20 Years Ago: AVP (2004)

There’s a moment that feels like authentic cinematic destiny in the twenty year old Alien vs. Predator (2004), or rather, AVP.  

From opposite corners -- left and right -- two classic movie monsters enter the same frame, and cast wary eyes on one another for the first time.  

The battle is joined.

The moment may work in a manner other than that as well, and perhaps in a way not entirely intended.

A fruition of fan boy dreams and fantasy, this meeting of the monstrous minds may also represent the first time in either franchise’s history that geek or fan desires are, well, pretty much the point of the whole enterprise. 

Matters such as story, character, theme and humanity are given short shrift so that two of the greatest silver screen monsters in history can duke it out. 

Again and again. 

In short, the movie is its title.  

You get exactly what the words Alien vs. Predator promise: a wrestling match between two extra-terrestrial menaces of different characteristics, but equal power or strength.

When the film premiered, in 2004, it was advertised with the tag-line “whoever wins…we lose,” and many critics ran with that self-inflicted wound, noting the veracity of the studio advertisement.  “We lose” was a symbol, in fact, of any audience unlucky enough to sit through the film.

I felt much the same way in 2004, though -- over rwo decades -- I’ve come to appreciate Alien vs. Predator a bit more. 

Why?

In part, because of what came right after. 

If you want to see two of the greatest horror movie monsters treated in genuinely shabby fashion, just spend ninety or so minutes with Alien vs. Predator Requiem (2007). That movie illustrates by example just how much Alien vs. Predator actually gets right.

But moving beyond invidious comparisons to the worst film in either monster line, Alien vs. Predator possesses some merit on its own terms.  

First, the 2004 grudge-match features some remarkable and imaginative visualizations, particularly in terms of its flashback sequences.  

And secondly, two characters seen in the film manage to make the enterprise feel like more than just a by-the-number monster-on-monster contest.

AVP’s biggest deficits, by contrast, involve the nature of the action -- which is toothless -- and the depiction of the vast majority of human characters. Beyond the two I mentioned above, the majority of the characters are -- as the script describes them -- literally cattle to be manipulated by one “monster” side or the other.

Still, I'll readily admit that I can watch Alien vs. Predator anytime and get a thrill or two out of the experience.  

If that’s the benchmark you require of the film of this type, it may be judged a success of sorts.  

The disappointment, I suppose, is that the film possesses no ambitious sub-text or theme.  Even the flawed Alien Resurrection (1997), by contrast, tried to get some message across to audiences. 

Alien vs Predator feels slight or empty, somehow, and therefore not the fitting heir to two remarkable franchises.

“The enemy of my enemy…is my friend.”

In October of 2004, a satellite belonging to robotics genius Charles Bishop Weyland (Lance Henriksen) detects a heat signature 2,000 feet below the ice of Antarctica. Soon, satellite imagery makes out a subterranean pyramid of unknown origin.

Bishop quickly assembles a team, including guide Alexa Woods (Lathan), archaeologist De Rosa (Raoul Bouva), chemical engineer Grame Miller (Ewen Bremner), and mercenaries Verheiden (Tommy Flanagan), Quinn (Casten Norgaard) and Adele Rousseau (Agatha De La Boulene) to investigate the pyramid.

When the team arrives at remote Bouvetøya Island, it discovers that someone else has already drilled down to the vast pyramid.  Alexa leads the way down, though she boasts reservations about Bishop, who is dying of lung cancer, participating on the mission.

In the subterranean cave far below, Bishop, Alexa and the other humans discover that they have walked into a trap; a trap sprung by beings called Predators who were once revered as Gods by primitive man.  

Now, the human beings are to be "fodder" for another alien race: fierce serpents who gestate inside living human hosts. 

Alexa attempts to survive, even as the two alien species go to war.

“It’s time to pick a side.

The idea of ancient astronauts visiting Earth and shaping human culture -- the Von Daniken Theorem -- may be absolute, total hooey in terms of history and science. 

But much like Prometheus (2012), Alien vs. Predator utilizes the idea to good effect. Here, it is the hunters, the Predators, who taught man how to construct pyramids, who used us in human sacrifices, and who basically taught mankind the fundamentals of civilization.  

Whatever its flaws, Alien vs. Predator’s flashback imagery -- of Predator strutting atop pyramids, hovering spaceships behind them -- remains powerful stuff.  The script is clever in the way it accounts for the disappearance of Mayan culture (a hunt gone wrong, and the deployment of a Predator self-destruct mechanism) in terms of franchise history. Similarly, human sacrifices are re-purposed to involve the aliens in a way that is imaginative, and yet doesn’t seem like a stretch.

