Tag: Motion Capture

AVATAR: FIRE AND ASH – Review

Varang (Oona Chaplin) in 20th Century Studios’ AVATAR: FIRE AND ASH. Photo courtesy of 20th Century Studios. © 2025 20th Century Studios. All Rights Reserved.

Director James Cameron is back with a third installment of his AVATAR franchise, which continues to deliver astounding visual effects and world-creation at the highest level. In the first film, a human expedition looking for resources to extract is sent to world called Pandora, a place with an un-breathable atmosphere and inhabited by tall, blue, technologically less-advanced people, dispatches a Marine, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), in the form of an avatar that looks like the forest-living Na’vi people, to learn more about them. But after falling in love with a Na’vi warrior woman, Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), Jake switches sides and leads a rebellion against the humans. The second film takes place some 15 years later, as Jake, wife Neytiri and their kids hide out from the human among some beach-dwelling peoples, pursued by Jake’s nemesis and fellow Marine, Quaritch (Stephen Lang). This third one, AVATAR: FIRE AND ASH, takes place shortly after that second film.

The main reason to see AVATAR: FIRE AND ASH, are the spectacular visual effects and it’s breathtaking world-building. The 3D visual effects are immersive and beautiful, with one breathtaking vista after another. AVATAR: FIRE AND ASH continues to astonish with innovative visual effects that combine motion-capture and digital effects, like the first film, and now including 3D like the second one, but the effects are even more fully integrated, allowing one to entirely be enveloped by its imaginary world. The impressive effects even continue in the scenes with regular non-CGI or motion-capture actor, creating a seamlessly believable world.

Since the outstanding visual effects are the major reason to see this film, the best way to do that is in a theater, on a big screen with 3D capability. If you watch it on a small screen at home or on a phone, you will be missing out most of the reason to see it at all.

The reason why that matters so much is, despite all that visual effect artistry and technical dazzle, the characters and story do not reach that same high level, remaining familiar figures from a classic hero’s tale, with the addition of a historical tale of a colonial or corporate power moving in on a less-technological indigenous one. These indigenous people are aided greatly by that fellow who switched sides, which sets up a David and Goliath / underdog tale.

Action is plentiful and looks great but the story adds more and more characters without expanding on the ones already there. The main characters remain underdeveloped, being either noble good guys or evil bad ones. The story focuses on battles and those breathtaking new vistas but that can hold audience interest forever.

The effects are 3D but the characters remain 2D. It is not the fault of the cast, but the writer. The characters are written to be simple: Worthington’s Jake is noble and brave, Saldana’s Neytiri is emotional and protective, Stephen Lang as Jake’s enemy is relentless, while Giovanni Ribisi’s corporate boss is greedy and heartless. If the story is familiar, the audience has to care about the people in the story to maintain interest, and that means making them more real, more rounded and full-developed.

This story introduces new peoples on Pandora, with peaceful trading peoples who travel through the air in ships attached to blip-like floating creatures. There is another, less peaceful group too, the raiders/pirates known as the Ash People, who prey on the traders and others less warlike folk.

Quaritch, now also using an avatar body, sets out to make contact the war-like Ash People, with the aim of forming an alliance. He hits it off with the Ash People’s fierce, fearless, blood-thirsty queen Varang (a splendid Oona Chaplin, granddaughter of Charlie Chaplin), and a deal is struck.

Meanwhile, Jake struggles with getting the Na’vi and water-based Metkayina Clan to consider using human weapons that he retrieved from the water after the last battle, rather than just bows and arrows. Jake and Neytiri, in addition to their own kids, have adopted two more: Kiri (Sigourney Weaver), the Na’vi child of the avatar of the scientist played by Sigourney Weaver in the first AVATAR, and a human boy nicknamed Spider (Jack Champion), the biological son of Jake’s enemy Quaritch, who needs a special mask to breath the air, a mask that has to be continually replenished to keep him alive.

