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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.
The correct word is "whet." To whet your appetite is to sharpen it, just as you would a knife with a whetstone. Wetting one's whistle refers to slaking or quenching thirst, but is entirely unrelated.
-mkb
BitTorrent download
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
Watching the trailer you can get a little bit of info about whats going on.
Humans go to another planet, looks like a jungle planet.
They create "avatars" that are either clones, simulacrum, or repurposed native bodies.
One of the humans (the main character) who is brainmapped into an avatar, is a paraplegic in his human body.
The avatars are sent on an exploration or diplomacy mission.
(It obviously wasn't infiltration because they were wearing human clothes and carrying human gear.)
There's some fighting with some dino like things, possibly with the natives as well, although I didn't see any shots showing actual combat with natives, just strung together combat scenes that implied combat with the natives.
Oh, and the main character falls for a native female.
I'm sure somebody paying more attention to it can pick out other tidbits of info, but yeah, it was kinda sparse on data. It's not like the trailers/ads for 6th sense where you can identify all major plot points including the so called twist ending... (so bloody obvious he's one of the dead...)
GI Joe did just fine without any actual story.
Best Slashdot Co
480p, 720p, 1080p Enjoy!
The important thing is not to stop questioning --Albert Einstein.
cameron even says so himself:
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/herocomplex/2009/08/james-cameron-the-new-trek-rocks-but-transformers-is-gimcrackery.html
avatar looks amazing though, a must see
the bit with the blue guys riding flying dragons reminded me a bit of "the dragonriders of pern" too
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonriders_of_Pern
now someone should make THAT into a movie
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The storyâ(TM)s protagonist, Jake Sully, is a former Marine who was wounded and paralyzed from the waist down in combat on Earth. In order to participate in the Avatar program, which will give him a healthy body, Jake agrees to travel to Pandora, a lush rainforest environment filled with incredible life forms â" some beautiful, many terrifying. Pandora is also the home to the Naâ(TM)vi, a humanoid race that lives at what humans would consider to be a primitive level, but are actually much more evolutionarily advanced than humans. Ten feet tall, with tails and sparkling blue skin, the Naâ(TM)vi live harmoniously within their unspoiled world. But as humans encroach on Pandora in search of valuable minerals, the Naâ(TM)viâ(TM)s very existence is threatened â" and their warrior abilities unleashed. Jake has unwittingly been recruited to become part of this encroachment. Since humans are unable to breathe the air on Pandora, they have created genetically-bred human-Naâ(TM)vi hybrids known as Avatars. The Avatars are living, breathing bodies in the real world, controlled by a human driver through a technology that links the driverâ(TM)s mind to the Avatar body. On Pandora, through his Avatar body, Jake can be whole once again. Moreover, he falls in love with a young Naâ(TM)vi woman, Neytiri, whose beauty is matched by her ferocity in battle. As Jake slides deeper into becoming one of her clan, he finds himself caught between the military-industrial forces of Earth, and the Naâ(TM)vi â" forcing him to choose sides in an epic battle that will decide the fate of an entire world.
http://www.chaotickingdoms.com
Yes, the CGI is stunning - for most of the trailer, it's hard to believe it's not live action. They have made a huge leap across the uncanny valley, and successfully.
But I have a few problems with it, just like most CGI movies these days:
The robots don't move right. It doesn't "feel" like a robot to me. James Cameron was the guy behind Aliens, and he seems to have forgotten that one of the reasons that was such a believable movie (despite taking place in the future, on an alien planet, fighting aliens with two mouths) was the use of "today" tech. So I would have expected Cameron to make Avatar's robots more like the military robots we envision today. I'm sure 1000 years from now, robots will move identically to a human (as in the movie) but I'd still prefer movie robots today to move more like real robots we have today.
Predators shouldn't announce their presence. There's a scene in the trailer where a dino-thing jumps out of the bushes, roars, and runs after people. I see this all the time in action movies where some large animal is about to attack the hero: the predator rises from the bushes (or from behind whatever), bellows, then rushes to attack. But in that split-second, our hero is able to throw himself behind cover, narrowly avoiding being eaten. Ever watch actual predator/prey wildlife - even a house cat pouncing on a mouse. Predators just don't announce their attacks - they just pounce. If you stop to roar, your prey gets away, and you go hungry.
That said, I'll probably still go see this when it comes out.
The story's protagonist, Jake Sully, is a former Marine who was wounded and paralyzed from the waist down in combat on Earth. In order to participate in the Avatar program, which will give him a healthy body, Jake agrees to travel to Pandora, a lush rainforest environment filled with incredible life forms - some beautiful, many terrifying. Pandora is also the home to the Na'vi, a humanoid race that lives at what humans would consider to be a primitive level, but are actually much more evolutionarily advanced than humans. Ten feet tall, with tails and sparkling blue skin, the Na'vi live harmoniously within their unspoiled world. But as humans encroach on Pandora in search of valuable minerals, the Na'vi's very existence is threatened â" and their warrior abilities unleashed.
Jake has unwittingly been recruited to become part of this encroachment. Since humans are unable to breathe the air on Pandora, they have created genetically-bred human-Na'vi hybrids known as Avatars. The Avatars are living, breathing bodies in the real world, controlled by a human driver through a technology that links the driver's mind to the Avatar body. On Pandora, through his Avatar body, Jake can be whole once again. Moreover, he falls in love with a young Na'vi woman, Neytiri, whose beauty is matched by her ferocity in battle.
