Triple Feature: A Bug's Life, Three Amigos, and Galaxy Quest

A Bug's Life (1998)

A Bug’s Life (1998)
Pixar’s take on Seven Samurai (1954) features a struggling troupe of insect circus performers mistaken for warriors and recruited by an ant to defend his colony from bullying grasshoppers, who return after each year’s harvest to steal the ants’ grain.

Three Amigos (1986)

Three Amigos (1986)
Three out-of-work silent film stars are hired to protect a Mexican village from a marauding warlord by a woman who thinks their on-screen heroism is for real. It’s not until one of the actors is shot that the trio realize they've been hired to fight, not entertain. Instead of fleeing back to Hollywood, the three decide to become the heroes they once portrayed on film. The film contains references to Seven Samurai remake The Magnificent Seven (1960) as well as The Wild Bunch (1969), the funniest of which is Wild Bunch actor Alfonso Arau’s performance as the villain El Guapo.

Galaxy Quest (1999)

Galaxy Quest (1999)
Jason Nesmith, the former star of a cancelled science fiction TV series who makes his living signing autographs at fan conventions and store openings, is approached by what appear to be over-zealous fans about a job. Jason assumes he’s being hired for yet another personal appearance. Instead, he is transported to deep space by aliens who believe the episodes of Jason’s television program are actually “historical documents,” and that Jason is a real-life space adventurer. They present Jason with a functioning replica of his TV spaceship and explain that they are the last survivors of a race that has been hunted to near-extinction by an interplanetary bad guy. Jason convinces his former co-stars to join him in reprising their TV roles for real in order to save the desperate aliens.

Triple Feature: Lone Star, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and Touch of Evil

Similarities abound in this trio of films about law, history, and legends in the American West.

Lone Star (1996)

"Forget the Alamo."

In Lone Star, the past of a small Texas border town is dug up — literally, in the remains of Charlie Wade, a cruel and corrupt sheriff who some 40 years earlier controlled the town through intimidation, extortion, and racial hatred until a young deputy named Buddy Deeds confronted Wade and ostensibly ran him out of town. When Wade's skeleton and badge are found barely below ground in a remote spot of desert, though, Sam Deeds — Buddy's son and the current sheriff — soon has reason to believe his late and now-legendary father may have been the killer. Sam continues digging, talking to townspeople who lived through Wade's tyranny and who view Buddy as their emancipator. The closer Sam gets to learning the truth about Wade's death, the more he learns about his own past and what it could mean for his future.

Set in a contentious town along the Texas/Mexico border where parents clash with teachers about the history of the Texas Revolution, Lone Star fills every moment with consideration of the past — certainly the pasts of Wade and Buddy, but also those of Sam, his high school girlfriend Pilar, Pilar's mother and successful businesswoman Mercedes, Wade's surviving deputy Hollis, and the estranged father-and-son pair Otis and Del Payne. Everyone is made to consider the past and to decide if history should be rewritten or if old legends should remain untarnished.

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)

"When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."

When prominent senator Ransom Stoddard arrives in the western town of Shinbone to attend the funeral of all but forgotten rancher Tom Doniphon, the editor of the local paper demands to know why. Stoddard unravels a tale of Shinbone's past, of his arrival in the frontier town as a young lawyer eager to bring civilized justice to the West, of a ruthless gunfighter named Liberty Valance who terrorized the town with a gun, and of how Stoddard's showdown with Valance catapulted Stoddard to fame and to Washington, D.C. The more Stoddard reveals, however, the more the reasons behind his now-legendary rise to power are made suspect. When the editor finally learns about the role of Tom Doniphon in these events and of the secret Stoddard has been concealing, he must decide how important the past is to Stoddard's reputation and to the town of Shinbone.

Touch of Evil (1958)

"He was some kind of a man. What does it matter what you say about people?"

Mike Vargas is a Mexican narcotics officer just married to an American woman. Out for a stroll with his new wife, he witnesses a murder-by-car bomb the moment he steps across the border into the US. He is soon joined on the scene by Hank Quinlan, an American cop who bears no love toward Mexicans and who doesn't hesitate to use intimidation and excessive force when interrogating Mexican suspects. Vargas and Quinlan butt heads and end up working the crime separately. To Vargas' surprise, Quinlan arrests the first suspect he finds, claiming to have found conclusive evidence. Vargas does some investigating of Quinlan, though, and what he finds threatens Quinlan's perfect record — and Vargas' life.

Double feature: Rambo: First Blood Part 2 and Avatar

During the original release of Avatar, when everyone with a blog was either touting or condemning it ("Dances With Smurfs!" Ouch.), I thought up my own annoyingly Twitter-appropriate review: "Everything you have heard about Avatar — good or bad — is true." I liked Avatar and read or heard no criticism that I couldn't take for granted, nor which effectively undid what was good about the film.

