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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
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
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 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.
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