Mental illness never looked so adorable as it does in Infinitely Polar Bear, Maya Forbes’ true-to-life family story about her upbringing in 1970s Boston. The film is an homage to her father, played by Mark Ruffalo, a manic-depressive bohemian type with a big mouth, a big heart and a voracious appetite for making others happy. He’s tasked with taking care of his two daughters while his wife, Maggie (Zoe Saldana), goes off to finish an MBA program. Infinitely Polar Bear isn’t a dreary family drama about a mentally ill father, but a gentle ode to a family man who, despite a difficult condition, kept his family together.

I spoke to Maya during her visit to San Francisco about the film she says she’s been preparing her whole life to make and the strange business of teaching two people to act like her parents. Infinitely Polar Bear is out now.

So what you’ve done here, really, is tell your family’s story, which isn’t entirely flattering, to thousands of people. Almost everyone’s had an emotional reaction to it and enjoyed the film. That’s got to make you proud.
I’m really happy because I wanted to humanize this issue and tell the story of someone I really loved, who was manic-depressive. I feel like you don’t see that a lot, someone who’s struggling and is a difficult person, but still has wonderful qualities. I’m also very happy to tell the story of my mother because I’m very proud of her.

Some actors, when they’re portraying real people, take the approach of not researching much at all and just playing the character to serve the story. Others research as much as they can. What was the case with Mark?
Both Mark and Zoe wanted to know as much as they could. Zoe wanted to meet my mother, and she talked to her a few times. I gave her pictures, letters my parents had written. She just wanted to dig into that as much as she could. My father died in 1998, so he wasn’t available, but Mark started to have dreams about him where my dad would give him notes. With him I shared video of my father speaking. Mark had never done a character from this milieu before, so we talked a lot about the way Cam enunciates—he savors the words he says. Mark’s often cast as characters who mumble more, but here he needed to speak crisply. They both wanted as much guidance as they could get because we wanted to make the world we were building palpable.

You’ve said that you’ve been preparing your whole life to make this movie. Were you emotionally prepared for this process? It’s a little bizarre, teaching people to act like your parents.
It’s really interesting. People ask how I feel about “exposing my life.” I think of it as sharing rather than exposing. It is a lot to put out there, and I never wanted to be self-indulgent, which is why the film is so lean and funny. But I wanted to also make it an emotionally immersive film. I’m so happy people responded to it the way they did, because if you put yourself out there and people say the movie sucks, it’s like they’re saying I suck! [laughs]

There’s a shot near the end of the film where Mark and Zoe lean on each other in an interesting way during a very emotional conversation, almost in a huddle rather than an embrace.
That was something I always saw in my head. It was an expression of, we’re together, but we’re apart. We’re two roots of a tree. It was divisive, that shot. People thought it looked weird. The other part of it is that, when you’re a kid, you don’t want to look over and see that! [laughs] You don’t want to see your parents standing like that and crying! It’s embarrassing!

I thought Mark’s physical performance was particularly good, how he occupies space and moves around a room.
Sometimes I feel like his eyes and his body are doing different things, and that’s really great. There’s this tension between them. We talked a lot about the movement of this character. He’s a theatrical person. When he sighs, it’s heavy. He wants you to know, “I feel really sad right now, and you should feel sad for me.” [laughs] There are also all these ways Cam lights his cigarette. In my father’s era, they went to the movies and saw guys like Jack Nicholson and Jean-Paul Belmondo and Steve McQueen. There was that era of cool guys, and I think there’s a little of that in Cam’s character as well.

I found the set design to be incredibly immersive.
Thank you! I wanted it to be immersive. I had a bunch of pictures we used as a visual reference. My production designer is from a similar world, so I gave him three pictures and he knew what I was looking for. There were always layers of stuff. Every wall was covered in art. We had a door with slats, and any card we got would go into those slats. There was a lot of texture to the world. My aunt kept a lot of my dad’s stuff, so a lot of the things you see in the apartment are actually his. That’s indie filmmaking! Way too indie! [laughs]

This movie kinda feels like a mom and pop shop. You’ve got a lot of your family members involved.
My husband is the producer and plays that loser guy Maggie drives to New York with. My daughter plays me, essentially, and it was wonderful to work with her. My oldest daughter makes a cameo at the end. My sister wrote the song after the end credits. My aunt drove my dad’s stuff to set in her van, and the guy who plays the money manager who gets punched is my cousin, who actually is a money manager! [laughs]

What will this movie mean to your family as the years go on? Will you watch it annually or something? [laughs]
I don’t know! That’s the funny thing. Sometimes when you’re sitting on an airplane, everyone’s watching the same movie. What’s it gonna be like if everyone is watching my movie? It’d be weird. I don’t know what the movie will mean to me or my daughters.

