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Cameron's Avatar Trailer Posted
graviplana was one of several people to submit that Avatar, James Cameron's 3D Sci-Fi epic has
released a trailer to whet your appetite. There's a lot of very cool visual elements in there but no indication of any actual story. Here's hoping there is one.
Adding to that, the summary contains 45 words and three sentences, contains one typo and one misspelling. Surely the submission approval process is not so strained that three sentences is too much to proof read?
In before "you must be new here".
the book version of starship troopers
otherwise the plot is a soldier goes to fight, gets some genetic modification and then figures out that the war is evil and being fought for ulterior reasons known only to a select few and he changes sides to fight for right
GI Joe did just fine without any actual story.
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This does not bode well. The CGI, which would have been impressive on an XBox or PS3, instead jars with the real-life scenes. They make no attempt to even hint at a plot, which tells me that they have essentially strung together a parade of impressive FX to hang on the bones of an irrelevant story. And you can guarantee that they will not take any time to let the story breath underneath all of those explosions.
No.
Who is this delectable creature with an insatiable love of the dead?
I've got to say I'm much more excited about the other avatar movie, due out next summer. I might end up being horribly disappointed, but the tv series rocked and left me wanting more.
There was not a single thing in that summary not clearly portrayed in the trailer. The trailer is not devoid of story - it completely gives away the entire plot. They only thing they don't show is the ending but it is very unlikely it wont end with things working out for the 'good' guys. But the paralysis - the transfer to another body - the love interest - the combat against invading earth forces - it's all there. This is a very typical anti-development, pro-nature type film that hollywood has been cranking out for some time.
I'm looking forward to seeing it - but not for the plot.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
i read somewhere james cameron said it was dances with wolves but with aliens. it's what came to my mind when i read the synopsis (dude infiltrates a foreign and somewhat hostile group, falls in love, becomes one of them, is forced to decide whether to betray his former life).
Trailer reflects a lot of different Joe Haldeman books. I see pieces of "All My Sins Remembered," "Forever Peace," and a tiny bit of "Forever War." Ridley Scott's planning to film "Forever War," and he said he was inspired to do it in 3-D after seeing what Cameron had done with Avatar. The avatar thing connects with Haldeman's "Forever Peace" very well.
Wish Taco would avoid the snide comment about the trailer lacking story. It's not like Cameron has proven himself a poor storyteller on his past films. Just because it's CGI and science fiction, doesn't mean this is going to be garbage like Transformers 2 or Terminator 4.
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What are you even talking about? The first trailer release for any movie is a teaser, they NEVER give you any indication of the plot. They're just trying to generate some interest. In a few weeks or months we'll get some more informative trailers. In any case, if you look closely you can see some potential interesting plot/character development bits, like how the main mech driver that you see seems to be in a wheel chair at first and then gets converted into one of the night-elf looking guys, thus regaining the use of his legs. How's that for a mind-trip? Also, did you notice there's a war on and what appears to be an inter-species love story as well? Jeez.
As for the graphics, get off your AOL dial-up connection and watch it at 1080p and then tell me it looks like an xbox. As someone who owns Beowulf in blu-ray and Final Fantasy, and whose gaming PC can play FarCry2 at 1920x1200 resolution, 2xAA with ~47 fps average framerates, I can say that this stuff looks better than any of those. I was surprised at just how little uncanny valley there is in the human characters. The aliens looked a little weird, but I reserve judgement until I've seen it. It could be that they're well aliens and we're not supposed to closely identify with their movements.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
I'm a fan of the Pern books myself - I would say that Eragon was a poor film because it was based on a poor book. (Which pretty much stole every interesting facet from somewhere else.) Not that Pern couldn't be ruined, but the books are good enough that good films could be based on them. Eragon never had a chance of being really good.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Here's the thing I hate about sci-fi plots. Humans have the ability to fly half way across the galaxy, can engineer biological hybrids, can link those hybrids to a humans mind, but the simple act of reconnecting a spinal cord back together in order to cure paralysis is still beyond their reach?