The best imagery in the film, in fact, involves the Predators and humans battling teeming aliens...defending Earth territory from the “serpents” before that apocalypse occurs.  The imagery here is spectacular, and it suggests that aliens and predators have always been with us…we just didn’t know it.

In fact, a truly bold AVP film might have been set during that encounter, in that civilization, with man playing an even more peripheral role.  Critics couldn't very well complain about paper-thin characters and characterizations, if no one spoke English, and the main characters were Predator "Gods" in an Aztec or Mayan city.

Another powerful image in the film involves Alexa Woods and the weapons a predator, Scar, gives to her.  She receives an alien tail as a spear, and an alien head as a kind of glove/shield/armor that stretches up her arm.  

This imagery reveals a lot about how the Predators regard their prey, and -- even more than that -- acts as a pointed call-back to both the flashback scenes, and the finale of Predator (1987). 

In the latter case, Dutch (Arnold Schwarzenegger) had to go “primitive” and prehistoric to fight off an alien threat.  In this case, Alexa does the same thing. She uses the resources available to stand in battle beside the Predator. The impression, overall, is that we are seeing a timeless partnership replayed in the present for our own eyes.

But a human wielding an alien head as a weapon is an unforgettable visual, 

I wish the film had more moments like the ones mentioned above.  Instead, Paul W.S. Anderson relies on clichés -- both visual and written -- for much of the film. There’s the dreadful moment that you will recognize from all action movies of the 2000s, in which Scar and Alex, for example, outrun a giant fireball.  It’s such a hackneyed visual at this juncture, and could be piped in from any number of insipid buddy movies.

I should probably establish that I am not an Anderson hater, as some folks apparently are. I have written positive reviews of both Event Horizon (1997) and Soldier (1998) on this blog, as evidence of that assertion.  But facts are facts. The director crafts Alien vs. Predator with absolutely no sense of suspense of tension.  

There is no build-up to the action...it just happens. The film opens in Antarctica on October 10, 1904, for example, and we follow a person being pursued by something, or some things, specifically an alien and a predator. The scene is so rudimentary and by-the-numbers that it makes us feel nothing. The scene’s final jolt doesn’t even provide a good jump scare.  

When one considers the level of suspense and terror in Alien (1979), or even in Predator (1987), AVP does not "feel" faithful to what has come before. The filmmakers demonstrate no patience, and do nothing to establish the setting or mood before leaping into the horror moments.

Again and again, the action scenes play out in this fashion with no real tension or suspense underlying them.  Most grievously, the final battle on the surface with the Alien Queen plays out this way too.  The special effects are fine -- extraordinary even -- but there’s no real sense of danger or surprise in the unfolding of the climax.  The movie just hums along, oblivious to the notion that its horror isn’t sticking the landing. We never feel scared or tense; we never feel the pure terror of these warring goliaths.

It would be something if the scare-less movie could make-up for its lack of suspense and tension with a sense of the visually grotesque.  Alien and Predator, after all, are both R rated franchises, noted for their violence and gore. But in an attempt to appeal to the widest possible audience, Alien vs. Predator is PG-13, meaning that almost no real, dynamic or memorable violence is depicted. 

Every time there is a promise of blood or gore, or even violent impact, the film simply cuts away to another scene, or to a post-impact shot that reveals nothing in terms of damage to body parts.  

No real suspense plus no real gore makes Alien vs. Predator a dull boy, or at least a very bland, generic one.

The characters are mostly fodder, too, for poorly-executed, poorly-shot death scenes. Few characters register here in the way that Hudson does in Aliens (1986), for example, or even the way Johner (Ron Perlman) does in Alien Resurrection. There’s just nobody that distinctive or memorable, overall.

With two important exceptions. 

First, what sense of humanity Alien vs. Predator possesses arises largely from Lance Henriksen. 

This is his third franchise appearance, and his third variation on the Bishop role.We’ve seen the innocent child/android (in Aliens), the malevolent tempter (Alien³) and now the ambitious, determined man behind all that futuristic technology, Charles Bishop. Henriksen brings his trademark humanity to the role, and shows us Bishop the climber (willing to go anywhere to achieve his goal), and Bishop the sick man, facing his own mortality.  