Did unexpected themes or ideas surface in the story once you started shooting or after it was finished?
Yes, they did. I realized I’d never thought of how theatrical my father was. I was talking about the heavy sighs earlier. I realized my dad was in a movie of his own mind, the movie star of his own life. I also learned about mental illness. When you have a tendency toward mania, you get ramped up by stimulus. It was true that my dad couldn’t go to New York City. It was so hard for him to deal with all that stuff coming at him. I feel like I understood a lot more what he dealt with and managed to overcome to take care of us. There was no way he could deal with the pressure of an actual career. I gained a lot of understanding about what he struggled with.

I love how many women are in your movie.
Thank you. I didn’t know until later that my movie was considered diverse because it had 50 percent women. It wasn’t a conscious thing for me; I just had all these characters I wanted to populate the movie with.

Women make up half of this country, but they’re treated as if they’re minorities in movies!
I know! I feel like there’s a genre no one talks about: the “woman-less” movie. No women at all. I feel like there are so many movies like that. It’s crazy.

A lot of the time people with mental illnesses are portrayed as scary people. I love how likable Cam is. It’s clear, even when he’s angry, how much he loves his family.
When my kids were little, I remember somebody telling me, “Never lose your temper around your children.” I’m not a robot! I want my kids to see me as a person! I thought of my dad. He would have a temper, but he’d apologize. Did I love it? No, but who wants to walk around with someone who’s on their best behavior all the time? I want to see real people in all of their horrible glory. That’s the thing with mental illness; sometimes it seems like they’re saner than the rest of us. They’re not playing along with things that don’t make any sense. That line between where mental illness is and where sanity is has always been very interesting to me. It’s a confusing line.

Talk about killing your darlings.
The scene that was the hardest for me to leave out was near the end, between the scene where Cam and Maggie are crying and the goodbye scene at the school. Cam and the girls are driving back from New York after a weekend of staying with their mother. She has a boyfriend, and they don’t like that. Cam is totally understanding and says, “Mommy tries so hard. She wanted things to go differently.” He was so compassionate in that scene, which was something I loved about my father. For whatever flaws he had, he was so kind to other people. He was so understanding that he was hard to live with. The scene ended up being confusing because people didn’t know where they were coming from or where they were going to. I loved it, but it seemed unnecessary.

I like how fluid the movie is, tonally. The laughs bleed into the serious scenes and the funny scenes often carry some heavy emotions.
Mark and Zoe and I were trying to go “life,” you know? I’ll be crying one minute and laughing the next, and it’s all rolled up into one mix of emotions. It was in the script that there’s a lot of humor, and we tried to be true to that in the performances. In the editing, you have to keep playing with that tone. You want it to flow. It is a balancing act with the tone.

I love how Cam is always tinkering with stuff.
He’s always trying to fix things. My father was always trying to fix things, but he could never fix himself. That was moving to me. Anything that was broken had his name on it. It’s funny because Mark Ruffalo is like that, too.

Are you and your husband going to co-direct your next film?
Yes, we are. We’re so excited. It’s for Jack Black, and it’s based on a real story. There was a documentary called The Man Who Would Be Polka King, about this guy who came here from Poland in the ’80s to be a polka sensation. He did become a polka sensation in Pennsylvania, wearing these bedazzled rhinestone costumes. He also ran a Ponzi scheme. It’s a true-crime comedy with polka music and dancing! Jack’s a great actor. You really feel for him; he’s got a great vulnerability.

Somehow, some way, filmmaker Maya Forbes has made mental illness adorable. Actually, that “somehow” is in truth a someone. Mark Ruffalo stars in Forbes’ true-to-life family story Infinitely Polar Bear as Cam Stuart, an eccentric, manic-depressive husband to a black working woman, Maggie (Zoe Saldana), and two young girls, Amelia (Imogene Wolodarsky, Forbes’ daughter) and Faith (Ashley Aufderheide). Set in 1970s Boston, the film is based on Forbes’ childhood, though more specifically, it’s a love letter to her father.

