Stop me if you've heard this before: A director who is the master of his medium, suddenly devotes all of his attention to an original scifi IP of his own making, with woefully lacking plot and characters, but it gets defended as one of the most beautiful things to grace the screen, and ends up getting #1 in ratings for its niche.
This tortured analogy compares James Cameron's Avatar, and Vince Gilligan's Plur1bus (or Pluribus), both of which are peaking in attention this month. Avatar 3 Fire and Ash just came out, and Pluribus has the most viewers Apple+ TV has ever gotten.
Most importantly, both of them have gotten the epithet "pretty" but in entirely different ways.
(For instance, I only think one of them is good.)
To deal with the complainers: both of these works lack a lot in the writing department. I know both of them have their defenders, but they're telling more about themselves than their fave. The Avatar series is the most basic alien Dances with Wolves story, done three times with extremely forgettable characters and dialogue. Pluribus has all the intelligence of a five page science fiction short story, but has stretched it out over an entire season of television. Both of them expect this to fill nine hours.
Don't fight to the death defending your "side" with contrarian arguments and fury. Admit your weakpoints, and move on.
Their strong points are that everyone agrees these works are "pretty." Maybe the prettiest thing ever seen. But what does that mean?
Pluribus is pretty in the craft of cinema. It has artful shots, where you can tell so much thought and effort has been put into the color composition and framing down to character details.
These following 17 shots are all from a single episode.
Besides the lighting and beauty, just look how well lined up this in these shots are. The ridge in the hills is pointing to Mansouso's face, and see how Carol's shirt matches the white cloud right behind her, while her blue jeans match the blue sky and her head is where the sun is. Do you know how long Vince had to wait for the clouds to be in that alignment and to figure where to put Carol and get the exact shot? Plus Carol had to wear that outfit for the entire scene leading up to this, and be put background where that wouldn't clash?
Here's my favorite shot so far, from episode 2.
Look how Carol and Zosia's colors are photo negatives of each other, in hair and top. Look how for both of them the back shoulder line lines up perfectly with their hairline. Look how Carol's downward eyes cast are pointing at Zosia's center, and Zosia's arm is parallel pointing at Carol's center.
Best of all, look how Carol is *within* the window frame, while Zosia is being pushed by Carol's gaze *outside* of the window frame. Carol's shirt matches and lines up with that dark reflection in the window. Look at every line that matches some shoulder level or top of the head level.
This is a renaissance painting! So much thought and work went into this one shot, just to communicate the attitudes of the two main characters. With shots like this, who needs dialogue?
Very often Carol is color matched to fit the background, whereas whoever is the representative of the hivemind, actually contrasts sharply with the background.
Yeah, the color of that car which appears in multiple episodes, just coincidentally matches Zosia's dress, just like the package Carol carries only coincidentally fills the line created by the curb as it goes behind Carol's sweatshirt. And Carol coincidentally changes into a minimalist green to match the minimalist-but-forest-colors grocery store.
(Whenever I see someone's outfit in the show, and don't see how those colors interact interestingly with the background scenery, it ends up that they are wearing that same outfit in a DIFFERENT background later, where it was clear why these colors were chosen.)
Allow me a brief detour of pettiness. How bad are television viewers at interpreting imagery? This is currently going viral as a blinding insight.
See? Colors are just a code Vince uses to say what side people are on. Let's look at this shot now:
Carol perfectly fades into the blue and white background so much you might not even notice she's there, especially compared to the BLARING YELLOW AND RED of the hive rep. Carol is part of this world, the Hive is not.
The above thread explains this shot as "the hivemind is pretending individuality to convince Carol of something and Carol is blue because she's trying to convince--" no this is just too stretched to continue.
And what would red mean, and the blacks and whites Carol and Zosia sometimes wear?
The colors are meant to be understood as part of the shot composition, and you have to talk about what each color is doing in each scene to contrast characters and connect parts of the background. (And bright primary, "plastic" colors are just an overall color-set Vince has chosen to be part of the show's entire character. Yes, a lot of items are the same hazard-warning yellow of the title's text or commercial's backgrounds. This is not because yellow is code for a particular ideology within the show arghbarglelggg.)
Plus they put an entire episode in the Darien Gap and that's just cool.
So, is this sort of artful composition what we mean when we call Avatar pretty?
Hahahahaha no.
Now, I won't deny that these are some killer screensavers (from 1998.) Cameron has envisioned a pretty rad fantasy world. But do any of these shots TELL us anything about the story, besides "hey look at this."[1] Is there anything artful to it besides "character design sketchbooks and teraflops of CGI exist." It's just kind of dumped on a plate for us to admire in isolation. Where anything is positioned relative to other parts of the frame (besides "dead center of the screen) is just irrelevant.
Is there anything we are learning from color contrasts? Ha no, that would require multiple colors on screen.
[1] Okay one thing we learn from these shots is "Fire chick is hot." Which is no mean feat! After three movies Cameron finally has a Na'vi who looks better as a Na'vi than as a human actress, and not just a human actor awkwardly stretched over a 7 foot frame. That is, some progress!
(Also I would like to make clear that James Cameron is a polymath genius who has revolutionized film multiple times and made some of the best movies of the past 50 years. He has forgotten far more about film than I will ever know. Judging his work like this feels like the highest hubris. But also this stuff is just boring.)
Ironically, the fact that any of these shots would work just as well looked at from any perspective, kind of makes the anti-filmic point. James has not created a film and a POV to see things from, he has created an entire 3-dimensional world to be immersed in. Frankly, that's a very ambitious goal.
Why are the movies three hours long? Well, if you bought a ticket to an amusement park, wouldn't you want to spend more time there rather than less? You don't want an efficiently paced story, you want to relax on the lawn and watch the jelly-fish caravan float overhead.
Martin Scorsese:
“I don’t see them. I tried, you know? But that’s not cinema,” Scorsese told Empire magazine. “Honestly, the closest I can think of them, as well made as they are, with actors doing the best they can under the circumstances, is theme parks. It isn’t the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being.”
Avatar is the kind of pretty that is a nine-hour day at a theme park without the lines, and friend food, and sunburn. That's honestly impressive! But it is an empty kind of pretty, the derogatory use of the term.
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