Stephen Lang’s Quaritch and Oona Chaplin’s Ash queen are by far the most interesting in this one, but if left undeveloped, will just join the crowd of cookie-cutter characters. The story is packed with action and battles and so full of twists (and new characters) that there isn’t much time to do much with this growing cast of characters anyway. But failing to develop the characters beyond the two-dimensional means that maintaining interest in the familiar tropes of this tale will become increasingly challenging.

Reportedly, director/writer James Cameron has two more of these visual effects extravaganzas in the planning stage but unless he starts creating depth to this characters to sustain this hero tale, he is likely to see waning audience interest, something already underway. It can’t just be pretty pictures.

AVATAR: FIRE AND ASH opens in theaters on Friday, Dec. 19, 2025.

RATING: 2.5 out of 4 stars

BETTER MAN – Review

Jonno Davies as “Robbie Williams” in BETTER MAN from Paramount Pictures

Does BETTER MAN make a monkey out of British musician Robbie Williams? Well, no, but it does make an ape, specifically a chimp, out of the one-time member of British boy-band Take That, a singing star who achieved greater fame in a successful solo career.

Actually, the “monkey man” (ape, really) idea was Robbie Williams’ own. And that motion-capture creation works better in this biopic than you expect, helping emphasize Williams’ own feeling of being a misfit in the world, as well as helping us spot the character, the only ape one, in any crowd. Plus it means Jonno Davies, who plays the motion-capture young Robbie Williams, does not actually have to look like him.

Don’t know the name Robbie Williams? It doesn’t matter, if you are a fan or even unfamiliar with the singer’s career, because this biopic is so well-told as a story by director Michael Gracey (THE GREATEST SHOWMAN) that you still can become drawn in to its emotional arc. The tale follows Robbie from childhood to youthful ambition to young adult success, as he is driven to pursue the musical dreams his instilled by his absent father, while haunted by his broken relationship with that charismatic, elusive father. That story arc gives the film more of an Everyman quality, especially for anyone who has had a difficult relationship with a parent, although the film still follows the usual rise-and-fall-and-rise-again pattern of other music biopics.

You would think that making the lead character into a young chimp would be so distracting that viewers would never become fully immersed in the story. In fact, the opposite effect takes hold, once you get used to seeing it, and it gives the film both a kind-of perfect weirdness, plus a touch of humor, that boosts it above ordinary biopic.

Making him a chimp is a good choice works, due to audiences’ prior experiences with all those motion-capture apes in the PLANET OF THE APES movies (and even Gollum in the LORD OF THE RINGS films). In those, we spent hours with motion-capture chimps on screen. Here, Robbie Williams, played by Jonno Davies, is the only chimp on screen (and always a young chimp, who look closer to human), an effect that externalizes his inner feelings of being different, being out of place, from childhood through adulthood.

Because the chimp-human motion capture effect is so familiar, we get comfortable with it sooner than expected. It works better than another music biopic, where Pharrell Williams’ story is told in a Lego animation. Motion-capture allows us to see the play of emotion on the main character’s face, unlike the mainly-frozen Lego faces. Plus Robbie’s motion-capture chimp is the only one we have to deal with rather than a whole world of them.

The motion-capture technology now is so advanced that we lose none of Jonno Davies’ expressive acting as Robbie Williams, and in fact, it most likely is enhanced by the special effects. Davies’ Robbie is always a young chimp (who look more human-like anyway) but he starts out as a younger chimp, with Asmara Feik playing Robbie as a child. As always, the motion-capture work creates more of a human-chimp hybrid than a true chimp, and particularly the green-hazel eyes remain human. That helps emphasize facial expressions and emotions, but director Michael Gracey wisely keep out of any uncomfortable “uncanny valley” territory.

Of course, some will still find the ape-human FX distracting or even irritating. And, in many ways, BETTER MAN is a conventional musician biopic, following the usual rise-and-fall-and-rise-again pattern. But the use of motion-capture effects makes it unique at least in that respect, and the fact that director Gracey handles this material very well, keeping the pacing right and the focus on the personal side of the story, of a man haunted by an elusive parent. The combination of the music biopic with the emotional personal parental story and fine, affecting performances make this drama surprisingly engrossing.