We meet him wearing only red briefs, banging on the windows of his family’s locked car, Maggie and the kids cowering inside with their packed suitcases. After his mental breakdown and a short, institutionalized recovery, Cam is met with the biggest challenge of his life: to better support the family, Maggie goes off to school to get her MBA, leaving him to take care of the girls by himself in their tiny bohemian apartment, his mental faculties still out of whack. She promises to visit on the weekends, but that may not be enough to keep the house in order.

If the premise sounds dreary, don’t be dissuaded; Polar Bear is an almost aggressively upbeat film in which entertainment and fun is of high priority. Ruffalo’s casting is the cornerstone of the whole production. Everything revolves around him: he sets the tone and leads the scenes, and is very much the heart of the film. Very few actors could make manic depression look cute, but if you’ve ever seen Ruffalo and those soulful eyes on-screen before,  you know the challenge is well within his acting capabilities. Cam says some nasty things to his wife and kids, things that would rupture even the strongest family bonds (he occasionally abandons the girls and even flips them off from time to time).

But despite this, he never becomes someone we don’t want to be around. He’s full of love and vim and has a voracious need to make people happy. His off-key sense of humor has trickled down to his girls, resulting in funny, disarming exchanges that come from left field. Cam’s almost always off the rails, but there’s a beauty to his rawness. Sometimes he says things most parents wish they could say but wouldn’t ever dare to. His brutal honesty is admirable, if a wholly unconventional for a parent of two.

The movie, like Cam, is bursting with life. There’s a fluidity to the storytelling that feels refreshing in a sea of family dramedies that too often feel emotionally stiff and segmented. Those movies play out like this: Funny scene. Serious scene. Funny Scene. Serious scene. One minute you’re laughing, the next you’re nodding your head with a stern expression, arms folded. In Polar Bear, the laughs bleed into the dramatic scenes, and most moments of happiness have a tinge of melancholy or sadness lurking in the subtext.

What Forbes does that’s so great is sensitize us to the unconventional inner-workings of the family until their ostensibly wacko ways of doing things feel normal and even sweet (Me and You and Everyone We Know comes to mind). When Cam gets upset with the girls, he throws things and storms off, screaming things like, “I can’t take this anymore!” He’s yelling at his girls, which is scary, but the fact that he doesn’t condescend to them and trusts them enough to share his feelings openly swells the heart. Cam’s room is packed with gizmos and appliances in different stages of repair, and we often see him tinkering with something, whether it be a bicycle gear or a sewing machine or old Polaroids. Maggie tells him she could never sleep in a room so messy with doodads and tchotchkes, but after a while his clutter only makes him more endearing, both to Maggie and to us.

If there’s a downside to Forbes’ upbeat style it’s that she doesn’t give us enough moments of respite. The film flies by, which may count as a good thing to most, though I found the lack of down time to be slightly problematic. Forbes doesn’t allow us to be sad for long before she rushes on to the next dose of positivity and comic hysteria. Like I said, I love the movie’s fluidity, but a bit more narrative asymmetry might have given the story a more interesting shape.

The child actors are exactly where they need to be, conveying intelligence and wit without coming off as too precocious. Not only did Forbes have her daughter helping out with the film, but her husband, Wallace Wolodarsky, produced, and several other family members played small parts in making the film a reality. Infinitely Polar Bear is truly a family affair, like a movie version of a mom and pop shop with Forbes’ father’s name written in big letters on the sign above the entrance. One can only imagine he’d be ecstatic to know that his daughter has turned their family story into a film that will touch so many others.

It’s a given that children’s movies will fall into certain plot paths. Characters and story devices are often obvious; themes and lessons are overly sentimental. Given the right mix of well-placed maturity throughout, this doesn’t have to mean a children’s movie feels “dumb.” Pixar has been doing it right for years. Dreamworks has started catching on with How to Train Your Dragon. Twentieth Century Fox has mostly stuck to animal films, and Reel FX Animation has hardly produced anything, but the two companies are certainly branching out with their latest, The Book of Life. Full of some vibrant and excellent animation, fraught with detail, the film gives some much overdue appreciation and attention to Latino culture. But the film is limited in its innovation, leaning heavily on its imagery while being weighed down by stock children’s cartoon characters with Mexican accents (though not even consistently).

