as his vulnerable daughter-in-law. This isn’t to mention excellent performances from a rogues gallery of character actors, from Jon Voight to William Fichtner.

Mann keeps all these plotlines perfectly balanced in a film that is very long but never drags for a minute. Crammed with exciting set pieces and brilliant sequences, it’s a film that manages to feel like it is about a very masculine crisis – the failures of men to balance the personal and their career, selfishly harming those around them because of their addiction to action. Mann’s film looks brilliantly at the essential emptiness and sadness this leads to – as well as the blinkered drive that never prevents men from stopping for a second and changing their lives, no matter how many reflective cups of coffee they have. Mann partners this existential, poetic feeling drama with the ultimate crash-bang cops and robbers and thriller, which will leave you on the edge of your seat no matter how many times you see it. Quite some film.

Dances with Wolves (1990)

Kevin Costner finds his inner peace in Dances with Wolves

Director: Kevin Costner

Cast: Kevin Costner (John Dunbar/Dances With Wolves), Mary McDonnell (Stands With A Fist), Graham Greene (Kicking Bird), Rodney A. Grant (Wind In His Hair), Floyd Red Crow Westerman (Chief Ten Bears), Tantoo Cardinal (Black Shawl), Jimmy Herman (Stone Calf), Nathan Lee Chasing His Horse (Smiles A Lot), Michael Spears (Otter), Charles Rocket (Lt Elgin), Robert Pastorelli (Timmins), Tom Everett (Sgt Pepper), Wes Studi (Toughest Pawnee), Maury Chaykin (Major Fambrough)

At the end of the 1980s, Kevin Costner was the biggest film star in the world, with a string of hits behind him. So he did what Hollywood stars before and since have done: cashed in all his chips and made the film he had to make. It would be long, it would be mostly in a foreign language, it would have no stars (other than himself) and – most poisonous of all at the time – it would be a Western. When the funding started to dry up, Costner even paid for the overtime out of his own pocket. Not for no reason was the project dubbed “Kevin’s Gate” by the sceptical media, eagerly expecting Hollywood’s golden boy to land on his face.

How wrong they were. Dances with Wolves not only made almost 20 times its budget at the box office, it changed many Americans’ perceptions of Native Americans – oh yes and it also won seven Oscars, including Best Director for Costner and Best Picture. Costner plays Lt. John Dunbar, a civil war veteran who (after an act of suicidal death-seeking foolishness to avoid having his leg amputated) chooses a posting to an abandoned fort in the middle of Sioux country. Forgotten by the army, Dunbar forages alone and comes to the attention of the Sioux. At first cautious around each other, Dunbar eventually befriends healing man Kicking Bird (Graham Greene) and finds himself cautiously welcomed into the Sioux tribe as a guest, finding love with Stands With A Fist (Mary McDonnell), a white woman raised by the Sioux. He begins to find the Sioux as kindred spirits.

Costner’s film is an expansive, heartfelt poem, a film in love with sweeping vistas and with an endearing, humanitarian view of the world, beautifully shot by Dean Semler and helped immensely by a wonderful, swelling lyrical score by John Barry – one of the best scores you are likely to hear. Costner dispels any doubts about his abilities to direct by throwing himself into a truly epic canvas – and some of the ideas here are reminiscent of Lean, in their beautiful use of the American plains. Within this large canvas, Costner tells an actually fairly simple, but also sweetly touching, story of the disillusioned man who finds himself in the wilderness.

If there is a flaw with Dances with Wolves it is that its story is so traditional and (in many ways) predictable. It’s understandable that the story introduces a white man to be our surrogate when encountering the Sioux. But it’s hard to shake the feeling of all that all-too familiar trope, the White Saviour. The primary good the Sioux serve in the film is to help Dunbar discover himself, to come to peace with himself. In turn, it’s Dunbar who increasingly becomes the tribe’s protector – helping them to find the buffalo, giving them guns and leading the defence against a Pawnee tribe attack, increasingly recognised as a “celebrity” in the tribe.

On top of that, Dunbar’s love interest becomes the only other prominent white character in the film. Again I understand that the film needed someone who was able to serve as a cultural and language bridge between Dunbar and the Sioux. But could there not have been some sort of narrative invention to make this female character a Sioux who had learned some English? It seems as if the film can only go so far – and showing a multi-racial relationship was probably that. Saying that, McDonnell is very good as the gentle Stands With A Fist, but it feels like a cop-out.

Costner’s own central performance gives everything the film requires. It’s a fairly simple role: the disillusioned soldier finding inner peace. The film plays very much into the attraction of the “noble savage” – the simplicity and honesty of the Sioux lifestyle being so much purer than the corruption of the “modern” world (needless to say, nearly all the white men in the film are truly awful people). But Costner brings his considerable charm to bear, delivering many of his lines with that slightly cocksure, shy grin he uses so well. The film suffers from its narration being delivered by Costner’s flat and unmodulated voice, but he’s perfectly fine in the role.

He plays it with an entirely straight honesty – and, for all its faults, this honesty makes the film work. The film goes overboard to humanise and provide empathy for the Sioux, as if wanting to correct generations of films that have cast Native Americans as dangerous savages. The Sioux are humane, generous, welcoming and dignified. Graham Greene has to carry much of this as medicine man Kicking Bird, and he gives a stirring, sympathetic performance, with equally fine performances from Rodney A. Grant and Tantoo Cardinal in particular.

The film delivers all its tropes and traditional structure with a straightforward, heart-warming simplicity – it really means that you go with the picture, and find yourself as drawn to the Sioux lifestyle as Dunbar is. Also, for all the criticism of the film’s narrative, it shouldn’t be forgotten what a warm reception it had from Native American groups, delighted to see their ancestors presented in such an empathetic light (the Sioux Nation later adopted Costner). And the film sensitively and brilliantly stages this way of life, with a series of beautifully done vignettes ranging from marriage to simple cooking and spending time around the fire.

The most stunningly filmed of these is the buffalo hunt, a soaring marvel of camera work, editing and horseback adventure. The film doesn’t let you forget the sequence before either, where the Sioux come across a series of buffalo killed for their hides by white hunters – in comparison to the complete use of the carcass (and limited numbers killed) by the Sioux. The buffalo hunt sequence is an exciting triumph – it’s probably responsible for several of the technical Oscars the film received – and it’s a tribute to Costner’s mastery of the visuals of the American West (even if, rumour has it, chunks of it were actually filmed by Kevin Reynolds).

Dances with Wolves is a very heartfelt and honest film – and its sincerity means it kind of gets away with its obvious flaws (and its great length). Costner wanted to make an important film and he does to a certain extent – but one which wears its importance fairly lightly, and makes a series of enriching humanitarian arguments that carry real weight. It’s in many ways an extremely accomplished retelling of a familiar story. But I found myself genuinely moved by the story it wanted to tell, and the questions it asks of its audiences. Is it a great film? Probably not, but it is a good one.