Jonno Davies is outstanding as Robbie Williams, capturing an energy and personal charisma at the various points in his life, despite the special effects filter, and creating a very watchable performance in the musical numbers. Asmara Feik plays Robbie Williams well as a gawking kid, while Jonno Davies takes over as Robbie grows into an ambitious, smart-mouthed street-wise young teen, a teen performer thrust into the boy band fame crush, and then as a surprisingly elegant young man (in chimp form, no small feat), as a star at fame’s peak. Further, the film is aided by a fine supporting cast, including Alison Steadman as young Robbie’s emotional rock Betty, Raechelle Banno as his young love interest Nicole Appleton, and particularly Steve Pemberton as Robbie’s charismatic, manipulative, unreliable father Peter.

The combination of polished visual effects, strong storytelling and a compelling performance, musically and acting, by Jonno Davies and strong supporting cast, all make BETTER MAN a better drama than one expects from a musician biopic, with an interesting visual FX twist.

BETTER MAN opens Friday, Jan. 10, in theaters.

RATING: 3 out of 4 stars

KINGDOM OF THE PLANET OF THE APES – Review

(L-R): Noa (played by Owen Teague), Soona (played by Lydia Peckham), and Anaya (played by Travis Jeffery) in 20th Century Studios’ KINGDOM OF THE PLANET OF THE APES. Photo courtesy of 20th Century Studios. © 2024 20th Century Studios. All Rights Reserved.

KINGDOM OF THE PLANET OF THE APES continues the “Planet of the Apes” science fiction saga that was rebooted from 1968’s THE PLANET OF THE APES with Charleton Heston into a trilogy that started with RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES. The last two films in that trilogy, DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES and WAR FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES, directed by Matt Reeves and starring the great motion-capture actor Andy Serkis as lead ape Caesar, reached soaring, almost Shakespearean, storytelling heights, while also wowing audiences with the realism of its technically advanced motion-capture acting and special effects.

That’s a hard act to follow, but KINGDOM OF THE PLANET OF THE APES does not even try to match the heights reached in the last two “Apes” movies, instead offering more of a coming-of-age and hero’s journey adventure tale set several hundred years after the last of that previous trilogy.

Gone are both director Matt Reeves and the great Andy Serkis, but KINGDOM OF THE PLANET OF THE APES still delivers an entertaining action-adventure tale in the “Planet of the Apes” world.

Wes Ball, who helmed the MAZE RUNNER trilogy, directs and the story features all new characters. The film is filled with excellent world-building for the apes’ post-human environment or vine-covered human-built ruins, and even more impressive and technically advanced motion-capture,. Unlike the 1968 original, the actors do not wear masks or make-up but gear for advanced motion-capture technology, which films and translates the actors’ performance, their facial expressions and movements, on to digitally-created apes, with even more incredible detail and subtle effect than in previous films using mo-cap. From a technical aspect, this film is incredible.

KINGDOM OF THE PLANET OF THE APES returns us to once again explore the world where enhanced apes and diminished humans battle for the dominance. In the previous trilogy, a lab-created virus gone wrong gives apes the power of speech and enhanced intelligence, while it kills off humans and leaves the remaining humans without speech and mentally diminished. In that trilogy, it was the human’s world that the apes lived in, but now things are reversed and it is the apes’ world that humans inhabit.

KINGDOM OF THE PLANET OF THE APES is a coming-of-age story, in which a young ape goes on an unexpected adventure of discovery, revealing long-forgotten history and hidden secrets. In this future time, Caesar (the ape leader of the previous films) is a distant, barely-remembered figure. This world is filled with little villages of apes – chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans – who have formed their own clans, and are going about their peaceful low-tech lives in the vine-covered shadow the remains of the human built environment. Humans themselves are are largely absent, a rarely seen wild animal – mute, feral and dim-witted – who are so scarce they are almost mythic. In the village of the Eagle Clan, they are called “echos.”

