Tag Archives: Tim Burton

A.i.

We finally got to watching A.i.: Artificial Intelligence. We’re probably the last people alive who haven’t seen it, so I trust you will allow me the indulgence of a few spoilers in the course of my criticism.

Let’s start with the big issue: the movie has the most egregious deus ex machina ending I have seen in years of movie-watching. It’s so hideous that it could be used as the canonical example when educating future generations of movie makers in what not to do. Apparently the ending was part of the Kubrick script for the movie, but Spielberg gave it that final saccharine twist. I’d like to think that Kubrick would have seen sense and removed the whole thing, like he did the original pie fight ending to Dr Strangelove.

A.i. is supposedly some kind of tribute or homage to Kubrick…but of course, the problem is it’s hard to pick two directors whose styles are as dissimilar as Kubrick and Spielberg, unless you start talking about (say) Errol Morris and John Waters.

Visually, there’s really nothing Kubrick to see. The fight with the bike gangs is a frenetic MTV cut-up, rather than a sequence of smooth menacing tracking shots. Even when David finds rows of boxed Davids, and Spielberg finally tries to use a Kubrick-style tracking shot for effect, he keeps the camera too high and the result is merely tedious. In fact, it brought to mind the groundbreaking camera work of Ed Wood, as lovingly recreated by Tim Burton.

Perhaps the worst thing, though, is that Spielberg just can’t seem to avoid the temptation to try and make every single story into a kid-friendly movie. Thus a male robot prostitute suddenly takes David to visit the cartoon head of Albert Einstein, voiced by Robin Williams, which we’re told is conveniently situated in the middle of the biggest red light district on earth. No, that’s not the noise of Stanley Kubrick spinning in his grave, it’s just the whirling pulleys as my suspended disbelief comes crashing to the ground.

In the original script, the mother’s an alcoholic, and the robot kid inadvertently feeds her problem when he keeps making her Bloody Marys just the way she likes them, in a futile attempt to get her to love him. Yeah, that would have worked. What doesn’t work is making mom a nice mug of coffee. Not even if you whirl the coffee containers around in an inexplicable fashion in the middle of the shot. But problem drinking is an Adult Situation, so we can’t have that in a Spielberg movie.

Yes, it’s a fairy tale, but I’m old enough to remember that fairy tales used to have wicked witches and evil monsters in. C’mon, Mr Spielberg, I know you can do better.

Movie magic

Hollywood loves remakes. The trouble is, they only ever seem to remake movies that were perfectly good the first time. The thinking seems to be that since Psycho was a great movie the first time, all we have to do is make a near-exact copy, and couples will drop $20 to go see it again. The other popular option is to take a perfectly good movie that suffers from having too many English or Australian people in it, and make a crappy copy on the cheap in Hollywood.

But of course, only an idiot will pay to go see a cheap knock-off of The Italian Job when they can watch the real thing on DVD for about the same amount of money.

So, it seems to me that what Hollywood should be doing is focusing on movies that they can actually improve by remaking them. Which means, setting the bar really low. So, I have a dream…

Someone needs to do a remake of Plan 9 From Outer Space. No, really. Pitch it as The Day The Earth Stood Still and Independence Day meet Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Use state of the art CGI for the aliens, have them shoot vicious metallic electrodes, give them a big impressive saucer, and make them kill and resurrect an entire army rather than just three people.

I just know Tim Burton could do it, if he’d let himself. And think, unlike with Planet of the Apes, there’d be no risk of ending up with something cheesier or more nonsensical than the original.

Planet Of The Apes

The 2001 Remake. Ugh. I’d heard it was a stinker, but Tim Burton’s made some great movies, so I decided to watch it anyway.

It seems from the commentary that Burton was mainly interested in the aesthetics of having a bunch of great actors dressed up in really good ape suits. He does a great job of coming up with a convincing fantasy world of semi-civilized apes; it’s the SF pieces and the plot that make this a stinker. An infinite number of monkeys with an infinite number of typewriters probably could have come up with a script that made more sense.

So our hero (in the least convincing spacesuit I’ve seen since the original Buck Rogers) travels through an electrical storm somewhere near Saturn, and ends up a few hundred years into the future. We can tell this because his spacecraft has a clock that shows the year, and which somehow measures that he’s being whisked through time.

The spaceship emerges from the storm near a planet, and crashes in a lake; the hero wanders into a jungle and encounters a world of intelligent apes, and is captured. He makes friends with a female ape, escapes with her and some humans and a few other apes, and a lengthy chase ensues.

They make it to where the hero’s spacesuit crashed. He retrieves the survival equipment which he apparently hadn’t felt was worth retrieving when he crashed. The radio receiver locks on to a rescue ship, or so he thinks.

They follow the signal through more conflict and chases, and find the skeletal ruins of the space station the hero launched from. The command center is nevertheless intact and fully functional and still recognizes his handprint. He plays back the log, and discovers the space station went after him, crashed on the planet, and the genetically enhanced smart chimps they were using to test pilot the spacecraft (yeah, right) turned vicious and attacked. It’s these apes which became the ape civilization he’s now in, hundreds of years later.

So far, so good. A bunch of stuff happens which we needn’t go into, and eventually the hero leaves the ape planet in a spacecraft to return through the electrical storm back to his own time. The spacecraft clock obligingly winds backwards to 2036 or so.

Arriving back in the past the hero skips Saturn and the space station, and heads straight for Earth. (Why? We’ll probably never know.) His spacecraft is going haywire from the electrical storm, so he chooses Washington, DC as a sensible emergency landing place. (Sure, why not?) He crashes from orbit onto the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, but emerges completely unhurt from the smouldering wreckage. (Cap’n, the audience’s disbelief cannae be suspended much longer!)

But it’s not the Lincoln Memorial! Instead, it’s a memorial to… the ape bad guy from several hundred years in the future. The audience sits and goes “Huh?” as the credits roll.

So if you want to see a bunch of actors in ape costumes in a lush and believable fantasy world, this is the movie to watch. If you want a plot that makes sense, you’d be better off with the original, sad to say.