Beg pardon. I’m lousy with names – I tend to focus more on the message. Point is what it is though.
Kate.lin, your English seems pretty darn great to me. I’d be hard pressed to express what you did in Chinese!
I haven’t seen any films by the director you mentioned, but will have a look.
As for your criticism of naivety and schism within the film, well, it’s a subjective consideration, but I didn’t see it that way. I thought it was a rather subtle play on the theme of humans as merciless and technologically-advanced aliens from the perspective of an isolated species – which ultimately transforms via the main character’s perseverence in trying to communicate with us into a more benign “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”. This theme gets brought in right off with the initial outer space shot that focusses in on first Earth, then Antarctica. We have a sort of space/Earth; Earth/Antarctica parallelism there that sets the stage for the dynamic that will be developed. Very quickly, it is more concretely manifested with the sea-gull’s story of alien abduction, and it plays out from there.
What you guys saw as a giant Greenpeace sign (when the fishing trauler is first seen by the penguins), I saw as the citizens of New York and LA looking up at the giant alien ships enveloping their entire cities in shadow in “Independence Day”. They are getting their first “real” view of the “annihilators” that have been described to them. (When you consider the methods employed by the fishing industry these days - drift-nets, bottom-trauling, 2-mile-line fishing and so on to catch an ever-dwindling supply of sea-life for the bottomless stomachs of nations like Japan and China, I think the depiction is accurate).
This portrayal is tempered, however, by the child at the zoo, who, unlike the headless adults, is able to make a connection that establishes communication through Mumble’s quirky method of self-expression. (Come to think of it, this aspect calls to mind the children in [url=World-class violinist performs in Wash. subway at rush-hour story[/url], who kept craning their necks to see the virtuoso violinist as their parents pressed on, headlong and headless.)
The “second part” of the movie is not just about environmentalism, it’s about Mumble’s not backing down – neither to his own kind, nor to an alien menace, nor to the mind-numbingly huge distance that separates them (That distance, and the isolation it creates, is the reason that penguins were the proper casting choice for this movie - although admittedly they have been kind of trendy ever since “Madagascar”). Moreover, this portion of the movie - as in “Close Encounters” - is about establishing communication when words or voices fail.
I think when we get down to it, what makes people uncomfortable about this movie is not “heaviness”, but that it portrays all-too-accurately our race as it would initially be perceived by a species that first came into contact with us. With the whole “self-esteem” movement in education and Doctor Spock in parenting, feeling guilty is definitely “out” these days – “Don’t preach to me” is everybody’s slogan – whether they need preaching or not.