Thanks to BSC Review for pointing out this ten minute Avatar featurette.
Here is why I’m showing up for Avatar. It is because, most of the time, Jim Cameron delivers. He delivers on action for a certainty. But he also delivers on story, whether it has its moments of cornball dialogue or not (you can count on it). Avatar will have to be a good story to work. The dazzling effects on their own will not cut it with audiences. If anyone knows this, Cameron does. I belong to the group of people who prefer the action scenes in Titanic to the story. Once the ship hits the iceberg the movie starts for me. In Aliens, once the team finds themselves having to defend against the aliens with Sigourney Weaver driving the truck – that’s when the movie starts. In T2, once they rescue Linda Hamilton from the asylum, the movie starts.
20 Responses for "Avatar Ten Minute Featurette"
The bit around the 4 minute mark is pretty interesting stuff to say the least. I’m trying my best not to propagate the use of Avatar buzz words (game-changer, revolutionary, eyeball rape).
Kudos to you Sasha for putting up these Avatar articles to keep the conversation going, despite vocal opposition.
December 10th and the reactions from London can’t come soon enough.
I have to admit, there is nothing like a big Christmas event movie to get me in the holiday spirit.
That featurette cost 47 million dollars.
Is it wrong for me to hate Jon Landau?
I don’t why, he just seems to annoy me.
I’m still confused. Apart from obviously doing it on a grander scale, can someone tell me what Cameron is doing with “Avatar” that is different to what Robert Zemeckis has been doing with his mo-cap 3-D animated films?
I`ll address some concerns. I love Cameron work because he makes small and simple iconic. He has that touch as a film-maker which is really rare. “I`ll be back”, “Ripley holding Newt and the gun, Ripley in power loader suit, “I`m flying, Jack”, Sarah doing pushups. Those images are iconic and they are all simple. However, this movie does not feel like Cameron movie. It feels like Peter Jackson movie (reads:overblown). There`s WETA digital overkill. I emphasize WETA because they seem to make the same-looking CGI over and over again (and before someone brings up District 9, Canadians did that one). There`s overload of it, it`s blurry, there are waterfalls, dusk/dawn light. Pandora or Skull Island, no big difference. And, unlike simple yet iconic Cameron, this Cameron has too much going on in every frame, thanks to CGI overkill. Now, I don`t think Cameron should make same styled movies all the time. Good to see him try something different. But this better have a good story and appealing characters to get passed fist-in-the-eye digital style.
Which brings me to Kansas line. is that the best they have? No, seriously, it`s not good. It`s “jennifer is evil, not just high-school eveil” bad. I dunno why they insist on pushing this line but it`s not working. makes the movie seem like a joke.
However, Saldavatar is totally adorable (save for emo scene which is laugh out bad) and the flight did give me goosebumps (though I instantly remebered Buckbeak and how gorgeous that scene was because it was so simple). I totally want to see this but I`m affraid of it too. I don`t want it to suck but there`s so much pros and cons that I don`t know what to think. perhaps I should just stop thinking and leave kansas behind? :p
I slightly disagree. The first half of Titanic is essential for two things: 1st, setting up the excuse and 2nd, setting up the scenario Jim needs to show you in advance so you don’t have the idea certain aspects of the mayhem are comming out of the blue. I’m in the minority that thinks Titanic was actually the best of the nominees back then and certainly beat L.A.Confidential with a simple question… was Titanic a genre best? (Disaster) Certainly. How did L.A. Confidential look in front of, say, Double Idemnity? That’s it. L.A. Confidential was a great movie but not a masterpiece… T2 started really to me at the videogame sequence when both Terminators met for the first time (those unforgettable slow-mo roses hitting the ground and being crushed by Arnie…) and Aliens did start to me when there was the exposition of the characters (Bishop and Vazquez specifically) after waking up and at the dinner table… even in the horrendous Piranha II: The Spawning you could glimpse Jim’s talent here and there… I don’t count out Avatar for anything, even thought my hopes aren’t much this time. By the way, why is 2012 out of the shortlist of Visual Effects – among others?. It’s the most detailed state of the art achievement in Visual Effects in years! (and don’t make me argue about the movie itself, which was incredibly entertaining even if with problems).