Henriksen gets a great scene with Sanaa Lathan in the film; one where he describes how climbing to a new summit is worth the risk, even if death is the result of the journey. The dialogue is good, but Henriksen makes it soar, and grantsthe audience a thorough understanding of this flawed but admirable human being.

I also love his death scene. Refusing to be ignored as harmless (and therefore unimportant) by the Predator, Bishop strikes the hunter with a flame, showing it his teeth. The Predator stops in its track, and gives Bishop the death he has earned, the death of a warrior.  It’s a fantastic scene, and in many ways, the highlight of the film's action. Bishop didn’t get to his position of power by being ignored, by being written off as sick.  

And if he has to die, he’s going to go out the same way as he lived: noticed and notable.

Secondly, Sanaa Lathan is a solid, promising lead as Alexa Woods. She’s not Ripley, and yet she displays a similar ability to survive by adaptation. 

Alexa thinks on her feet, and the audience can see her thinking things through.  That quality makes it easy to identify with her, especially since Alexa has to do a lot of catch-up learning about her enemies in the course of the film’s action.  

Specifically, I admire Lathan’s tendency not to over-emote, or play things for melodrama. Instead, she keeps just the right amount of distance from the material. There’s one moment in which Scar takes a bloody alien stump to her face, to mark Alexa as a survivor or hunter.  She endures it without complaint or drama, but you can see her in her eyes that she is girding herself.  

No, she probably doesn’t want an acid scar on her face. But are you gonna stop a Predator in his tracks when he is, in his own fashion, honoring you for bravery?

In short, I feel that Lathan takes the character and material seriously, but doesn’t fall into the actor’s trap of overplaying scenes that, if exaggerated, could transmit as silly.

I have read a lot of reviews that claim the fight scenes in Alien vs. Predator are too dark, but -- having seen Requiem -- I can’t make the same observation. Basically, I could make-out the details of each fight in the film and I would be a liar if I said I didn’t enjoy the battles on some visceral level.  Again, if that's all you're looking for, you will find it here, and likely enjoy the film.

My big complaint with the monsters in Alien vs. Predator is that all the Predators are squat and chunky. They look more like over-fed professional wrestlers, than the lean giant hunters we saw in Predator and Predator 2 (1990). A couple of times, I was taken out of the film’s reality by the short, steroidal stature of the Predators here. They resemble muscle-men in costumes more than ever before in franchise history.

There are qualities to admire in Alien vs. Predator, as I hope I’ve enumerated in this review. 

So why don’t I like it more?  

Perhaps because the pedigree of both franchises is so strong. I feel that the Alien films are mostly great.  Same thing with the Predator franchise.  

So you put the two monsters together and get a film that is....merely serviceable?  I’m not certain how that really serves either franchise in the long run. 

But I suppose it did: the film was very profitable (though not as profitable as Prometheus was). Still, the film feels more like a high-concept gimmick than a fully developed, fully coherent narrative at times.

Indeed, there are points throughout where you sense the writer and director struggling for some meaty hook that will carry the movie across the finish line.  One such idea: the pyramid is like a prison! The aliens are escaped inmates, and the guards -- the Predators -- need their guns.  Another idea: the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

And finally, the script sees bound and determined to feature endless variations of the joke “you are one ugly…fill in the blank.” 

So Alien vs. Predator? 

Those who choose, may enter.  

But you do so at your own risk.  

I have taken the plunge at least a couple times, in part for the visually exciting flashback sequences and special effects, and in part because I truly enjoy the performances of Lance Henriksen and Sanaa Lathan. 

And again, Alien vs. Predator is masterful, accomplished filmmaking in comparison to the follow-up  effort: Requiem.

20 Years Ago: The Chronicles of Riddick (2004)

“They are an army unlike any other, crusading across the stars toward a place called UnderVerse, their promised land, a constellation of dark new worlds. Necromongers, they're called. And if they cannot convert you, they will kill you. Leading them: the Lord Marshal. He alone has made a pilgrimage to the gates of the UnderVerse... and returned a different being. Stronger. Stranger. Half alive and half... something else. If we are to survive, a new balance must be found. In normal times, evil would be fought by good. But in times like these, well, it should be fought by another kind of evil.”

-          Introductory voice-over narration, The Chronicles of Riddick (2004)

Following the box office success of Pitch Black (2000), writer/director David Twohy was afforded the opportunity to construct a big-budget franchise around the film’s break-out character: Vin Diesel’s anti-hero, Riddick. 

