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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.
GI Joe did just fine without any actual story.
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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