A DAD'S LIFE:I brought my child to 'Avatar' and some faith was restored, writes ADAM BROPHY
THE CINEMA was making me sad or, more accurately, Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquelwas making me sad. Well, sucking the will to live from my lacklustre bones. A year ago I sat through the first Alvin and couldn't fathom I had been suckered again. Damn kids.
I can’t believe film-makers insist kids will swallow this tripe. They’re kids, not morons, you can’t patronise them with this rubbish and expect them to smile. Then I look around and rather than balling up their €5 popcorn and throwing it at the screen in disgust, kids’ heads are bobbing, kids’ faces are smiling – the film-makers have got it right.
Some of the excrement I've sat through in the last year: Monsters versus Aliens, Aliens in the Attic, Planet 51(big alien theme in 2009), Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs(no aliens, dinosaurs instead), Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs(I was dying for the sight of an alien here) and then along came Alvin and his demented little chipmunk brothers. Despair rested on my head like a lead weight.
Upmade up for things a little. But to be honest, I enjoyed it more than the kids, that's the kind of film it is. A benevolent director must have taken pity on parents and made something we could be curmudgeonly about and pretend it was for children.
The future seemed bleak. I realised what we were missing were proper event movies. From the late 1970s into the early and mid-1980s we had the Supermanand Star Warsfranchises, ETand even a couple of spook ass-kicking Ghostbustermovies. You queued for these films, chatted about them with your buddies in advance, dissected them afterwards and went to see them as often as possible. Making double figures was a badge of honour, not a tattoo of loserdom.
Who, without a gun to their head, would see The Squeakquelmore than once?
The second batch of Star Warsand Superman Returnswere nearly events, spoiled only by the fact that they rendered viewers comatose with boredom. Any attempt at story had been superseded by an apparent diktat to insert as many effects as humanly possible into every screen minute.
This is crazy. Adults go wow at special effects, we know that they are difficult to produce. Kids think they come out of the box. They want story and effects that don’t look like effects that beg to be applauded with every blue-screen explosion. The story doesn’t have to be nuanced and subtle, but just needs a start, middle and end.
I brought the elder to Avatarwith a little trepidation. Animated sci-fi wouldn't be top of my must-see list and James Cameron's last outing about that boat that sank was one of the worst 17 hours (it was that long, wasn't it?) of my life.
Avataropens with real people acting before it turns into real people being cartoons. Sigourney Weaver is particularly disconcerting multi-coloured with a tail. I spent the first 20 minutes providing explanations that led to more questions. Yes the hero is travelling for five years asleep in a spaceship so he can lie in a sunbed and control this monstrous alien (of course they were in there) body with a ponytail that can plug into other plants and animals. How would an eight-year-old find that difficult to follow?
A half-hour in I asked her did she know what was going on. She replied in the negative, but didn’t care and went back to gazing in wonder at the screen, popcorn butter running down her chin. Over the next two-and-a-half hours she asked for clarification on a couple of points but her eyes never left the action. She sat, absorbed, immobile. Loving it.
Here it was, her first event movie. It had the lot: escapism, drama, action, romance. But most of all, it was clear who the good guys were and who the bad guys were. The fact that we, the bad-assed humanoids, were the baddies made it all the more riveting in her mind. The film has been criticised for its liberal politics, portraying the evil corporation killing off the tree-hugging natives for their mineral deposits, but that adult obviousness aside, this was a flight to another world. This was more than a film – for the first time in years it felt like a true cinema experience.
For the first time, as if in a life-size Venn diagram, our interests were overlapping without either patronising the other.