I probably first watched Rambo: First Blood Part 2 on cable a few years after its 1985 release, though I can't remember — it was not a movie I was terribly interested in. I do remember watching it in college, however, as part of a class on "captivity narratives," and gaining a slightly better understanding of the Rambo phenomenon of the 1980's and beyond. I re-watched it a few days ago, enjoyed it despite some glaringly silly bits, and found myself thinking that my one-line review of Avatar also applied to it. And while the pairing of the two films hadn't occurred to me before, many likenesses came to mind. Both films transcended their status as box office hits to become "cultural phenomena," due in part to their polarizing effect on film goers (or maybe the polarization was a result of the phenomenon...I'm not sure it really matters). Each movie can be seen as superficial entertainment, or as a film with a social message, or both. Or, perhaps more critically, as superficial entertainment disguised as social message. (In an interview clip on the Rambo DVD, director George Cosmatos explains that he never thought of the film as political, but rather as just an action movie. James Cameron has been somewhat less coy about Avatar.) In any case, it is these messages — or "message wrappers," if you prefer — that really connect the two films.

Rambo: First Blood Part 2 (which for simplicity in this post will be referred to only as Rambo, not to be mistaken for the fourth installment of the First Blood series) presents a re-writing of the Vietnam war. Made in the mid-1980's amidst the reexamination of America's treatment of Vietnam veterans, the film offers not only a way to redeem the American public for its poor reception of returning soldiers, but a way to win the war itself. Rambo's mission is to find American POW's still in captivity in the jungles of Vietnam. His success in rescuing several such soldiers not only presents filmgoers with an American victory in Vietnam, but shows forgotten and mistreated vets being brought back into the fold.

Key to the film's rectification of history is the transfer of all responsibility for the war onto a single, un-American source. While America's culpability for the treatment of its veterans is embodied by Murdock, the bureaucrat in charge of the ersatz rescue operation, and while Rambo kills a fair share of Vietnamese enemies, the real power behind the POW camp is the Soviet Union, in 1985 still a hot adversary to the United States in the Cold War. In this way, present and past animosities are united and blame is simplified onto a single, sneering, Soviet bad guy, sparing the audience any need to consider a more complex reality.

Avatar, in turn, offers vicarious and fantastical redemption for White expansion into the American West. Much has already been written about the similarities between this movie and others, especially Dances With Wolves (I am guilty of contributing my own two cents), though suffice it to say that Avatar's Jake Sully, much like Dances With Wolves' John Dunbar and A Man Called Horse's John Morgan, offers white audiences a historical re-do: he acts out a racial guilt-purging fantasy that displaces wrongdoing onto a specific subset of white colonizers (led by corporate cog Parker Selfridge, a stand-in for Murdock), which bears not only the blame for past racial sin but for modern evils as well: corporate greed, environmental neglect, and the questionable and excessive use of military force. When Jake is accepted into the native Na'vi tribe — when he is in fact accepted as their "chosen one" and defends the tribe against the invaders from Earth — he gains the forgiveness and redemption we desire.

Other similarities strengthen the connection between the two films. Rambo and Jake are both injured Marines — Jake's injuries are physical and visible, while Rambo's pain is emotional and mental — recruited to help in missions that will give them a "second chance." For Rambo, the mission is an opportunity to be released from prison and to finally get to "win" a war. For Jake, a tour on Pandora is a chance to leave the bleakness of an environmentally ravaged Earth and possibly have his injured legs repaired. Both heroes are sent to fulfill the orders of a military or corporate "machine" (both of which are headquartered in military-style bases carved out of and fenced off from the surrounding jungle), but each redefines his mission according to his conscience, putting him at odds with his own society. Rambo, like the Na'vi, is more at one with the natural environment than are his adversaries. He hides from enemies by covering himself in mud or by lurking underwater. He uses nature as a weapon, making traps and weapons out of tree roots and vines. Both the Na'vi and Rambo use simple weapons like bows and arrows and knives against the high-tech weaponry of their enemies (there is at least one instance of rack focus between shooter and arrowhead in each film!). Rambo repeatedly shows his disdain for technology by cutting loose his gear, shooting up a control room, and declaring "I've always believed that the mind is the best weapon." (Rambo is adept, however, at flying military helicopters, which are emphasized in both films as an important way of travelling between the two worlds straddled by the heroes). And it is probably not insignificant that Avatar writer/director James Cameron also co-wrote the screenplay to Rambo.