In 2004, The Chronicles of Riddick -- a sort of “Riddick meets Dune” re-vamp of the Riddick-verse -- was released to mixed critical reviews and middling box office.  Heavy on CGI landscapes and quick-cut fight sequences The Chronicles of Riddick undeniably proved imaginative and ambitious…perhaps to a fault.

A decade later, the film’s extensive special effects appear highly-dated, and one can also detect how the film shoe-horns two good stories together, even though, perhaps, they should have remained as two separate chapters.  One story involves Riddick’s escape from a burning planet called “Crematoria” and the rescue of a friend, Jack, while the other involves his interactions with a malevolent cosmic army the Necromongers, and unexpected ascent to the empire’s throne.  

Each story in its own right would have made a great second Riddick picture, but The Chronicles of Riddick often experiences trouble finding the right balance between them, and erects too vast a “mythic” architecture around Riddick.  

No longer is he merely a gifted and clever outlaw.  Instead, Riddick is the subject of sacred galactic prophecy, and the man who can save the universe from slipping into perpetual darkness. Riddick thus carries more weight on his muscular shoulders than Atlas himself, and there are times in the film when it’s all too much.  Choosing one story (and saving the next for a sequel) would have streamlined the movie and resulted in a more appealing, cohesive sequel.

When I first screened The Chronicles of Riddick in theaters, I felt profoundly disappointed with it, feeling that the film was over-stuffed and over-burdened in terms of “world building” and mythology-building.  What I had connected with so deeply in Pitch Black was the simple idea of a man surviving an inhospitable planetary environment and eco-system using his wits, and his own code of morality.  The Chronicles of Riddick features moments that reflect that particular (original) aesthetic, but everything has been made so grand and “galactic,” that much humanity is lost in the process.

Watching the film again for this review, I must acknowledge that I enjoyed and appreciated The Chronicles of Riddick much more than I had before, while still feeling that Twohy had miscalculated somewhat in terms of approach.  

Riddick is Riddick, and he can thrive or survive anywhere. He doesn’t need to be “The Chosen One” or the messiah for audiences to feel interest in his adventures. Yet today, I can also detect how The Chronicles of Riddick -- released in 2004 -- meaningfully reflects its War on Terror Age context.  The film involves a group of fundamentalist radicals, so called “World Enders” that have hijacked “established” civilization (think Iran, or Iraq) for belligerent purposes.  This subplot is pretty clearly a metaphor for radical Islam.

Also -- and I never picked up on this element before, blogger Roman J. Martel once noted in the comments section of the Pitch Black review that my description of Riddick reminded him “strongly” of Robert E. Howard’s vision of Conan.  Roman’s insight is doubly true of The Chronicles of Riddick.  

Much of the mythology that comes to surround Riddick in this sequel feels like a space age variation on Conan’s mythology.  Many details match, or at least line-up. That insight and literary context from Roman actually brings new luster to The Chronicles of Riddick, and makes the film much more intriguing to discuss and debate.  

So there is plainly more in The Chronicles of Riddick than I saw in 2004, even while some of the film’s flaws have not been ameliorated with the passing of two decades.

“There's gonna be one speed: mine. If you can't keep up, don't step up. You'll just die.”

On a planet consisting only of ultra-violet light, the bounty hunter Toombs (Nick Chinlund) attempts to capture the escaped convict Riddick (Vin Diesel), who has not been seen in five years.  Riddick promptly kills Toombs’ crew, strands Toombs on the planet, and steals his ship.

Riddick learns that the man who put the price on his head lives in New Mecca, in the Helion System.  Specifically, his old friend, the Imam (Keith David) is responsible for the bounty.  As the Imam -- now a husband and father -- reports to Riddick, the highly-advanced and civilized planet is under threat of invasion from an army of militant religious zealots called “Necromongers.”

Because Imam knows the story of Riddick’s birth -- that he was nearly strangled to death with his own umbilical cord and left for dead in a dumpster -- he suspects that the convict may play a role in the prophecy of the Necromongers’ destruction.  

Specifically, it is known that only a Furyan can destroy the Necromongers’ Lord Marshal (Colm Feore). So the Imam sent Toombs to retrieve Riddick, and share this information. 

Riddick refuses to take sides in the conflict, but when the Necromongers swarm the planet, and kill the Imam, he fights the Lord Marshal and his soldier tooth-and-nail.  Like all the people of New Mecca, Riddick is given a simple choice by the invaders: convert or die.

