The Hype Monster vs. The Great and Powerful Backlash

Hype is tough to avoid. The dutiful moviegoer and friend that I am, I like to recommend a good movie when I see it. Plus, if a good film does well at the box office, there may be more of its kind down the road and less garbage wasting screens at my local theater. There’s a difference though between a recommendation and hype. A recommendation says, “See this, I liked it and you will too.” Hype builds the anticipation to levels a film could never possibly satisfy. As a result, people who didn’t see the movie the opening weekend and aren’t riding the hype train feel underwhelmed when they finally do get to the movies. Thus, backlash ensues.

This happens with movies of all kinds from summer blockbusters to the Oscar-nominated. It happened with Avatar last year, The Dark Knight two years ago and it’s starting again with Inception right now. All of the above are critically acclaimed and the first two have become megahits with the latter likely to follow suit. I enjoyed all of them too, but it’s important to keep things in perspective.

Critics and moviegoers alike were hailing Avatar as a game-changer. Movies would never be the same, they said. Six months later, Avatar hasn’t had nearly the cultural impact of Star Wars, which the film was repeatedly compared to, or even Cameron’s own Terminator films. For better or worse Avatar has popularized 3D and proved it to be a profitable investment for studios. Yet I’m at a loss to quote a single good line from the movie and I can only think of one memorable scene off the top of my head. (I rather like the scene when he first gets into the avatar and feels the dirt under his feet.) For me, Avatar remains in my mind what it was when I first saw it theaters: A visually stunning and creative but poorly written sci-fi action movie.

When The Dark Knight came out two years ago, there didn’t seem to be any other movie out that summer and were people so wrong to treat it as such? The Dark Knight is the best superhero movie yet (though Spiderman 2 is a close second for me) and I admire the way director Christopher Nolan gave his film the tone, structure and grandeur of a crime epic. Is it a great film though, in the Citizen Kane, Godfather or Fargo sense of the word? Probably not. That didn’t stop me from championing it as such at the time, of course, but I have to be honest and look at the film in perspective. Heath Ledger deserved every bit of hype he got, but Christian Bale’s grunt can be a bit much and I wish the movie didn’t end with such an obvious sequel set-up. (That last shot of Batman on his motorcycle was cool at the time, but it’s more frustrating than anything else now.) Still, I look forward to one day showing Nolan’s Batman movies to my kids the way my father showed me Richard Donner’s Superman movies. As a piece of pop culture, The Dark Knight is a classic. But remember, that’s pop as in popcorn.

Now Nolan is at it again with Inception, a movie that everyone and their grandma have been calling a “mindfuck.” I’m still not sure what that means and how the word qualifies as a recommendation but I think I understand the intentions. Personally, I prefer the way a Charlie Kaufman movie makes sweet love to my mind and doesn’t just leave the next morning but to each their own, I suppose.

Since Inception’s release, some critics have laid out reasonable critiques of the film, mostly arguing that the movie’s action sequences and set pieces lack the mystical and amorphous qualities of real dreaming. This is true. I admire all of the above-linked reviews, particularly the A.O. Scott one, but I think some of these critics are missing the point. Christopher Nolan set out to make an action movie sprinkled with thoughtful ideas, not the other way around. If he did, he would’ve made it more Waking Life than The Matrix. Those are two more movies I like, but for very different reasons.

Movies operate on a sliding scale of ambition and Nolan has succeeded wonderfully in making a brilliant action movie. That little trick about how ten seconds in one dream equates to twenty minutes in another and an hour in a third is ingenious and I’ve never seen anything like it before. It’s an inventive little cheat to give our heroes more time and who cares if it doesn’t hold up to anything resembling logic in the real world?

Those proudly waving the flag of backlash are shouting that the movie is not a visionary masterpiece. Who said it was? Certainly not Nolan. Ah yes, that snow-balling monster of hype did, giving a perfectly entertaining action blockbuster labels it never wanted.

When I searched for a synonym for "hype" in my computer’s thesaurus, I got "ballyhoo" as an option. I like that word more because I think it captures the ridiculousness of people's tendency to overrate. See Inception and see it again but please, let’s try and keep the ballyhoo in check.

- Steve Avigliano, 7/19/10