Double feature: Red River and There Will Be Blood

There's a scene in Red River (1948) where John Wayne, as frontier settler Tom Dunson, arrives at a seemingly arbitrarily chosen tract of land and claims it as his own. When agents for a man named Don Diego, who lives 400 miles away, south of the Rio Grande, arrive to dispute this claim, Dunson shoots and kills one of them and sends the other back to Mexico with the news. After burying the dead man, Dunson surveys the land that is, by his thinking, rightfully his:

My land. We're here, and we're gonna stay here. Give me ten years and I'll have that brand on the gates of the greatest ranch in Texas. The big house will be down by the river, and the corrals and the barns behind it. It'll be a good place to live in. Ten years and I'll have the Red River D on more cattle than you've looked at anywhere. I'll have that brand on enough beef to feed the whole country. Good beef for hungry people. Beef to make them strong, make 'em grow. It takes work, and it takes sweat, and it takes time. Lots of time. It takes years.*

That scene, and the one immediately following, which jumps 15 years into the future to show that Dunson does indeed succeed in raising that many cattle, establishes Dunson as a driven man who has a plan and the will to see it through, regardless of — in fact, aided by — legal and moral uncertainties. He is a man with the requisite ego to act on Manifest Destiny.

The opening scenes of There Will Be Blood (2007) show Daniel Plainview to be equally driven. We see him working a claim on a silver mine, alone, enduring an accident which leaves him with an apparently broken leg and possible internal injuries, before he arrives in the nearest town (presumably after crawling through the dessert to get there) to cash in. While Dunson associates (genuinely or not) his claim with the future success of the country, Plainview's goals appear to be more solitary. The work of both men, however, advances the infrastructure and, mostly, the economy of the developing nation.

Both of these films are Westerns — Red River more obviously so, set amid the trappings of traditional Westerns like cattle drives, American Indians, and quick-draw shoot-outs, but There Will Be Blood also, for much of it is set in the last period of the Old West amid not the territorial but the economic expansion of the country. Both lead characters are bold, brave, determined to stake a claim on the frontier and defend it above all else, bullying, not always likable, at times detestable, at times amoral, at times immoral. In short, most likely the kind of people who really did settle the American West. Both films show these men attempting to realize a difficult plan in pursuit of wealth, and becoming increasingly isolated as their bludgeoning personalities make it increasingly difficult for them to work with others.

The men are also similar in that they each adopt (officially or not) boys who have been orphaned by the same enterprise the men pursue. These boys act as the men's sons, and serve as counterweights to their adopted fathers' unscrupulous wills. Dunson takes in Matt, a boy orphaned when his wagon train is attacked by Comanche Indians. Plainview adopts H.W. after the infant's father is killed while working on Plainview's oil rig. Each boy is an aid to their new father: Matt by using his easy rapport with the cowhands to smooth over tensions caused by Tom's increasingly belligerent behavior, H.W. by giving Daniel the appearance of a man with family values, which helps during negotiations with families and small towns for land and drilling rights. Tensions develop between father and son when the sons eventually act on their own initiatives. Matt alienates Tom when he wrests control of the cattle drive from a near-homicidal Dunson, and Daniel viciously disowns H.W. when H.W. reveals plans to start his own oil company in Mexico. Without the support of their sons, both men fall into greater anger and bitterness.

The two men also have a conflicted relationship with religion. Tom appears to be a Christian, with "I'll read over him" (in reference to reading scripture at a funeral service) becoming his refrain. His devoutness is called into question, however, by the fact that some of the men he reads over are men he has himself killed. Daniel is more obviously at odds with religion. After paying lip service to landowners concerned about his religious beliefs, and after being humiliated by Eli, an ambitious preacher on whose father's land Plainview builds his fortune-making rig, Daniel's "victory" over Eli (and, symbolically, the Church) at film's end seems to cap not only his freedom and career, but his unspoken life's ambition.

I'm finished.

* Though I am not suggesting 2001: A Space Odyssey as part of a potential triple feature, this speech of Dunson's nonetheless reminds me of the prehistoric segment of that film. After being visited by the monolith, the primates discover that bones can be used as weapons. There is dramatic emphasis on how one group uses bones to kill members of another group, allowing the former to expand and dominate. Prior to this, however, emphasis is placed on the killing of an animal for food; shortly after the kill the group is shown eating meat, presumably for the first time, and eating lots of meat — a piece of raw flesh dangling from practically every primate hand. The infusion of that much protein into their diet — and this is something I picked up elsewhere, not directly from 2001 — allowed carnivorous primate brains to grow larger, giving them an evolutionary advantage and allowing them to expand and eventually evolve into the dominant species. Dunson's mention of beef, hungry people (by which he doubtless means White settlers), and time — "lots of time" — brings to mind this evolutionary process. While it doesn't qualify as an evolutionary advantage, certainly their great numbers, and not their weapons alone, enabled White settlers to overwhelm the native civilization (at least according to "Hollywood history" — see mentions of the relentlessness of the white onslaught in Dances With Wolves and Little Big Man, e.g.). Such numbers needed infrastructural support, and the raising of cattle contributed not only to that infrastructure, but to the need to annex more and more land on which to raise more and more cattle.