Riddick escapes from custody, and allows himself to be re-captured by Toombs, in hopes that the bounty hunter will take him to Crematoria, the prison world where his old friend, Jack (Alexa Davalos) has been reported incarcerated.  

Toombs complies, and Riddick is dumped in the subterranean “slam” on Crematoria, a planet with an inhospitable, charred surface.  Riddick and Jack are reunited, but she now goes by the name of Kyra, and holds a grudge against Riddick for abandoning her five years earlier.  Riddick counters that he went into hiding so all the mercenaries gunning for him wouldn’t endanger her.

Putting their differences aside, Riddick and Kyra engineer a jail break to the fiery surface of the planet, even as the Lord Marshal’s top underling, Vaako (Keith Urban) arrives to bring Riddick back to Helion.  

But Vaako and his manipulative wife (Thandie Newton) are enmeshed in courtly politics, and believe that Riddick is the key to ridding the Necromongers of the Lord Marshal once and for all.  Using Riddick as his assassin, Dame Vaako hopes to install her husband in the Lord Marshal’s place.

 “We all began as something else.”

In very basic terms, The Chronicles of Riddick involves an invasion of a highly-civilized planet by fundamentalists that want to either “convert or kill” all sentient beings.  There is no negotiation with these violent radicals, either. You either become one of them, or you are destroyed.  Concepts such as democracy, education, and civilization mean nothing to these theocrats.  They care only for their draconian faith, and their (promised) ascent into another realm, the UnderVerse.

Very plainly, the Necromongers are meant to represent the Taliban, or other radical Islamists who had declared war on the Western world in the first decade of the 21^st century. Like the Necromongers, these radicals practice a restrictive, draconian faith, and claim that their (violent) actions in this reality will meet with a reward in the after-life. 

This real-life context is reinforced in The Chronicles of Riddick via the setting of the planet Helion and the city of New Mecca.  

Specifically, there is a distinctive Middle Eastern design to the visualization of the Imam’s planet. New Mecca looks like it could be a space-age Tehran, or even Baghdad -- on Earth, once the home of the Islamic Golden Age -- before the fever of religious radicalism takes hold. In short, a planet of reason, technology and democracy falls to tyranny.  All the progress towards a just and fair society is lost.

The Necromongers are terrifying for the same reason that radical Islam is, in my opinion.  Imagine spending generations arduously lifting your culture out of ignorance, fear and superstition through the development of science, education and social justice, only to see a military coup which knowingly reinstates all those vices.  

Welcome to the New Dark Ages…

In my introduction, I mentioned the stories of Conan, and The Chronicles of Riddick also offers some unique parallels to that character’s life as it has been depicted in both literary and film form.  

In particular we learn that Riddick comes from an extinct planet called Furya.  Conan is, likewise, a Cimmerian, another survivor of a dead and gone society.  

Furthermore, in both Conan the Barbarian (1982) and The Chronicles of Riddick, we learn that a religious cult leader (either Thulsa Doom or the Lord Marshal…) is directly responsible for the death of the hero’s parents.  Thus, the life-time quest for that hero -- although he doesn’t know it, initially -- is to avenge his parents’ deaths and vanquish the war lord.

Similarly, Riddick and Conan have both functioned, throughout their narratives, as occasional thieves and outlaws. But they boast one other vocation in common, and it is of vital significance. 

They are both kings.

During the denouement of The Chronicles of Riddick, Riddick assumes, uneasily, the Necromonger throne. 

Similarly, in Howard’s mythology (and we see the image briefly in Conan the Barbarian…), Conan also usurps the throne of an enemy.  He replaces the tyrant of Aquilonia and becomes that kingdom’s ruler.

In terms of fantasy settings, The Chronicles of Riddick and Conan may even have something else in common: they are both set in a kind of baroque “mythological” age rather than an historical one.  Conan’s adventures are set in the long-gone -- and fictional -- age of Hyboria, and The Chronicles of Riddick is set in a distant future epoch.

One other inspiration also helps to lift The Chronicles of Riddick above its over-used CGI and chop-suey cutting: the works of Shakespeare.  

Vaako and Dame Vaako are very patently futuristic versions of MacBeth and Lady MacBeth.  Like their literary predecessors, these characters ambitiously scheme to control the kingdom, and eliminate the rightful ruler, whether King Duncan or the Lord Marshal.  

