Avatar (James Cameron) - Page 5  

I'm the same way.  But with REAL-D, the dizziness is gone.  I saw Beowulf and UP! in REAL-D and after about 10 seconds I forgot I was wearing the glasses. 

 Well, holy fucking shit.  I must say the music in the trailer is outstanding.  I'm still excited that I am not seeing the preview tomorrow.  But I do look forward to the trailer in two months...and the film in 4 :)

Looks pretty freakin' awesome for sure.

  i knew you'd love it...

i think i've watched the thing about 900 times so far - i can't seem to stop.

I've watched it all day.  I'm interested to see how it looks the way he wants it to be seen.  I guess I will get an idea tomorrow.

First let me say I haven't read this entire thread. If I retread some old ground, my apologies.

The trailer looked pretty good but I have my doubts about the story.

I am probably in the minority here but I thought Titanic was terrible story wise, not particularly well acted and cliche. Without a doubt it was visually stunning and there were certainly moments where the script did a great job at capturing what was happening to the people, but the main plot was laughable.

From what I have read about Avatar's story, what we seem to have is "Dances with Wolves on an alien planet" (read that somewhere else, can't take credit for it). For the record, I liked Dances with Wolves. However, after watching the trailer I just get this vibe that once again what we are going to get is a visual stunner with a story that will be tough to choke down.

I hope I am wrong. We will just have to wait and see.

-Keith

I thought I'd like it with measured expectations.  I had heard good to great things, but based on comments many other places, I expected worse CGI and nonsense cuts.  While there are standard action tropes in there and the CG still looks like CG (it does look like great CG)...geez, it looks beautiful.  I've been keeping my anticipation in check for some time, treating this like a unicorn.  I'll believe it when I see it.

Now that I've seen it, and we're down to 4 months...

In all honesty, I'll be seeing the midnight show (in IMAX 3D), and probably seeing it again in the same place at least once more opening day.  And then I have to take my wife.  Man, we've waited a long time for this.

Yeah, I keep coming back to it.  If Cameron can give the characters his usual treatment, and match the direction to the concept and visuals, this should be a real treat.  Something truly special.  

It's pretty amazing but I got a similar SW prequels vibe.  That's not a good thing but I'll get over it.  I thought SW Ep. 3 would have been far more compelling if it didn't feel like I was always watching a computer generated world with humans inserted into it.  Regardless, I'll be there opening day for Avatar.  Cameron's track record is too strong.




mine, too! 

yeah, that's what i hope for, too, with the qualification that i hope he gives us the characterization that he did in The Abyss - I'm with Keith, above, in really disliking Titanic pretty much from the ground up, but especially dicaprio and winslett's characters...

as for the CG, for sure it's still recognizeably CG (red: artificial), but it appears to be about as seamless as we're able to get at the moment.  that said, i absolutely love CG and would be all for there being many movies of nothing but. 

i want the movie to break my heart with its beauty. i really, really do. 

Well, regarding Titanic, I can only quoth thus:

Uryenes: Lord Leondegrance! Join us against the boy! 
Leondegrance: I saw what I saw! The boy drew the sword. If a boy has been chosen, a boy shall be King! 
Uryenes: NO, I challenge that! 
Sir Ector: The sword has been drawn! 
Uryenes: [to Leondegrance] Are you with us, or against us? 
Leondegrance: Against you!

But I acknowledge the concerns.  I thought Titanic very effectively captured the raw power (and heedlessness) of young love, something often regressed or made more mature than its years in Hollywood.  And he wound it about an epic tragedy, wisely letting one narrative feed another and vice versa.  It's a hugely populist film, and I acknowledge it's periodic cheesiness and often groan-inducing script.  But you cannot deny the fundamental power that story possessed for a great many people, and I include myself in that bunch.

There are moments of emotional beauty in the scriptment for Avatar.  There are very obvious parallels with Dances With Wolves, in that it uses those basic storytelling tropes (that existed well before DWW I might add) to tell a straightforward story about culture shifts (with strong Western parallels and environment consciousness).  There is a strong love story, and it plays out with some similarity to Titanic.  That was the scriptment and the script itself might have changed.  That said, the teaser clearly indicates the love story is a fundamental part of the film.