After a brief scene of the funeral of Caesar, we leap forward several hundred years. Noa (Owen Teague) is a young chimpanzee in the leafy village of the Eagle Clan, the son of the clan leader who is also the trainer and guardian of the clan’s eagles, which help them with hunting. Noa and his friends Anaya (Travis Jeffery) and Soona (Lydia Peckham), are approaching their coming-of-age ceremony, where they will get their own eagle, but first they must climb steep cliffs to steal the eagle eggs from the precariously perched nests. Noa is a brave and skilled climber, but his jokester friend Anaya less so, yet both boys are encouraged by enthusiastic adventure girl Soona. Noa is bold but he is also the one who reminds the others to remember the rules – the laws – of their traditional village, laws based on the teaching of Caesar. Noa has high standards for himself, and tries hard to please his somewhat intimidating father.

As the young apes eagerly await the ceremony that marks their entry into adulthood, tragedy strikes, Their village is attacked by a strange group of apes, who often invoke the name “Caesar” during their brutal attack. The attack propels Noa onto a journey, one which leads to new discoveries that upend his view of the world.

Along the way, Noa encounters a quirky, erudite and talkative orangutan named Raka (a delightful Peter Macon), who is the last of group devoted to keeping the memory and teachings of Caesar alive. Raka tells Noa many surprising things and also shows kindness to a human woman who has been following Noa, dubbing her Nova. As Noa’s journey continues, we eventually learn that the attackers were followers of a gorilla named Proximus (Kevin Durand), who styles himself the new Caesar and the king of the apes.

Further description risks spoilers, but there are twists and surprises ahead, an upending Noa’s idea of the world, and a pointing to a new direction for the series, leaving a door open to, possibly, another trilogy.

Although Caesar is a distant figure, almost a legend, his presence dominates throughout the film. There are some impressive action sequences, starting with the one where the young friends are trying to steal eggs from eagles’ nests. The feel of the film is more like the director’s MAZZ RUNNER series but it works for this hero’s tale adventure. Still, the journey part gets off the a rather slow start and things drag a bit before a turn when the travelers encounter more apes, and the film again sags a bit later on before launching into its final, thrilling action sequence.

Character development is not as complex as in the last two Apes films, but that is not surprising for a hero’s journey adventure tale. However, the acting is very good and further advances in the mo-cap technology make the detail and nuances of expression on the digital apes’ faces breathtaking at times.

The cast is very good, starting with Owen Teague as Noa. Andy Serkis, who very much invented mo-cap acting, starting with his role as Gollum in the LORD OF THE RINGS movies, actually coached Teague for this role, and also worked with some of the other actors as well. All the actors had to participate in training in ape movements, although these apes, as they advance in language, also tend more to walk upright like humans as they rapidly evolve.

The amazingly convincing translation from the actors face to that of a digital ape is more impressive than if they were playing some kind of made-up alien, as we all know well what apes look like, making the risk of either images that ring false or enter the “uncanny valley” a higher possibility. But the technical work is outstanding, and one of the joys of the film.

Acting is strong throughout, with nice work particularly from Kevin Durand as the smooth-talking, self-styled king Proximus, and the very entertaining Peter Macon, who adds a needed droll humor.

But the standout in this adventure film is the technical side, which is a joy. While not reaching the heights of the previous trilogy, the sequel/reboot KINGDOM OF THE PLANET OF THE APES delivers enough satisfying adventure entertainment on its own, with new characters and an open door to new directions set it up well for a new trilogy, creating a little intrigue but not leaving things unfinished

THE KINGDOM OF THE PLANET OF THE APES opens Friday, May 10, in theaters

RATING: 3 out of 4 stars

THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN – The Review

Motion capture animation and 3D appear to be the rising stars of cinema technology, both of which have the equal shares of supporters and opponents. One thing is for sure, both relatively new technologies are still within their infancy, but there are occasionally examples of the inspiring potential of this trend toward high-tech storytelling. The most current being THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN, a collaborative effort of gargantuan proportion.

