Grindle's Eye

Rating: Null/10 (21 November 2007)

I'm glad to be alive for this period, when cinema is simultaneously maturing into deeper realms of introspection and evolving into a new form altogether. Even when I see a thoroughly unredeemable story like "Transformers" done with this new awareness of time and space, I feel ennobled, even hopeful about the future. And isn't that one reason we go to the movies, to fight the weight of others, the feeling that society is doomed?
What's happening is that different technologies are freeing us from the constraints of the physical camera. This  constrained only by what is thought to be the viewer's requirements for understanding  allows modern storytellers to see things differently, with a grander vocabulary.
It means adventures of the imagination. It means that we get to question and expand just who we are in relation to the story we watch. Are we invisible ghosts but with otherwise human limits? Are we agents in creating the story, things bent by our expectations and needs? Are we companions or competitors with the writer as he reveals, Scroogewise?
Or are we also growing  at least a little  into the literal weavers of the space into which the worlds of the story are poured by others? I believe so, and that belief deepens when we see even the most vulgar filmmakers get on board. This is new in the last decade and it is accelerating apace. No adventure film that depends on effects that was made even a decade ago is effective if first seen now.
I'm not sure what technologies will survive. By that I mean whether motion capture will be necessary, with real persons behind the puppets we see, as we have in this movie. Or whether we'll have something more like "300" and "Sin City" where the emphasis is on the subtle details of humans and all else synthesized. Or even whether the Pixar movement will grow. But I do know that the way we allow the camera to move has changed, and this film is a milestone of sorts.
Part of that is the way it was engineered to allow for the IMAX 3-d experience  how I saw it. Its more grand and overstated than we will end up with in real films, I'm sure. But it is a marker.
Unfortnately, since we still have a dummy at the steering wheel, the overall benefit is lost. What Zemekis does is swoop, but except for more overhead shots than usual, what he does is give us all the "ordinary" perspectives someone like him normally would a decade ago. But they are seamlessly connected. So it is generally: shot, swoop, pause, swoop, shot. We do get some spatial definition and weaving, but it is an unintended byproduct. He's just not smart enough to live in the connecting movements instead of the endstations. I'm watching this with "Three Crowns of the Sailor" made 25 years ago which had precisely the verb awareness instead of the noun, but without the technology.
So once again, we see the story reflecting what we have in the film. The story, if you don't know, is about the merger of the human and non-human. We see two iterations: one imperfect, a second nearly perfect. The first is grotesque but powerful, the second graceful and airborne. This movie is the first, a rather grotesque synthesis that we only expect to toss things about. (It intimates something along these lines with "the new religion" as well.)
We can only hope for the champion to arrive to give us the real juice, the one prepared to wrestle with only his soul, and to have a soul that matters. And when he comes, BOTH Robin and Angelina will carry.
Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.