Produced by Guillermo del Toro and directed by feature first-timer Jorge Gutierrez, The Book of Life tells the story of La Muerte (Kate del Castillo) and Xibalba (Ron Perlman), the rulers of the Land of the Remembered and the Land of the Forgotten respectively, who make a wager regarding three children: empathetic and quick-witted Maria (Zoe Saldana), musically inclined Manolo (Diego Luna), and the heroic and orphaned Joaquin (Channing Tatum). Separated at a young age when Maria is sent off to boarding school in Spain, Manolo grows into a sentimental musician forced into the family business of bullfighting, while Joaquin — aided by a magical pin the sneaky Xibalba gave him ensuring he can’t be hurt — becomes a prized soldier like his general father before him. Maria returns all grown up and the wager for which of the men will win Maria begins. But Xibalba doesn’t play fair, and when Maria begins to fall for the crooning Manolo (women are so predictable) he sends his venomous snake to do away with Manolo. This sends Manolo on an adventure among the dead, determined to reunite with Maria.

In a somewhat telling parallel, the film’s story is told by a museum tour guide to a group of unruly white kids. This isn’t the only way Mexican director Gutierrez panders, working in many recognizable Mexican elements (churros, moustaches, mariachi) almost as if to soften the heavier subject of the Mexican view of death to white audiences. It wouldn’t be so bad except that the script meanders and fails in its likability to make up for such things.

The love triangle is generic, with very little motivation behind the men’s competition other than their view of Maria as a muse (Manolo) or a prize (Joaquin). And while she asserts herself, Maria’s feminist stance is barebones and rather moot in the face of almost no character development. Instead generic themes erupt as if trying to fill some sort of quota — teamwork wins, love prevails, good conquers evil, death is not the end, friendship is greater than or equal to love, etc. They’re all there, but none of them really stick. And when about 8 new characters are introduced in the second half of the film, there is just too much going on for there to be real connectedness to anyone.

The puppet style of the characters, with their hinged limbs, is an interesting animation choice, but doesn’t necessarily tie in to Día de Muertos directly. Overall the abundance of detail can be somewhat feverish and points to a director whose background lies primarily within animation. The sunset coloring is at first striking, and then numbing. It is undeniably skillful, but some restraint may have made it that much more impressive.

The Book of Life is overstimulating, holding all its energy in its colors and the constant action of its characters, but when broken down, while everyone is doing so much, there are almost no moments of originality or chances for emotional affinity. I can’t decide if Gutierrez and co-writer Douglas Langdale underestimate children’s ability to notice when clichés are being thrown at them, or if there was some sort of self-doubt that accounts for their over saturation of trite techniques in the film. Given so much to look at and experience, the film ends up offering very little, even when it seems obvious real talent lies behind the effort.

Most people–hell, most comic book readers–have little to no knowledge of the Guardians of the Galaxy, a team of misfit, cosmic Marvel superheroes introduced in print in 1969. James Gunn, the director of Marvel Studios’ film adaptation of the D-list franchise, has a similar level of notoriety, with his work (Slither, Super) mostly only familiar to indie and indie-horror geeks. Why would Marvel take such a risk, dumping millions of dollars into producing a movie with minimal name recognition?

Well, let’s look at it from this angle: What if all of the scumbag bounty hunters, smugglers, and monstrous brutes from Star Wars got their own movie? What if you infused it with the attitudinal, irreverent humor from the first Iron Man movie, cranked up to 11? And what if you slapped on a bitchin’ ’70s soundtrack on top of it all, just for the hell of it? That’s Gunn’s film in a nutshell, and it’s totally awesome, off-the-wall, sci-fi fun. Marvel knew they had a gem on their hands, and with Guardians of the Galaxy they’ve unleashed on us a hell of a good time at the movies. And a talking tree. And a talking raccoon. And Chris Pratt’s abs.

