THAT
SINKING FEELING
by
Lev David
Visually,
Atlantis: the Lost Empire is an admirably ambitious departure
from the classic Disney style. Although rival animation studios and
crabby film reviewers may ritually and bitterly harass Disney, the studio
remains the most innovative, adventurous producer of animation in Big
Hollywood. Sadly, not all adventures turn out well.
The film's visual inadequacies stem largely from Disney's well-intentioned
mistake of hiring comic book artist Mike Mignola to develop the film's
visual style. Bless them for giving him the chance to apply his unique
gift to a film project, but this is not unlike asking Martin Scorsese
to direct a Teletubbies movie - right man, wrong job.
Mignola's style is stark and angular, relying heavily on the use of
flat colour and silhouettes. In his deeply noirish Hellboy comic book,
this style works implausibly well. But Atlantis is about a majestic
ancient city, under the sea, with mammoth buildings, glorious architecture
and funky, glowing magic crystals. All that colour, all that detail,
all that movement is not something Mignola's style is suited to.
Certain
elements of his style look particularly queer blown up from the size
of a comic book frame to the unforgiving expansiveness of CinemaScope.
The characters' hands, for example, with their rectangular fingers and
triangular fingernails, look strange and wrong. In many ways, the humans
look far less organic than the buildings and stone machinery of Atlantis.
A sense of size, depth and awe is sorely lacking. Atlantis should be
majestic. Here, it isn't.
The
script is as flat as the visuals. Some of the plot's key assumptions
are extremely unlikely, others fantastically illogical. At times, it
reads like a bedtime story ad-libbed by a desperate parent, stringing
one astounding event to another, not really caring if it all makes sense.
Sleepy kids might forgive this, but many will not.
In
spite of these failings, the film is not completely unenjoyable. With
Disney cutting the song-and-dance shtick altogether, and cutting back
on the cuteness, the movie might be a hard sell to younger kiddies,
but it has other assets. There are a fair number of exciting bits involving
giant mechanical fish and such, and the voice characterisations are
gorgeous.
(Michael
J. Fox as Milo Thatch, and Don Novello as an explosives expert are especially
good.) Still, Atlantis could have been so much more. In the movie,
Milo never goes slack-jawed at what he discovers, not even when he first
casts eyes on Atlantis. Finding a living underwater city should be a
pretty big deal. Sadly, neither Milo nor the audience is given reason
enough to gasp.
She's
a computer game heroine, pop icon, cyberbabe, daredevil adventurer,
and thief of a zillion computer geeks' hearts. And now, the improbably
buxom Lara Croft makes the grand leap to celluloid in the form of Angelina
Jolie, in LARA CROFT: TOMB RAIDER. You'll get to see sides of
Lara you've never seen on your 14-inch computer monitor - Lara cooks
(a TV dinner, which she spoils); Lara cleans (or rather, watches her
butler clean); Lara takes a shower (in a laughable, PG-10, slo-mo sequence).
And, naturally, there's a little tomb raiding thrown in for good measure.
In the tradition of action computer gaming, Tomb Raider's plot
is singularly ridiculous - an ancient society of evil lawyers, "The
Illuminati," are searching for an ancient juju which will make them
masters of the universe once an extremely rare planetary alignment occurs.
Lara must stop them!
The
cheesiness of the plot is, of course, intentional. Unfortunately, this
movie lacks the wit and charm to allow us to delight in the cheesiness
as we do with the Indiana Jones trilogy, which the Tomb Raider franchise
so plainly imitates. And so, Tomb Raider's plot does little more
than disrupt an otherwise thrilling ride with unnecessary yawns.
In the world of action computer games the plot is simply an excuse
for the action. Director Simon West (who also adapted the game for the
screen) would've done well to follow this lead. Although I'm not suggesting
that the movie should have been plotless, could they not have simply
had the characters exposit the essential details over the gunfire, instead
of pausing to talk about it? Or why didn't they just have us read the
backstory off the screen at the beginning of the film? Somebody desperately
needed to tell West to just shut up and play. When he does, the film
works beautifully.
Two
of the action sequences in particular are giddy-good; beautifully choreographed,
well shot, and exhilarating to a point where you can forgive the film
for dilly-dallying with dialogues between Lara and her deceased daddy
(played by Jolie's real-life father, Jon Voight, sporting a moustache
and an English accent, both of which are thick and ridiculous).
Great though the action sequences are, it would've been nice if high-stakes
problem-solving got as much emphasis as combat. In the computer game,
Lara often finds herself alone, trying to figure out some giant, millennia-old,
booby-trapped puzzle in the belly of an ancient monument. The tension
can be heart-stopping. In the movie, Lara is never really alone, and
there's seldom enough quiet for something to jump out and surprise her,
or us.
Jolie
makes a great Lara, though. The part doesn't require much acting beyond
maintaining a cute smirk while kicking ass, but the role is crushingly
physical, and Jolie deserves some respect for doing almost all her own
stunts, making it look good, and having so much fun that it's impossible
not to have fun with her.
©2001 Lev David
CineScene
