Review of the decade: Film - Technical hitch

Published on Thursday 17 December 2009 19:23

The Noughties were an era of virtual sets, CG characters and versatile high-definition digital video cameras. Yet, the advent of all this new technology has not led to revolutionary new films, writes Alistair Harkness, in the final part of our critics' look back at the cultural decade

• Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight

IN A tidy piece of serendipity befitting Hollywood's ongoing passion for regurgitation, the first decade of the 21st century looks set to draw to a close in more or less the same manner as the final decade of the last century: with the biggest blockbuster of the year sharing headlines with the cheapest for highlighting cinema's ongoing digital revolution.

Ten years ago it was Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace and The Blair Witch Project ringing the changes. Now it's Avatar and Paranormal Activity. That there's little actual difference between these respective sets of movies, however, shows how unrevolutionary the move to digital has really been.

When The Phantom Menace ushered in the era of virtual sets, fully interactive CG characters and versatile high-definition digital video cameras, for instance, the attendant hype was full of declarations about how the technology would free up filmmakers and enable them to tell stories that could never have been told otherwise. It's a familiar argument – so much so, that Avatar producer Jon Landau fed me pretty much the same line last week when I asked him what the future held for filmmakers in the coming years. But after a decade spent watching huge – and hugely successful – movies based on decades-old franchises (the remaining Star Wars prequels), toy lines (Transformers, GI Joe) and theme park rides (Pirates of the Caribbean 1-3) I can't help wondering if these advances in technology are ever going to be matched by similar advances in storytelling.

Avatar's clunky mixture of myths and plotlines from other movies certainly doesn't bode well, and nor, at the other end of the scale, does the Blair Witch-replicating success of Paranormal Activity. Regardless of its merits, the fact that it took ten years for another DIY movie of any kind to break through into the mainstream, let alone one that followed to the letter the template of an existing hit, shows how ghettoised micro-budget filmmaking has become. Even with the rise of high-speed broadband and video file-sharing sites such as YouTube, MySpace and Veoh, the old distribution methods held true. Nobody broke through via new media in the Noughties; instead this potentially revolutionising platform became the bane of the studios, most of which went into overdrive trying to stamp out illegal downloads, citing vastly over-inflated projected losses to justify their Luddite behaviour.

As a result, as the studios became more fixated on enticing audiences into the cinema, the big movies simply got bigger and the small movies got smaller, with everything in between struggling for survival. Having said that, when used properly some of the claims made for this so-called digital revolution held true. Peter Jackson pioneered the motion-capture technology James Cameron would later update for Avatar to make Gollum the most complex, engaging and fully-realised character in his mammoth The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001-3). Claims that digital filmmaking didn't look as good as 35mm film also proved unfounded. At the high-end level of filmmaking, Michael Mann embraced it wholeheartedly, deploying it to beautiful, brilliant effect in both Collateral (2004) and the decade's most underrated movie, the hard-edged Miami Vice (2006). And while he subsequently came unstuck with this year's awful-looking Public Enemies, David Fincher proved it was possible to shoot a period film digitally and make it pulsate with the immediacy of a contemporary-set movie with his astonishing Zodiac (2007).

Perhaps the boldest digital experiment, though, was Dogville (2003), Lars von Trier's stripped-down Depression-era interrogation of America's value system. Having already become an ambassador for the emotional directness of digital film with his Dogme mandate, the Danish prankster dispensed with physical sets altogether, shooting his actors on a black soundstage with locations marked out in white tape. At the time people were quick to liken the technique to Bertolt Brecht, but perhaps Von Trier just had a canny inkling that this was the future of film: after all, this is essentially how James Cameron shot his actors for Avatar – on a blank soundstage, albeit with significantly more details filled in later. In Dogville the technique shrank the distance between the actors and audience and made for one of the most blisteringly raw viewing experience of recent years.

Nothing, however, was quite as raw or as emotionally charged as the footage of the planes flying into the Twin Towers on 11 September, 2001. Plenty of people commented on how the news footage looked like a movie, but for a brief moment filmmakers didn't quite know how to react. Hollywood did a bit of soul-searching and pondered over whether there was any point in churning out thoughtless blockbusters with nothing to offer but empty spectacle, but business soon returned to normal, with Tom Cruise announcing at the first post- 9/11 Oscar bash that bringing joy and magic to the world via movies mattered now "more than ever". The decade was subsequently dominated by escapist fantasy franchises such as Harry Potter, reams of comic book movies (Christopher Nolan's revamped Batman movies, the first two X-Men films and Spider-Man 2 are the only ones worth remembering), with the occasional liberal hand-wringing issue movies such as Crash (2004).

On the plus side, that left room for the emergence of Paul Greengrass. The director of the decade, his unbearably tense, thoughtful and heartbreaking United 93 was the only feature to directly engage with the realities of 9/11 without sugar-coating them for mass consumption. Meanwhile, both The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum (my top two films of the decade) showed it was possible to make big, brainy, blockbusting action films that reflected the political realities of the world while hardwiring us into the most visceral, intense cinematic experience possible.

In fact, looking back over the decade I've come to appreciate those direct connections more and more. That's why I can't get excited about 3D yet. For all the Avatar led PR bluster about its immersive quality, I've yet to see a 3D film that can suck me into its world and keep me as transfixed as I was while watching that throbbing vein on Daniel Day-Lewis's forehead in There Will Be Blood (2007); or Javier Bardem's coin-toss confrontation in No Country For Old Men (2007); or the whispered exchange between Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson in Lost in Translation (2003); or the devastating gut-punching finale to Darren Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream (2000); or Jake Gyllenhaal cycling home to the strains of Echo and the Bunny Men's The Killing Moon in Donnie Darko (2001); or the introduction of Heath Ledger's mad-as-a-badger Joker in The Dark Knight (2008); or the barmy brilliance of Chan-wook Park's OldBoy (2003); or the crying baby that interrupts the fire-fight in Alfonso Cuarn's Children of Men (2006); or the countless, lovely, handmade moments of magic in the collected works of Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), Spike Jonze (Adaptation, Where the Wild Things Are) and Wes Anderson (The Royal Tenenbaums); or the too-many-to-mention moments of Pixar perfection that have made going to the cinema over the last ten years such a blissful experience. When 3D can induce a similar state, the digital revolution really will be worth something.

REVIEW OF THE DECADE

Duncan Macmillan on Art: Silly money chasing silly art

Fiona Shepherd on Pop and Rock: The accent is on pop's brogue traders

Kenneth Walton on Classical: Years of change

Jim Gilchrist on Jazz and Folk: Young talent keeps the torch burning

Joyce McMillan on Theatre: Black Watch leads triumphant march forward

Alistair Harkness on Film: Technical hitch