As Jake slides deeper into becoming one of her clan, he finds himself caught between the military-industrial forces of Earth, and the Na'vi - forcing him to choose sides in an epic battle that will decide the fate of an entire world.
http://www.chaotickingdoms.com
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?
Holy smokes, does that look stupid.
I couldn't even bother to finish a 2 minute trailer. Can someone from Hollywood send me 30 million bucks, and I'll mail them my bowel movements for the next year?
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
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.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Trying to ride on the coat-tails of Felicia Day's hit indie geeky music video (Do You Wanna Date My) Avatar, which shot to the top of iTunes/Amazon/YouTube on Monday. How very sad.
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!
Weren't the humans in Final Fantasy the Spirits Within CGI? Wouldn't that make this film 8 years late in being the first?
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?
This seems rather similar to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_me_joe which was originally published in 1957. All the elements are there: cripple who telepathically controls a foreign species due to hostile environment, who then loses his grip on who he is. It's a great story but I hope it gets credit as the "seed" for this movie.
http://www.aintitcool.com/node/42087
lol
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Over and out.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
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?
I couldn't even bother to finish a 2 minute trailer.
I do believe that there is a treatment for that.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Jake has unwittingly been recruited to become part of this encroachment. Since humans are unable to breathe the air on Pandora, they have created genetically-bred human-Na'vi hybrids known as Avatars. The Avatars are living, breathing bodies in the real world, controlled by a human driver through a technology that links the driver's mind to the Avatar body. On Pandora, through his Avatar body, Jake can be whole once again. Moreover, he falls in love with a young Na'vi woman, Neytiri, whose beauty is matched by her ferocity in battle.
Humanoid aliens. *sigh* I can buy it if the scenario is along the lines of ancient astronauts where the humanoid aliens are actually genetically modified from human stock or something like a Stargate where human life is seeded on other worlds by powerful entities in the past but it does sort of irk me when humanoid lifeforms evolve independently with no other explanation than someone handwaving and saying "Perhaps the bipedal form is the most superior one for earth-like worlds." Bah. I'll only buy it if the explanation is "They don't look like us. We look like them!"
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
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.
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?
I guess Health Care Reform didn't work in this sci-fi.
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
If you immediately associate 'men with big guns' with HALO and elves with WoW then please, please, gtfo my slashdot.
Not sure why 12 year olds would wanna hang out here anyways.
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'm a little stunned at the lack of faith here.
This is the guy who directed (and even more importantly, WROTE) Terminator, Aliens, The Abyss, and Terminator 2. The latter two in particular also pioneered groundbreaking CGI effects for the time, and the stories certainly didn't suffer as a result.
Cameron has proven himself a visionary and gifted storyteller (particularly in the sci-fi realm) many times over. Your self-assured criticism of the story (based on a TEASER, ffs) is unwarranted and premature. This isn't Michael Bay or McG we're talking about here, it's a man whose previous forays into sci-fi are widely considered classics of the genre.
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
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.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
Brilliant Marketing
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
There was a lot of very inconsistent frame doubling.
One part went like this: (starting at 0:25)
single frame: I
doubled frame: -
I-IIII-III-III-I-I-II-I-I-I-I-II I-I---I--I--I--I---I--I-I-I-I-I-II-I-I-I-I-II-I-I-I
This scene cross fades with a scene that doubles every 9th or 10th frame.
Yes, that works. Thanks:
wget -U "QuickTime/7.6.2" http://movies.apple.com/movies/fox/avatar/avatar2009aug0820a-tsr_h1080p.mov
I read the screenplay for this about 5 years ago at this point. Honestly surprised it took so long to get made. I guess Cameron wanted technology to catch up to his imagination.
The basic plot is a) humanity discovers alien world, b) populated by weird creatures, the most intelligent of which are the blue humanoid ones - you can think of them sort of as Native Americans; and c) that's pretty much the plot. Humans come to conquer this new world.
To do this they d) grow "avatars" who are biologically like the aliens but into which human consciousness can be uploaded. This is done to e) interact with the aliens and convince them to let humans take over their planet. f) The aliens are not so keen on the idea and g) fight back. h) it turns out that they're not just primitives but that they i) live in close consciousness-sharing harmony with other creatures on their planet and j) their entire planet via plants.
See, they k) have nerve bundles growing in their hair and these let them connect with other living beings, such as l) the pterodactyls which they're able to pilot by mind control. m) One particularly nasty human soldier scalps one of the main aliens and this is a very dramatic thing. n) the protagonist is a crippled Earth scientist who can't walk, but when loaded into his "avatar" he can, and so he wants to stay in his alien body. o) When an alien dies they get absobed by the foliage and become part of the planetary consciousness. p) Because the protagonist helps to chase off the nasty humans q)by wiping out the invading force and sending Earth a fake message about a lethal virus being on the planet, r) the aliens make him a permanent alien. s) there is also the obligatory love story.
There, aren't you glad I just saved you 2 hours and $20???
Sure, it'll be visually pretty but the plot is lame. Unless you're 13.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.