For me, Aliens started immediately, primarily because of how it worked so well with the original Alien. It’s what the film sequel should be; not imitating the original, but enhancing it. And that’s what Aliens did, action and story. I love how Cameron made the story from a horror story into a redemptive tale about a mother trying to protect her child from another mother.
ha, JJ! Thanks for the laugh.
Much needed, much appreciated.
Avatar is looking more and more awesome. $47 mil well spent.
Yeah Jon Landau is so corny when he sells a movie in interviews. But he’s one of the best producers alive, so I’ll give the poor guy a pass.
This featurette bumps my anticipation level even higher. When everything we’re seeing is in context, I have a feeling it will be a completely different day to us – way moreso than any other movie that’s been marketed to us.
We’ve seen a dozen clips from Nine, and they’re all awesome, but you get what you see. When I see those parts in the theater, I doubt they’ll take on a special new meaning in the context of the whole picture. But Avatar is absolutely different. It’s a full-bodied experience that you must see on its own terms. Call me crazy, but that really excites me.
This looks overblown? I mean sure it does, but it really isn’t. Just like Titanic was this big epic… it took place on a boat. Aliens had essentially two locations. Avatar doesn’t focus it’s story on a major part of a moon (or planet, they’ve said both in the featurettes) it takes place in one village on the plamoon. Just sayin
Look, I love Cameron as well but the Avatar hype machine is still pissing me off. I don’t like being told that this film is going to change cinema forever, and I certainly don’t like being told that you have to see it or else the film industry will collapse. Sorry but that’s fear-mongering; if we don’t accept it from our government then why should we accept it from the film industry? And I’m sorry but it looks stupid. CGI should not be used to build worlds. It doesn’t have the weight of models or proper sets. It might as well be a video game. As for 3-D: Anti-piracy gimmick. End of.
Hell yeah, Avatar better have a good story. Peter Greenaway tried to reinvent the wheel when he made The Tulse Luper Suitcases but behind all the bells and whistles was a flimsy adventure epic that nobody could possibly care about. How is Avatar going to be any different? Artworks that change the medium don’t try to do so; most of the time, it just happens to work out that way.
I just don’t think AVATAR is going to have the cross appeal that TITANIC had and what I think is necessary to make a Best Picture victory.
TITANIC was able to capture all demographs because it was an action/romance movie about an historical event nearly 100 years earlier. You had people intrigued by it from all angles.
I will be very pleasantly surprised if I hear about many people over the age of 60 going out to the movie theatres to experience AVATAR. I just don’t think what has been marketed up to now shows any appeal for them. My mother in Texas who fascinatingly seems to have tastes exactly in line with the Best Picture winners of the past ten years has zero interest in it.
And I think you really do need that wide demographic appeal to score a Best Picture win.
For AVATAR to hook an older crowd, they are really going to have to make a case for the STORY being something special. The special effects will be sexy to a lot of young people, but the look of the film I think is a bit of a turn off for people past the Nintendo playing years.
By the way, I’ve been reading up on Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void, and quite honestly, it sounds like a much more exciting, inventive, and significant filmmaking achievement on Avatar, one that doesn’t rely on 3-D to impress.
I love video games – but they too have to have a story – just look at the reviews on IGN to see how seriously gamers consider story. And, just to be clear, story is not simply plot, it’s the quality of the plot and the writing. Titanic had a pre-built plot, and JC was free to write around the actual story of the Titanic disaster as he saw fit. In the case of Avatar, he’s had free rein to invent even the base story. For a man of his limited literary skills, taking the idiotic dialogue, pacing and his chosen story arcs in Titanic for example, this is quite a scary prospect to me.
