English Canada’s two most successful film directors released movies in 2022, and they make a great study in contrasts. James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of the Water is a Disney sci-fi extravaganza. It’s probably the most expensive movie ever made and is one of the highest grossing. David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future is a Greek-Canadian-French-British body-horror film with a modest budget it did not come close to recouping at the box office. Cameron’s movie is fast-paced, full of motion, and consists almost entirely of computer generated effects, while Cronenberg’s film is slow, static, and had a busy props department. The former is a visually marvellous1 , clearly told story about familial love and community responsibility, while the latter is a janky-looking, obtuse nightmare about erotic desire and expression. Both films contain plenty of violence. For Cameron violence is an expression of good or evil; for Cronenberg violence is quite literally an art form.
Like the first Avatar the sequel presents us with cat-like aliens living on a faraway planet. They are hunter-gatherers living in balance with their eco-system, and represent indigenous nations the world over in their struggle against resource-extraction and colonialism. These films reverse the Western formula of the mid-twentieth century. The Cowboys are the American military and the corporate interests they serve, and the audience is encouraged to identify with and root for the resisting Indians as they defend their land and way of life. There’s been some criticism that these movies lack indigenous representation and lean into white saviour tropes. I’m not sure it would be better if Cameron had cast indigenous people as an alien species, and anyway the influence is general enough to cover most of the globe—the blue Na’vi could stand in for tribes in the Amazon, Papua New Guinea, or Sub-Saharan Africa. It is pretty remarkable that Hollywood’s biggest global product is so passionately anti-colonial, anti-capitalist, anti-military, anti-extraction, pro-environment, and pro-indigenous-sovereignty. You simply cannot say the same about the Marvel, Star Wars, Fast & Furious, or Bond franchises. The other big blockbuster last year, Top Gun: Maverick, was made with the close participation of the United States Air Force.
Of course the Avatar films, like their distributor Disney, are themselves a hegemonic enterprise. Their technical sophistication and visual intensity are so overwhelming that local cultural production doesn’t stand a chance. The funding for the films came from a monopolistic corporation that intentionally squeezes out smaller movies from cinemas. The 2+ billion in ticket sales could, theoretically, have been spread out to support hundreds of different films by indigenous filmmakers, keeping their own existing cultures alive. Then again it might be that, in the current theatre-going landscape, only films with the scale and bombast of Avatar have any chance of being seen on the big screen at all.
Crimes of the Future, which came and went with limited fanfare, is set in a future where people no longer get infections or feel physical pain. This is a Cronenberg film, so new forms of erotic activity have sprung up in response to the new paradigm, including mutilation and amateur surgery. Some people are also growing mysterious new organs, much to the alarm of governments and to the fascination of the arts community. Our protagonist Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortenson) is a performance artist whose partner Caprice (Léa Seydoux) surgically removes these bonus organs in rusted out gallery spaces for small audiences.
This is, by design, a disgusting, upsetting movie. It starts with a child getting murdered, and only escalates (or goes downhill) from there. Annie is baffled that anyone would enjoy watching such a thing, and I can’t really say that I enjoyed it. It did, however, give me something interesting to think about. Spoiler alert here: it turns out the organs showing up in people’s bodies are part of an emergent branch of human evolution, which allows people to eat and digest plastic. That we might adapt to our toxic, artificial environment—that, in fact, our environment isn’t toxic or artificial at all but just another form of nature we can live with—is a provocative and interesting idea. Cronenberg came up with the idea decades ago, and has expressed wonder that since then micro-plastics have shown up in our bodies and throughout the natural world.
Crimes of the Future doesn’t suggest that turning into toxic garbage eating organisms is good, but it is maybe a more grounded vision of the future than what’s offered in The Way of the Water. There is, frankly, no chance that humans are going to ever live in balance with nature again. Until we go extinct our planet will exist under the tremendous weight of our technically advanced species, and the best we can hope to do is manage our impact.2 Cameron’s films reflect a previous era of industrial encroachment on nature, and root for the indigenous people to somehow stave it off. But that battle, on Earth at least, is long, long lost. With radical changes to our diets and consumption habits the living world could be restored in many places, but humans are simply too demanding and too ingenious to ever fall back “in balance” with nature. The final image in Crimes of the Future is Viggo’s gorgeous, incredibly expressive face chomping on a piece of plastic and gazing off with ecstatic relief as he finally accepts the future.
At 3 hours and 12 minutes it’s probably a bit too long for the story it’s telling. On the other hand it does spend that entire runtime producing the most immersive digital renderings I’ve ever seen. IMAX High Frame Rate 3-D is more like a hallucination or a dream than something you watch.
To pick just one sobering statistic, 60% of all mammals are farmed, 36% are humans, and only 4% of mammals are wild.