Pratt plays Peter Quill, an earthling abducted as a child in the ’80s who now thieves, gets laid, and causes a general ruckus across the galaxy in his spaceship, the Milano (named after Gunn’s childhood crush, Alyssa Milano). We meet Quill (or Star-Lord, a self-appointed moniker he desperately hopes will catch on) in treasure-hunter mode, looking to loot a mysterious sphere from a tomb on a seemingly deserted, dusty alien planet. He navigates the rocky terrain with some clumsy of rocket shoes, a bug-like space mask, and his trusty Walkman, which cues Redbone’s “Come and Get Your Love”, the first of the film’s many retro-tastic tunes only Gunn has the cajones to blanket a multi-million dollar movie in. In an homage to Raiders of the Lost Ark, Quill steals the sphere, eludes laser-toting baddies, hops back into the Milano, where he’s startled by a drowsy one-night-stand he forgot spent the night. Whoops.

Quill bands together with all manner of galactic riffraff to protect the sphere from warmonger Ronan the Accuser, the film’s dark, creepy big-bad played by an imposing Lee Pace who has evil intentions of using the thing to destroy the planet Xandar. Quill’s band of outcasts are Gamora (Zoe Saldana), the green-skinned, badass daughter of Thanos, the biggest villain in the galaxy; Drax the Destroyer (hulking WWE alumni Dave Bautista), who’s hellbent on avenging the death of his family at the hands of Ronan; Rocket (Bradley Cooper), a genetically engineered talking Raccoon with a heavy-artillery fetish and a Joe Pesci temper, and his amiable tree-creature BFF, Groot (voiced by Vin Diesel).

Pratt is the absolute right man for the job, with the film’s subversive, witty material playing precisely to his strengths. Fans of his work in Parks and Recreation are guaranteed Guardians ticket-buyers, and they won’t be disappointed. Diesel and Cooper (with great help from the talented visual effects team) make Rocket and Groot an irresistibly lovable on-screen duo, and almost steal the show altogether. Bautista surprisingly hangs right in there with his more experienced cast mates, drawing just as many laughs with Drax’s lack of capacity for sarcasm and metaphor. Saldana often gets lost in the noise, as the other Guardians’ unique, colorful personalities make the more conventionally sketched Gomora feel a little stale.

Guardians is refreshingly detached from Marvel’s flood of Avengers movies (though it does technically exist in the same universe), offering up an edgier, funnier brand of superhero action. The film feels even more like Star Wars than J.J. Abrams’ 2009 Star Trek reboot did, delivering big-time adventure while being thoughtful enough to highlight the well-written core-character relationships above all else. The action is sufficiently epic and more brutal than any Marvel movie before, with even the good-natured Groot doling out heaping helpings of bone-crushing violence. (A scene in which the gentle giant pulverizes a group of hapless grunts mirrors Hulk smashing up Loki in Avengers, but gets an even bigger laugh.)

Gunn does a great job of preserving his wacky indie sensibilities and incorporating them seamlessly into a giant, crowd-pleasing blockbuster film, a feat that takes more finesse than his Troma-boy resume may lead you to believe he’s capable of. While it isn’t as out-there as Slither or Super, Guardians feels like a Gunn film through and through.

The film hits a few tonal stumbles along the way, with the heavier dramatic scenes between the core characters feeling slightly out of place. (A tortured existential outburst by Rocket feels the most awkward, though it’s effectively acted by Cooper and the animators.) The myriad supporting characters–Glenn Close as the leader of Nova Corps, Xandar’s police force; John C. Reilly as a Nova Corps officer; Benicio Del Toro, in a brief appearance as the Liberace-like Collector–are good fun, though they’re too great in number for any to make a lasting impression. Michael Rooker’s Yondu, Quill’s venomous abductor and adopted father figure, sticks out amongst the supporters with his wicked volitility.

Visually, Gunn and DP Ben Davis use every color of the rainbow to give Guardians a distinctive sci-fi look, with each detailed environment looking more imaginative than the last. This is an oddball movie that’s as funny as Galaxy Quest and as thrilling as any Marvel movie that’s come before, and it’s cause for excitement for the futures of both Marvel Studios and Gunn’s career.

Guardians of the Galaxy trailer

When you consider Out of the Furnace is packed with a star-studded cast and a director who demonstrated outstanding talent in his previous film (Crazy Heart), it is disappointing that the biggest surprise of the film is just how underwhelming everything turns out. Much of the film relies on telling the audience how to feel rather than actually making an emotional impression. Scott Cooper’s atmospheric character drama greatly benefits from its cast, but its predictable narrative lacks too much ambition to allow for the characters to truly shine.