And I am happy for that :)

Edited by Chuck Mayer - 8/20/09 at 10:45pm

amen to that - me, too...

although i have to say that if i understand avatar's narrative (as it appears in the teaser, anyway), unlike DWW, the love story is between the protagonist and a member of the "target race", for lack of a more felicitous description, and i prefer that element to dunbar's meeting and falling in love with another white person who also just happens to be member of the sioux tribe. and i prefer it even with (because of? in spite of?) the complicating factor that whatever one makes of the question of whether the protagonist is the avatar or not, the actual bodily individual doing the loving is (or seems to be) a member of the target race.

one of my favorite elements of DWW is the friendship between dunbar and wind-in-his-hair - i wonder if there'll be a similar facet to avatar...you can't do much better than a well-told tale of love and friendship, in my books.

    

john, your understanding is correct.  The scriptment had a bit of the "nature of the avatar" thing going on.  

I merely like DWW, but I distinctly recall blubbering (and I was a teenage male, the most "hardened" of film viewers) near the end of DWW, with respect to Wind in His Hair and their dialogue.  Awesome stuff.

The design of the aliens is pretty disappointing.  We find intelligent life on another planet light-years away, and it turns out to be humans with funny ears, tails, and blue skin?

I guess James Cameron wanted the alien characters to be roughly humanoid to make it that much easier for audiences to relate to them, but I was hoping for something much more exotic.

I'm still looking forward to the movie, though.

I guess it wouldn't be the same if the alien was just a small, highly intelligent blob on the ground, that doesn't have facial expressions that we can relate to.

Someone sitting next to me at Inglorious said outloud something that made a lot of people laugh: "What is this, World of Warcraft the movie?"  I saw it and thought the same.  The whole thing just looked like a mid-level PS3 video game.  I had been really hyped on this, "The Abyss" is one of my favs, but this thing looked god awful (IMHO).

I played a lot of mid-level PS3 (and 360 games), and most of the high level ones.  They don't look like this.

If I had to use one word to describe my thoughts on this trailer it would be "underwhelmed". I realize that this is only 2 minutes of a 2+ hour movie and that the actual film itself might end up being fantastic, but I definitely wasn't blown away by the trailer. I think the look of the aliens is what bugged me the most...they just looked ridiculous IMHO.

I would agree. I'm not concerned about the FX (it looked pretty great to me), but some apparent details of the story are worrisome. Cameron is a brilliant filmmaker with an occasional weakness for sentimentalism. I hope that tendency doesn't get the better of him here, given all the effort he's put into this.

Specifically, I worry about the fact that Cameron apparently decided to make his main character (possibly spoilerish speculation to follow)...

Warning: Spoiler! (Click to show) I should point out that I could well be talking out of my ass here (and in fact, I hope I am). Cameron may have come up with a perfectly good explanation for all this. He is a creative fellow.

Visually, though, I think it looks great. I'm guess I'm part of that Internet minority that must need glasses or something, judging by all the screaming elsewhere (i.e., AICN) about how terrible it looks. The film is a victim of its hype, I guess. Fanboys are fickle.

I suspect what people are really criticizing is design of the aliens, which is admittedly somewhat cartoonish, even if the presentation is intended to be photoreal. I imagine it may look better blown up on a big screen, where the fine detail (pores, etc.) will enhance believability. But as pointed out above, I'm sure Cameron designed the aliens as he did to ensure that audiences could still empathize with (and heck, even be a little weirdly attracted to) them, and get caught up in the love story.

Anyhow, I'm certainly there come December.