As befitting MacBeth’s characters, Vaako is the conspirator with doubts and some residual sense of loyalty. And by contrast, Dame Vaako is the one with murderous certainty.  Part of the reason that the Necromonger sequences work at all here is because of this Shakespearean dynamic made fresh.  The underlings of the Lord Marshal could have been fairly anonymous or lacking in definition, but the MacBeth “homage” adds resonance in a most welcome fashion.

Finally, I also appreciate the welcome visual imagination of The Chronicles of Riddick.  

The opening scene set on Planet U.V. is visually-distinctive, and the escape from Crematoria is, perhaps, the film’s adventure high-point. 

In the latter case, a group of survivors flee across a desolate planet surface as walls of treacherous fire encroach on them.  When Jack becomes trapped on a mountain peak, Riddick must brave the scorching fires to pull her out of mortal danger.  It’s all pretty exciting, and dynamically wrought.

In space operas like Star Trek, Dune, and Star Wars, audiences have seen again and again the desert planet, the ice planet, and so on, but The Chronicles of Riddick tries hard to mix things up a bit with its unusual (and dangerous) planetary environments, and that’s certainly a point in the movie’s favor.

My deepest concern about The Chronicles of Riddick has always been the fact that a great (and Carpenter-ian…) anti-hero is ret-conned into being a sort of “Chosen One” on a heroic quest.  The comparisons to Conan’s story help ameliorate that concern to a large degree, it’s true, but the thing I’ve always liked about Riddick is that he seems like a very “in the moment” kind of character; one who measures his situation and his options, and acts according his moral code.  

Somehow, knowing that Riddick is the “instrument of fate” as it were diminishes some of his virtues.  He has been “ordained,” in other words to be special, because of his unique heritage….not because of his experience.  I suppose I just like my Riddick movies lean and mean, and without all the pretensions to grandeur.  I like the character as a bad-ass…I don’t need him to be a mythology-fueled, supernatural bad ass.

In terms of production design and imagery, I love the concepts of The Chronicles of Riddick, but dislike the execution. I fully realize that CGI is the preferred mode for visualizing other worlds at this juncture in cinema history, and will be for the foreseeable future.  But there’s so much CGI in The Chronicles of Riddick that your eyes don’t always know where to look, and they nearly get burned out by the over-stimulation.  When absolutely every edifice is colossal and baroque, nothing really looks impressive or stands out anymore.  Instead, it all looks kind of…flat.

Similarly, the fight scenes in the film have been turned into nonsensical hash. The quick-cutting ruins any sense of rhythm or momentum, and instead, we’re just watching sheer spectacle: (beautiful) bodies in motion.  In these fights, men and women defy gravity (courtesy of wires), but we never really know how or why they do so.  In conjunction with the CGI overkill, the editing approach for the fight scenes creates a sense of distance from Riddick.

And so while I remain authentically impressed with the real world War on Terror context and the Conan influences in The Chronicles of Riddick, I am also disappointed by the film’s colossal-ness, to coin a term. 

The one quality I sought most in a Riddick sequel was to re-connect with the character emotionally. Riddick has some great lines of dialogue here, and Vin Diesel still moves great, but all the world-building around Riddick keeps us away from getting as close to the guy and his struggles as perhaps viewers would like to be.  

Pitch Black was thrilling, spectacular, and most importantly, intimate.  The Chronicles of Riddick is….spectacular on a whole other level, but often at the expense of intimacy.

20 Years Ago: Big Fish (2003)

"A man tells his stories so many times that he becomes the stories. They live on after him, and in that way he becomes immortal."

- Big Fish (2003)

Tell me, which alternative fosters a better understanding of your life experience: the bare bones truth, or an embellished, "flavored" version of the truth that contextualizes you life as a great story, one with heroes and villains, winners and losers, and a beginning...and inevitable end?  

Tim Burton's 2003 fantasy masterpiece, Big Fish beautifully and emotionally makes the case for the latter option.  

In real life, we're each of us but a little fish (only 1 out of 8 billion...) swimming about in a global sea.

But in our imaginations -- and in our private family circles -- we're all big fish: colorful personalities who loom large in the stories of our sons and daughters, and our Moms and Dads. In our private worlds, we're important, nay the most important figures.

The first shots and compositions of Big Fish lead the viewer down into the sun-drenched water of a fresh-water river as a big fish swims alone there, and this inaugural visual perfectly captures the movie's most important conceit: the idea that we all make ourselves and our lives out to be "big." 

Sometimes we even do so at the expense of those we love, who risk becoming mere "context" in another person's epic poem.  