Right off the bat Out of the Furnace begins with a deplorable opening scene that lets you know what you are getting yourself into. The drug-dealing villain named Harlan DeGroat (Woody Harrelson) force-feeds a hotdog to his date at a drive-in theater before her screams are heard by others parked around them. One bystander comes to check on her, prompting Harlan to get out of the car and swiftly beat up the innocent man. There is so much commotion caused by all of this that everyone is pauses from watching Clive Barker’s The Midnight Meat Train on the outdoor screen to see what is happening. While the film never reaches the same level of spontaneity or pacing as this scene had, it does at least set a gritty tone from the very start.

The film centers around an off-duty solider Rodney Baze Jr. (Casey Affleck) who has racked up a great deal of gambling debt owed to John Petty (William Dafoe). Rodney’s older brother Russell (Christian Bale) just finished some prison time after a drunk driving accident caused a couple people their lives. Now Russell works at a mill in town and does what he can to help Rodney pay off his debts. Rodney insists on entering underground boxing matches to help with his debts, even though Russell practically begs him to get an actual working job. But Rodney’s stubborn personality prevails and eventually leads him to enlist in a high-stake fight that crosses paths with Harlan and his gang.

Although there are times when the characters express emotions, they are rarely ever felt. For example, it is easy to understand that their father’s passing would be difficult to deal with, yet the film does not do a great job with making the audience actually empathize with its characters. The same can be said about the subplot between Russell and his ex-wife (Zoe Saldana)—save for a brief moment later in the film. The other part of the problem is that the film does not spend enough time with the more stimulating characters such as Affleck and Harrelson, and instead we are forced to spend the most time with the inert Christian Bale.

The best assets of Out of the Furnace by a long shot are the performances from the talented cast members. Despite the script not allowing Bale’s character a lot of depth, he does a good job commanding the lead role when its needed—especially considering what he had to work with. While the fate of Affleck’s character was destined for destruction from the very beginning, he breathes life into the film that desperately needed it. The roles of Forest Whitaker and Salanda were so secondary that they were merely serviceable despite their commendable efforts.

While the beginning scene blindsides you with its unpredictable action, the rest of Out of the Furnace stays on the same level of excitement without any real surprises. Because of this, the second half of the film is only mildly interesting enough to keep watching. The slow and methodical approach works better when there is something to sink your teeth into as a viewer—this offers little more than some atmosphere and good acting. Unfortunately when the film does attempt to spice up its narrative with some minor “twists”, they end up not carrying the significant impact that they should.

Out of the Furnace trailer

Unfortunately, I was rather unimpressed with the 3D effect in the theater. Being that this was my first 3D experience, I was imagining the 3D parts to be a little better. I think I would have enjoyed the film just as much without the 3D. After about 20 minutes, I nearly forgot about the 3D, except for a few scenes. So if anything don’t let that be the only reason you watch this film, believe it or not, it has a story too.

Avatar is about a paraplegic war veteran, Jake, who is brought in to learn the culture of another planet, Pandora. Our military has greedy corporate intentions of mining for precious materials which happens to be loaded on Pandora. While trying to dig up information about the local customs of the Na’vi race, he begins to fall in love with one of them. This forces him to choose between carry out the mission or to take the side of the Na’vi and fight for their land.

The concept behind Avatar was very interesting. I saw metaphors of racial issues, environmentalism, and even religion. Somewhat similar to District 9. Looking at the big picture, the film was well written and imaginative. Which is what a film that is the highest grossing film in history should consist of. It was also one of the most expensive movies ever made up to this date with an estimated budget of US $280 million.

It was by no means perfect though. First off, on more than a couple occasions, the film was fairly predictable and typical. There were some minor flaws too such as, how did the Na’vi get guns in the battle towards the end?

Some of the things I enjoyed best were the little details, such as: the interfaces of the computers they used, the way monitors were curved and transparent, how a tablet computer should really function, those jellyfish looking creatures and the way you had to “connect” to the animals. I thought the CGI was top notch and Oscar worthy. It’s pretty incredible that 60% of the film is actually photo-realistic CGI.

Bottom line, I thought the film was worth watching, especially for the broad concepts, technologies and metaphors. The subtle details. It did a lot of things pretty well but it didn’t get too far from the stereotypical Hollywood formula for a blockbuster film. Perhaps it didn’t want or need to though.

Update: It did end up winning Best Cinematography, Best Visual Effects, and Best Art Direction at the Oscars.