Wizards with No Soul

HOW GULLIBLE ARE we that pundits write about the global warming theme of The Day After Tomorrow and critics take this latest Roland Emmerich fiasco seriously? Any kid could tell you the film has nothing to do with the upcoming presidential election; it's all about the digital. That nifty scene of the Hollywood sign being demolished letter by letter and the surrealist overhead shot of four tornado funnel clouds drilling into the Los Angeles cityscape were just convenient for Fox's pseudo-political promotional campaign. Any film geek knows those funnel clouds were stolen from X-Men 2, that the ocean liner drifting down New York's snow-covered Fifth Ave. was derived from the ship-in-the-desert scene of Close Encounters. Yet, they are awed. This period of special effects dominance has taken place just when moviegoers feel more sophisticated. Fact is, they're more credulous than ever.

Today's willingness to accept f/x gimmicks is not the same as openness to belief. It's an eagerness to consume, to buy Hollywood product while enjoying such meaningless debunking as Emmerich having its totem demolished. Yes, infantilization has ruined recent movies (not just Disney kidstuff but even the adult kidstuff like Lost in Translation). But the problem is the susceptibility evident when reviewers claim that a dismal piece of froth like Shrek 2 has some special "adult" quality. Only the most pandering films are ever conceptualized for children; today's highly cynical movies congratulate the childishness in non-demanding adult audiences.

Emmerich improves on both Independence Day and Godzilla just by shortening the tedium, but The Day After Tomorrow's update of a 70s disaster movie merely pretends to be about the nightmare effects of global warning. Emmerich wouldn't pursue anything so weighty; the film is really just an excuse for another pseudo-Armageddon. This digital-effects destruction of famous landmarks hasn't a whiff of 9/11 or even an ecological nightmare. It's all X-Box, designed to entertain people with the urge to break things.

Similarly, if Dreck's (I mean, Shrek's) $271 million gross is not simply the result of parents dragooned by their offspring into the idiotplex—that is, if the film's popularity has anything to do with eliciting actual emotional responses—then this, too, is a bad sign. Instead of satirizing fairytales and nursery rhymes, Shrek 2 simply uses their familiarity to sell underwhelming animation technology. A sensitive viewer cringes at the jerky, hobbled movements of creatures who are meant to be enchanting. They're so uncinematic, they resemble bad marionettes. No strings visible, yet they incessantly utter tongue-in-cheek dialogue and third-rate pop song covers—a true cultural fiasco. Obeying Shrek 2 hype in the guise of appreciating the moral lessons and narrative wonder of children's tales is little more than the triumph of Hollywood salesmanship. Viewers submit to cgi as if the technology itself were art.

We are not currently experiencing a movie renaissance, all media hype to the contrary. Even though the things they do with digital effects these days suggest a consistent "creative" movement, actual creativity cannot be found in these films. Whether it's the regressive Hellboy, the frantic, overwrought Van Helsing or the silly Shrek 2, The Day After Tomorrow or Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, there is the same, lame, unoriginal and uninspired attempt at fantasy. "Uninspired," meaning there's no reason or justification for the cgi extravagance other than simply showing off the technology. And the technology is only a manifestation of capitalist might. These films do not express life experience, but its avoidance. The characters don't matter (which was not the case, however campy, with the 70s disaster flick).

There's no moment in any of these movies that is more effective than comparable dangerous situations from the days before digital. Today's airborne demons, oversized ogres, funnel clouds, ice storms and morphing apparitions are, in fact, less effective because they're all stock. They look easily achieved. (Surely part of the charm of the 1933 King Kong was that the effects were the result of apparent effort. The combination of back-projection and animation was clearly wooing the audience to suspend disbelief.) Each of these recent films is definitive proof that technology and its worship have taken over where imagination used to rule. Filmgoers with memories must now approach every new f/x movie with lowered expectations.

It's been hyped that the third Harry Potter movie could invigorate the series because producer Chris Columbus (an arthritic director) gave up the reins to a more creditable filmmaker, Alfonso Cuaron. But my memory of how Cuaron botched the 1998 update of Great Expectations made me cautious. Sure enough, the same problem exists in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Cuaron still has a shallow concept of character, which was bad enough in a Dickens narrative where plotting is meant to expose personality and fate. For Cuaron, Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe), the British youth enrolled at Hogwarts academy for magicians, isn't a troubled, parentless kid making trial-and-error discoveries of the skills and traits that can see him through a difficult world; he's just a pretext around which the film's f/x wizards can build their hallucinations.

Neither Cuaron nor screenwriter Steve Kloves pull much out of J.K. Rowlings' novel; their failure is in not making the imagistic presentation of Rowlings' work give evidence of life, of Harry's felt despair. In Prisoner of Azkaban, Harry, who is still obsessed with the death of his parents, is hounded by a dangerous escaped convict, Sirius Black (Gary Oldman), and further threatened by the spectral prison guards the Dementors, wraiths who suck the souls from their victims. Fact is, Harry and his Hogwarts buddies Hermione (Emma Watson) and Ron (Rupert Grint) have no soul. Now entering puberty, the three 13-year-old wizards are made to suppress their obvious sexual precosity. Nothing in Prisoner of Azkaban gives off the metaphoric frisson of P.J. Hogan's recent, exciting version of Peter Pan (a near-masterpiece that simply lacked the promotional onslaught of a summer blockbuster). They still haven't licked the problem that Harry is a dull kid.

Fans of Cuaron's erotic trash Y Tu Mama Tambien might expect at least a ghoulish or lurid blurring of sex and death as when Harry and his classmates are told: "Think of the thing you fear the most and turn it into something funny, ridiculous." Yet, there's nothing akin to that Peter Pan moment when Wendy and Peter euphemize about exchanging a "kiss" and a "thimble" (an erotic suggestion straight out of J.M. Barrie but that director Hogan expressed with contemporary cheek). Cuaron proves himself every bit the hack Columbus was by watering down the suggestiveness that makes fantasy movies powerful. When Harry is taught to tame a beast called the Hippograff (a combination horse-griffon-eagle), the event is asexual, more neutered than the Pushmepullyou in the Doctor Dolittle books. It's part of Rowlings' simplistic pilfering of children's literature. Worse, it's another instance—like the Lord of the Rings trilogy—of special-effects domination sucking the soul out of cinema fantasy.

Admittedly, this film moves more nimbly than its predecessors. However, the lack of imagination during Harry's flight aboard the Hippograff (his god's-eye survey of Hogwarts sees nothing of interest) shows a lack of seriousness as insulting as The Day After Tomorrow. Hogan's Peter Pan (just released on DVD) put the otherworldly in touch with credible human experience. Even Azkaban's best effects, such as the hanging portraits of dry, cracked oil paintings resembling the faded history in Rohmer's Lady and the Duke, or those succubi Dementors who turn sufferers into Francis Bacon-style distortions, are inconsistent with the majority, impersonal f/x—like the digital dollying through metal clockworks. It lacks dimension and real- world wonder.

Can we stop psyching ourselves that f/x movies are innocuous? There's no better proof than Azkaban's three comic villains—Oldman's Sirius Black, David Thewlis as Prof. Lupin and Timothy Spall as Peter Pettigrew. These refugees from Mike Leigh's stock company howl like the raving miscreants in Van Helsing. They're good at this histrionic pas de trois, but they tell us nothing except that in this f/x enterprise, they're the prisoners. o