The big fish swims alone, after all.

Of all Tim Burton's films, I readily confess that I find Big Fish the most emotional. Maybe because it's a story of fathers and sons learning to understand one another. Perhaps because it concerns the inevitability of death, and the passing of the generations (as well as the storyteller torch).  

Regardless, this film hits me on a very personal, very intimate level every time I see it. I had an important person in my life until 2010 who was, like the movie's Ed Bloom, a masterful and ridiculous storyteller.  He was a man who had (so he claimed...) met and conversed with Colin Powell and Albert Einstein, and who was biologically related both to General Robert E. Lee and Katie Couric. He absolutely never met a fish story he didn't like. The man could put you on with the straightest of straight faces, and in some moments, could even devise for you what your life story should be.

This larger-than-life figure spoke in the most idiosyncratic and singular manner I've ever known,  replete with lots of extremely colorful metaphors, and he passed away following the sudden onset of a terminal illness. And yet -- in large part because of his incomparable manner of expressing himself and telling his stories -- he remains an everyday voice in my head. Today, he's an indelible fixture there, and sometimes, almost against my will, I still hear his unique voice, and his flamboyant way of communicating. His vocabulary alone -- his bizarre lexicon -- seems often to be on the tip of my tongue. 

I don't always know why.

Now, I don't want to romanticize this man and turn him into a saint, because that description does no one any good. We're all but human beings, with flaws and foibles. But there was an element in this man -- as there is in Big Fish's Ed Bloom -- that raises questions; that fascinates. He turned his stories into great adventures, all while leaving the real man, the truth itself, opaque. His crazy stories and jokes cloaked...what precisely?  

So, in one sense, I knew this man and his unique mode of expression deeply for over twenty years, and yet in another very basic sense, I didn't know the real man at all.  

At least not until I understood the seemingly impossible: that the stories, jokes, and tall tales were the real man. They were part and parcel of his individual and mental gestalt, and you couldn't separate him from those tall tales.

I don't usually write here about how films affect me personally.  I generally don't like that approach in film criticism, preferring to rely instead on examinations of compositions and leitmotifs, and so on. 

And yet I can't honestly deny that Big Fish hits me in a close place. It seems so true to my own personal experience that I suppose I have a hard time separating Will Bloom's story from my own experience. What I can declare with conviction is that Big Fish is the most heartfelt and touching of Burton's works. Perhaps not the best (a title I reserve for Ed Wood or perhaps Edward Scissorhands), but certainly the most emotional.

As Clint Morris wrote of the film in Film Threat: "It takes those oddities and twists that many don’t usually go for if they’re not a big fan of the director and interweaves them into a tale that’s so enriching, so heartwarming, so funny, so touching and so breathtaking, you’ll wonder why the king of wackiness didn’t branch out sooner." 

And Peter Travers, writing for Rolling Stone, insightfully noted that Burton had finally hooked the one that got away, in the process deepening his "visionary talent."  

I agree with both those conclusions.  If I had to select one Tim Burton film for people who generally don't like Tim Burton films, it would be Big Fish.

"It doesn't always make sense and most it never happened..."

Big Fish is the story of Ed and Will Bloom, estranged father and son. Ever since he was a little boy, Will has heard his father tell crazy stories about witches, giants, werewolves, Siamese twins, and mysterious ghost towns.  

At first, Will believed the stories were wondrous and magical, but over the years he began to wish that his father would drop the fairy tales and just start relating to him as a real person.

Now, as an adult, Will learns that his father is on his death bed.  He asks his father to tell him one true thing before he dies, but his father insists that his stories are the "truth" about his life.  "I've been nothin' but myself since the day I was born, and if you can't see that it's your failin', not mine," he tells his son.   Will finds this hard to accept, especially as he prepares to become a father himself for the first time.  

After Ed relates his life story to Will's wife, his health declines further. On the verge of dying, Ed asks Will --- his only son - to tell him how his story ends.  

Will complies, and in doing so, gains a new insight into the man who raised him, as well as the importance of storytelling in all our lives.

"Dying is the worst thing that's ever happened to me."

In some senses, Big Fish is very much about a blowhard, as Roger Ebert suggested in his review of the film. It's uncharitable, but true. Ed may have led a big life, but he also has a big mouth.

In fact, Ed Bloom (Ewan McGregor/Albert Finney) has so transformed his life into a series of weird and wonderful stories that his grown son, Will (Billy Crudup) isn't sure he even knows his father. That's a terrible thing.