--Jefferson Morris

I've seen a lot more ridiculous looking things in star wars.  Which begs the question, what is an alien supposed to look like?  This is also a teaser, not a trailer.  I'm not getting involved in all the wild speculation this time around, just going to go see the movie and avoid the hype machine. 

doesn't seem surprising to me: the bipedal, humanoid organism has proven the most successful lifeform on earth (at least if by "successful" one means something like "dominant"), so as a matter of (statistical) evolutionary xenobiology, it stands to reason that a similar form might prove similarly dominant on other earthlike planets.

but even were that not so, there are any number of other narrative devices that could plausibly account for the form of the aliens...

we shall see what we shall see, i guess. 

  

I don't think there's any set way aliens are supposed to look, but these just look silly to me.

it's hard for me to make sense of this...i mean, if you landed on a new planet and actually met creatures that looked like that, saying that they looked "silly" would literally be an unintelligible comment to me. imagine if i told you one day that i thought trees looked silly, or fish, or rocks...what do you think i would be saying?

if something is not "supposed" to look a certain way, then what does it mean to say that that thing looks silly? doesn't it just look the way it looks?

That's exactly what I was thinking. 

Moving away from xenophysiology, I would imagine (or provide conjecture) that the design of the Na'Vi was made with the consideration that this film is being targeted at many ages and both genders.  For better or worse, Cameron has opened his aperture a bit and is making films for big audiences.  That he is able to retain some edge and versimilitude is to his credit.  But the Na'vi are meant to also appeal to women and older kids. 

I am also not opposed to some sentimentality.  I don't want the film to veer into mawkishness, but I don't mind a little optimism and idealism.  It goes well with muscular filmmaking :)

I put the 1080p version of the trailer on my PS3, which I moved into my bedroom temporarily. I forgot to change the audio settings on it to 2-channel, so when I played the trailer (which is AAC 5.1) I didn't hear dialogue. I've played it back a few times like that and it's quite powerful with music and sound effects alone. I almost don't want to hear what the characters are saying because it might take away from that feeling. Weird, but that's me.

it's not just you: after i watched trailer the first 50 times i also thought that i could watch the whole movie without a word of dialogue...

i certainly agree with this (and i didn't mean to suggest otherwise) - i just wanted to put cameron's artistic choice on a solid scientific footing...

and personally, i agree wholeheartedly with this rationale - i will be more moved by the film if i identify emotionally with the characters, which - and this may make me shallow and (astronomically speaking, anyway) parochial - will definitely be easier if i identify with the characters visually.

and, to me, the na'vi are beautiful. stunningly so, in fact.

Well, my favorite moment in the trailer is after the main character wakes up...he hits the window, and that is followed by his smile and the single piece of dialogue.  I love that moment.  We are supposed to feel as Jake Sully would...being granted wholeness again by this scientific miracle.  I think the trailer is quite powerful. 

And I (too) did not mean to argue with the potential science of it (since the world is also similar to earth, it WOULD at least make sense for a bipedal creature to be dominant).  I was just pointing out that when you spend $300M on a film, you have to make it for EVERYONE.  Let's not rush to judge the film from the teaser anyway.  Aren't we happy Cameron is making an original work within science-fiction (and the script has plenty of hard sci-fi)?

And the music and sound effects make the trailer work, asbolutely.  I am sort of astounded that some people think it is a badly constructed teaser.  I understand the common (and reasonable) complaint being about the effects.  I don't agree, but the scenes do look CG heavy.  As I said before, they look like GREAT CG, but still.  However, the narrative structure of the teaser is quite good.  It flows from concept to character to conflict to investment.

I actually feel joy when I watch it.  Will it change cinema?  The narrative certainly won't.  I don't believe the presentation will either, but I withhold judgement on that.  I've seen film elements in 3D (some Disney show did this a few years back, in Orlando, and it DID blow my mind), so I know the power this can have.  But we'll cross that Rubicon when we come to it.  The narrative makes me want to see it.

lol - it figures we'd be of one mind on that point, but in thinking about a silent version of the movie, my only reservation was precisely that moment in the trailer, because i didn't think the power of that moment could be adequately communicated without that one line...

The dialogue isn't relevant, but the way it is spoken works wonders for me.  I don't care what he says, just how he says it