While many audiences may not be aware of the film’s origin, or too young to know better, THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN: THE SECRET OF THE UNICORN — which happens to be the film’s official, unofficial full title — is adapted from a comic book series from the ’30s of the same name by the Belgian artist Herge, which also became an animated television series which ran 1991-1992. Sadly, I must report I have no personal knowledge or experience with either, so you will not find me referencing the source material in this review, but, by all means… seek them out as I plan to do.

With all the history behind TINTIN, it’s no wonder the film has such an all-star team of imaginative storytellers working behind the scenes to bring the adventures to a whole new audience. Directed by Steven Spielberg, who also co-produced the film alongside Peter Jackson (LORD OF THE RINGS), THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN was written by Steven Moffat, a very talented writer behind the popular BBC series SHERLOCK and DOCTOR WHO, with assistance from Edgar Wright (SHAUN OF THE DEAD) and Joe Cornish (ATTACK THE BLOCK). That’s a lot of creative star power, and we haven’t even introduced the cast yet.

THE ADVENTURES F TINTIN follows a clever, young report named Tintin – no, the dog is not names Tintin, that’s an entirely separate franchise – played by Jamie Bell (JUMPER). Tintin has an unquenchable curiosity, so when he happens upon a magnificent model ship, he manages to haggle a good deal. Immediately following, he finds himself the center of an immense mystery regarding that model ship, for which various unsavory and dark figures are seeking for them selves. This is where Tintin’s adventure begins, leading him to the drunken Captain Haddock, played by Andy Serkis (RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES), a man with a family history crucial to the mystery of the model ship. Tintin also encounters Ivanovich Sakharine, played by Daniel Craig (CASINO ROYALE), a deviously cunning and dangerous foe seeking the secret of the model ship.

One thing you will certainly not experience during the film is sleep. THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN is non-stop action and endlessly fun. Tintin is sort of a combination of the Hardy Boys and Indiana Jones wrapped up into a small, scrappy package, always getting into a pickle but always managing to find a way out of trouble. He and his trusty Scottish terrier – I may be off slightly on the breed — are an effective investigative team, as they work with Captain Haddock and his rum-induced amnesia to recover the secret of the model ship before Sakharine figures it out himself.

THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN takes the audience halfway around the globe to Morocco, where the greatest excitement of the story takes place. Tintin runs into a number of interesting characters along the way, including the bumbling Thompson twin detectives, played unrecognizably by Simon Pegg and Nick Frost (SHAUN OF THE DEAD, HOT FUZZ). Cary Elwes (THE PRINCESS BRIDE, SAW) also makes a welcome vocal cameo as the Pilot. The most awe-inspiring scene in the film occurs in Morocco, one last massive chase sequence that resembles a deadly life-sized Rube Goldberg contraption that spans an entire ancient city. This sequence is bound to have you leaning forward, even partially lifted from your seat, as Tintin repeatedly navigates through the perils of the Moroccan streets and Sakharine’s henchmen.

I’ve never had a personal grudge against motion capture, which seems a logical marriage between live acting and animation, as we move forward into new cinematic frontiers of technology. With that said, THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN does a splendid job of capturing the energy and excitement of the story using motion capture, but I am also pleased to say that the film gets the 3D right as well, integrating the often intrusive and annoying technology into the entire film, still utilizing the gimmick value of the tool, but without getting in the way. The use of 3D enhances the story without causing hurdles for the film to stumble over, which is rare indeed.

John Williams has been a busy man in 2011, having scored WAR HORSE as well as THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN, but the difference between the two scores is the music’s presence. In WAR HORSE, Williams’ music n unconventional backseat, but in TINTIN his work stands front and center, making itself known with all its glory and becomes, as is usually the case, a character in and of itself.

THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN is likely to be the most fun you’ve had in an animated family flick all year, perfectly kid friendly with plenty of visual stimulus to keep the rug rats entertained, while still creative and intelligent enough to keep adults thrilled and engaged. Personally, this is the first animated film in some time I have left the theater with an immediate desire to watch a second time.

Overall Rating: 4 out of 5 stars