And yet the movie ultimately sides with old Ed. He isn't viewed with harshness by Burton. Instead -- in the passing of the generations -- the movie reminds us that each storyteller will have his day. 

Ed has had his day, and now Will's day looms. At the movie's end, it is Will who tells the "end" of Ed's story, and who recounts for his son a lifetime of adventures. It's important too, that Ed is never portrayed as a liar. Instead, as his funeral reveals, he is just a serial exaggerator: one with a foot in fact, and another in colorful fiction. By Ed's reckoning, Will tells stories with "all the facts, none of the flavor," and that's just not his way.

Some reviewers have been hard on Big Fish, noting that it never really considers the son's point of view or feelings. 

There may be some truth to this perspective, but in the final analysis, Big Fish does right by both characters.

We follow Ed from birth to childhood illness, from his first love to, ultimately, his death. In Ed's life story, we readily detect his spring and summer (his youth), and even his autumn and winter (his old age and demise).  

Notably, Burton makes certain that the natural landscape echoes each one of these spans. As a young man, for instance, Ed sees Spectre as a beautiful, idyllic town, well-painted and carpeted in lush green grass. As a middle-aged man, however, Ed returns to the town and finds it paved over, browning, and in a state of decay. You can't go home again.

Similarly, when Ed courts the love of his life, their romantic love is expressed in the vibrant yellow of endless daffodils. As death approaches, such blooming (and remember his name is Ed Bloom...) has ended, and all the trees are stark and naked, bereft of leaves. Winter has come for Ed at last.

Will certainly represents an important chapter in Ed's life, but in a sense, his "part" of the story only really becomes important in the closing chapters.  Ed can't write his final sentences himself.  That's why he needs his boy. Ironically, it is to contextualize his life, not vice-versa as Will initially feared. 

And really, that's always the job of those left to carry on after losing a parent: to put the actions and span of the dead into some kind of meaningful order.

As it turns out, Ed's strange stories become important to Will. They represent the old man's legacy and gift, a colorful way of looking at the world and remembering Dad.Ed wanted Will to listen to his stories for a reason, and not merely to entertain him. Someday, the boy would need to know the details so he could take ownership of Ed's story and continue it for the next generation. Again, this is as much about Will as it is about Ed.

In life, we are all part of this cycle. We all heirs to a story, caretakers of that story, and then givers of the story -- after we've had it and protected it for a lifetime. Big Fish gets at this idea in a more beautiful and imaginative fashion than just about any movie I've seen. The imagery is enormously affecting, particularly as the strong, healthy Will picks up his infirm, dying father and lifts him into the air -- as if carrying him like a baby -- for one last adventure, one final tall tale.

There's something so innocent and beautiful about this image. The boy who was once held by his father's strong arms now lifts up his sick dad -- negating the realities of gravity -- and cares for him as he was once cared for.  This image gets me every time: the son becomes the father; the father the son. The roles reverse, and time marches on.

Big Fish offers other narrative and visual glories as well. I love the use to which director Burton puts Helena Bonham Carter here, essentially making her every "other" woman figure in Bloom's life. She is both a terrifying (if friendly...) witch and a young, innocent girl, all grown up.  

And I also appreciate another powerful image: one of a fork in the road that seems to literalize the Robert Frost poem about the road taken and the road not taken. Again, this fits in well with the story's meditation on the seasons of life, and the choices we make. Our destiny is sometimes as simple as deciding which path to follow.

Big Fish is filled with incredibly whimsy and magic, and yet, at the same time, the film seems to truly capture something essential about our mortality, and the mortality of those we love.  

We can view tall tales as merely "amusing lies" from someone we love, or as the seeds of immortality itself, a renewable source of energy that we can share with our children and our grandchildren.  

I wrote above about the man in my life who was a lot like Ed Bloom, right down to his southern heritage  He saw Big Fish back in 2004 and loved it. He especially loved that Bloom's stories were ultimately validated...that there was a degree of truth in his musings about giants and witches and werewolves, and so on. I get that now. In understanding our own lives, the stories we tell do become true to us, at least after a fashion.

It may be "impossible to separate fact from fiction, the man from the myth," but when you meet a storyteller of such caliber, you never forget his words or his life.  It doesn't always make sense and "most of it never happened... but that's what kind of story this is."  

I'm glad that Burton decided to tell this story.. It makes me want to hold my 17-year old son in my arms again.