I say again, if Titanic was the James Last of epic movies, Avatar is the Boney M.
I guess my problem is…in 2009, a story about a white man integrating himself into a native community — I love, love, LOVE that Zoe Saldana is saddled with some kind of broken Caribbean English accent, as if she wasn’t raced clearly enough — and falling in love with Their Ways, only to soon protect them from an incoming invasion by His People with their advanced Western technology (which, ‘natch, turns out to be nothing against the Nature prowess of the aboriginals/slaves/blue aliens) looks very old, very neo-primitivist, very colonial masking as colonial guilt. I could not be more bored by the story this is selling me, and I think it’s worth keeping in mind that if any book came out this year with this premise in hopes of snagging a Pulitzer Prize, people would very justifiably say “the one with the noble savage bs? Seriously?” For some reason, though, Oscar contenders can apparently get away with this fetishism toward Natives garbage for a few decades longer, so whatever — long live Avatar.
My point being: when Cameron talks about capturing the “e-motion” and special helmet mounted cameras, all I see is a capable but flapping mouth, and all I want to know is why he thought this was something we’d never seen before. I really do hope it delivers as a full cinematic experience, and I will give it full props for that if it does, but no effects team and no amount of money can make an amateur premise that has been groaned at for over a century in its various literary and cinematic incarnations go away. It takes a screenwriter, and ‘occasional cornball lines’ do not begin to describe Cameron’s weaknesses there.
On that note, off I go to grade papers — seriously — on stereotypical representations of noble Natives and their savage brethren in early Canadian exploration literature. Avatar, baby!
Boy, this movie better make some serious bank in the box office. I also agree that I don’t see it being quite as big as Titanic. That movie was easier to get people to see because of the romance story and the fact that it was a historical event. Avatar is a work of fiction and a story that no one has ever heard.
I could be wrong. Maybe it will make more than Titanic, but I’d be a bit surprised.
“Yeah Jon Landau is so corny when he sells a movie in interviews. But he’s one of the best producers alive, so I’ll give the poor guy a pass.”
I love Jon Landau. He is really enthusiastic and knows every little detail about the movie.
On the optimistic side I’ll give it up to 8 oscar nominations (picture, director, possibly screenplay, score, VFX, editing, sound mixing and dubbing, and sound editing) 120 million openning weekend with a 427 million domestic gross and 950 million worldwide. Less optimistic, about half those nominations, all in technical categories, and about 300 to 350 million domestic and 750 world-wide. I think this film is film is going to huge one way or another.
Seems to me that some people see Avatar`s biggest problem to be getting women interested and that “blue people” or “Thundersmurfs” are no match to Jacob Black`s 6 pack or something. However, wasn`t LOTR thought to be uninteresting to women but they actually became one of the major driving forces of the trilogy`s legs? Granted, good lookign actors helped but same thing (female-driven boxoffice) happeend with POTC where major draw wasn`t Bloom but, unexpectedly, Depp in eye liner, dreads and golden teeth. Women went nuts over Sparrow and re-discovered Depp who was boxoffice poison til then. Now he`s a major star while Bloom, who was supposed to be main attraction for the ladies, is…er…where is he? Retired? Ah, who cares.
Or how do you explain Severus Snape as a sex symbol? Not Alan Rickman but Snape from the books, with his yellow teeth, oily hair and oversized nose? No kidding, many ladies are nuts about him because they love his personality. They think him sexy. Before Twilight got huuuuge, there was Harry Potter and girls and women who swoon over Edward and Jacob swooned over Harry, Ron, Draco, Snape, Sirius and Remus even though none of them was described as gorgeous. In fact, some of them were described in the most unflattering terms. Didn`t matter.
My point is that women can get interested in the na`vi and avatars if they have appealing or intriguing personalities. Maybe not opening weekend if great WOM kicks in(if the movie is that good).
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