Cameron said he wanted to make more 'alien' aliens, but that conflicted with one of the plot points... a human consciousness in an alien body, falling in love with another alien. He had to go with the humanoid look in order to not completely repulse the audience.
From 1940:
Here's the thing I hate about sci-fi plots. Humans have created a vast global super-high-speed data network capable of transferring entire libraries of information across the planet in under one second, have sent actual human beings to the moon, have cracked the entire human genome and are genetically engineering crops and animals, but the simple act of creating a flying car is still beyond their reach?
Actually, creating a flying car isn't beyond our reach. There have been several of them. What is beyond our reach is creating one that is economical and safe enough for the average joe to use.
I also watched the 1080p version and was terribly unimpressed.
It looked technically complicated and high-res or whatever, but it did not look "good". I think it fell flat-faced right into the uncanny valley for me (which, as a perspective thing, is of course relative to the viewer). No need to throw insults around just because someone wasn't as enamored with it as you were.
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open source sub sim. I might start coding again for this. http://dangerdeep.sourceforge.net/contribute/
Having read the (now scrubbed from the web after having floated around for several years) full script treatment penned by Cameron, I can assure you that it's a very solid story.
It IS formula, but then so was Titanic, (and Dances with Wolves for that matter). But Cameron knows how to work a formula impeccably. And the guy has actually gone and found a New Cool technology, which if used effectively and spun right, (think Jurassic Park), can help significantly in the promotion of a film.
The buzz is that the 3D has got the techs in Hollywood really excited about going to work every day.
People are going to see this film in droves and they are going to be blown away by it. I feel safe in predicting that.
Avatar, however, isn't going to be bigger than Titanic in terms of sales. I'll go ahead and predict that as well. --Why not? Because he isn't tapping the same doomed-romance nerve which is crack-cocaine to the average 15 year-old girl.
The casting of Titanic was both cynical and brilliant: Casting the almost beautiful Kate Winslet as the female lead was a sly maneuver which allowed the female audience to fantasize over the notion that even plane-Jane girls like themselves could have their very own Leonardo Decaprio. --And that his character should conveniently die at the end of the film so that he wouldn't put his lover through years of poverty, while in the same action giving her a bitter-sweet memory to polish and secretly wax pathetic over for years and years. . , well, that's just orgasmic! The girl-buttons deep inside girl-machines are placed in some really odd ways, but Cameron found 'em all and pushed every last one he could reach.
Avatar is going to be really cool, but it's not going to press nearly so many girl-buttons. (Though, images of blue amazon elf maidens I suspect will become popular in comic book shops). And who knows? My own understanding of girl-buttons is admittedly rudimentary. Maybe Cameron's onto something that I'm not anticipating. It IS a love story, after all, and maybe that's enough to make the teen girls watch it half a dozen times as they did with Titanic. My guess, however, is that classical material riches, classic questions of marrying for love or for money, combined with the bad boy thing. . , well I suspect this will always out-rank sci-fi mojo amongst the teen girl set.
In any case, this film looks very much like I pictured it from Cameron's prose, with one exception; I thought most of the fauna of Pandora was going to be glowing like a school of lamprey fish, but I guess the screen tests of that just didn't touch the right emotional nerves in viewers. The Audience is human, after all and Cameron knows his human psychology. I'm glad he's a sci-fi film maker and not a propaganda man like Goebbels!
-FL
There is no victory for them, is there?
Nope, not if the plot is so trite that a few story points actually do give away the whole plot, or the story is so boring that just a few teases don't properly whet the appetite.
It's certainly not an easy thing to do, but I thought that's what some of that hundreds of millions of dollars went toward. I have often left a theater wondering why the producers don't take 1 million out of the 100+ million FX budget and put it into hiring someone with actual talent in vague concepts like storyline, continuity, plot elements, creativity, etc.
"the almost beautiful Kate Winslet"
Almost?!
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
Jesus, the eyes on the aliens are fucking so obvious crap CGI. That flop last year Dalgo or whatever had more realistic CG than these ones shown.