You're gonna need a bigger budget

Of all the motion pictures I've seen from all the decades and all the world my favorite is still Raiders of the Lost Ark. Its constant companions are Empire and Jaws; the movies that made me love movies in the first place.

They tell me of a drive-in theater, and I'm not altogether too young to remember the sacrosanct lots of old, but they tell me of one especial immemorial night when the Perseids fell and small Tiberi-chan was parked before God and God lit up with the Empire Strikes Back. Something of that experience — of popcorn power chords struck at a significant place, a ground like to a baseball diamond where intersect the ley lines of Americana — must have been imprinted upon the courseless mush of my wee brain, a signet pressed into the wobbling raw Spielbergus et Lucas, simultaneously claiming and creating a blockbusting fanboy nascent.

Those two wayward sons of New Hollywood conspired to undo the progress made since the late 60s toward a less bloated, more artful American cinema. They invented a more profitable business and restored the imperial might of the studios. In particular, Spielberg elevated Universal Pictures from a third-rate manufacturer of budget and genre pics and television, never respected by the exalted likes of Paramount, MGM and Warner, to the stature of theme park-operating behemoth, which we nowadays take as a given. Studio fortunes in the 80s came to revolve around movies-for-boys, which is to say around me. It was the golden age of creature effects. The wizardry was mostly analog, toolshed cobbling of snips and snails, muppetry and dwarfs, with computer enhancement to excite Atari junkie kid genius. Was I supposed to lament the lost refinement and grit of the 70s? When rallied about me were mogwai, skeksis, slimers, krites, deadites, poltergeists, rancors, rock biters and toons? When I had heroes like Ash, Mad Max, Dr Jones, Pee-wee Herman, Baron Munchausen, Boba Fett, Doc Brown and Sloth? The 70s didn't give a crap about kids. The Bad News Bears, Star Wars and Meatballs are the exceptions, the harbingers, that prove the rule. Spielberg and Lucas oversaw the only decade of great and enduring movies dedicated to being a kid, and they were my heroes too*.

Which is not to say S & L are the foremost masters of their dubious craft. No one has done better work in the blockbuster/fx era than James Cameron. It's not even a competition. And before I consent to hear your appeals on behalf of Ridley Scott and Peter Jackson, let me remind you that all of Cameron's films are based on original screenplays written by Cameron himself. By design his radical fx are always an integral and purposeful component of the narrative, made indispensable servant to the story — never an end unto themselves. I wouldn't say the guy's writing has quite the psychological depth of Bergman, but he has been a student of physics and philosophy (The Abyss is a great underappreciated work of science fiction) and as a disciplined and conscientious showman Cameron is unsurpassed.

And so I graduated from E.T. and Willow to Aliens and T2, and by high school I aspired to become a CGI fx artist (at least prior to junior year when the intoxicating truth of physics re-centered my world). I pored over a monstrous glossy christmas tome: behind the scenes at Industrial Light & Magic. I was too dazzled to be cognizant of the fact that the kind of vigorous, joyful filmmaking I wanted to be a part of was already over, set to devolve into the sterile, routine and gratuitous. A decade of genuine heart had absently bumped into nineteen ninety-too-cool-for-school, and the kids once briefly indulged are now denied that wondrous admixture of respectful regard and frivolous fun. The tail end of the 80s creature movies (...Tremors, Dead Alive, Army of Darkness) petered out in 1993; what Spielberg started with one mechanical squalus he put to a halt with a stampede of digital dinos. Hollywood was dazzled by ever cheaper CGI that yielded ever higher revenues by its ever more careless application. Lucas publicly revealed the already advanced stage of his dementia in 1997 when, to my ultimate horror, Greedo shot first. That same year Spielberg dropped the first Jurassic Park sequel, the Cretaceous Turd, and so embarked upon his ongoing series of ill-conceived and unnecessary misadventures, misfires and inexcusable mistakes. To date: Lost World, A.I., Minority Report, War of the Worlds**, Indy 4. Dear Stevie has lost his rudder, at least in the waters of sci-fi and pulp; possibly it was eaten by a four and a half foot baby thresher shark. My milk has gone sour.

Cameron went into hiding in 1997 after Titanic, which is a great movie but lacking protein, like waffles. In his absence and with S & L bent wretchedly to the dark side it has been dark times for the blockbuster. Every season they make gobs of money and they stink. Gladiator and the latter Matrix and Pirates movies are only the most prominent heaps among the decade's catch of execrable garbage. But there have been freedom fighters. The original Matrix remains a worthy achievement, and Peter Jackson has kept the whip cracking with Lord of the Rings and King Kong; with any luck his protégé, Guillermo del Toro, will soon produce a masterwork. Sam Raimi (of all people) brought new respectability to the superhero flick with Spider-Man 2, bettered by Christopher Nolan's two Batman pictures and Watchmen. And most miraculously have appeared a pair of ragged knights, somber and quick in the dusk like Picasso's Quixote: two great, invaluable new movies about childhood that will last your whole life. On the shelf where you keep a Chewie figurine and the game ball from a little league glory, alongside the Goonies, the Neverending Story and Stand By Me, you may put Terry Gilliam's Tideland and Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are.

Back to the crap. Six months ago the great and terrible Ebert, seizing the podium in a hectic fit, proclaimed Transformers 2 to be the abominable terminus of the Luco-Spielberg Folly. One can divine in the froth of his words Roger's wish that it be so. And certainly one can appreciate the fitting arc: As franchise royalty of the 80s Transformers would seem to have the right to spark the immolation of its kind. But alas (sweet mercy) Roger's wishes are not fishes. Them autobots grossed not quite a billion dollars, and so we folly on. If you paid to see the movie you are to blame.

Avatar is counterpoint to everything wrong with the blockbuster movie today. Cameron back from the Jundland Wastes, a new hope.

...

If my own wishes were fishes and copyright laws were stricken from the books I'm forced to concede the irony that Avatar would end up being the actual last of its kind. Absent copy protection the blockbuster would perish from the earth. When movies become free to distribute and exhibit a producer could never recoup a $200 million investment. Can you fathom donation and patronage supporting the summer movie season to which we are accustomed? I think the era would simply be over. Dino extincto. And you know what? I would be okay with that. To every thing a season.



* As a youngster I tended to assume my idols were just like me. When doing a report on Steven Spielberg in the fourth grade I was shocked — shocked! — to learn that he's a Jew. Really? But I thought Stevie was a Scout, like me... Admittedly thereafter the Nazi villains took on an even more sinister air, and I took greater satisfaction in their melting. I remember also my dad handing me the binoculars at a Cubs game and directing my attention to right field where — Sufferin' succotash! Andre Dawson was black.

** War of the Worlds in particular I cannot forgive. The gentle soul who created E.T. and Close Encounters, our two most humane, hopeful and beautiful pictures about making contact, had made a well known vow never to depict malevolent extraterrestrials. He felt it was a moral obligation, a chance to use the cinema not to fearmonger but to engender a more noble spirit of comity and curiosity. This gesture I felt had been Spielberg's most valuable contribution, of greater significance than Amistad or Schindler's List. So what in tarnation happened after 9/11 and the Iraq War? Spielberg reverted to exactly the kind of huddled hysterics I had long admired him for rising above — reviving our most iconic episode of baseless panic, to boot — in a time of national stress when his former clearheaded example was most needed. He betrayed us all.