James Cameron’s Avatar Teaser Trailer
Posted on Thursday, August 20th, 2009 by Russ Fischer
Posted on 08/20/2009 9:30:34 AM PDT by AreaMan
The teaser trailer for James Cameron’s new film Avatar has arrived.
The clip isn’t yet properly live at Apple, the site meant to be hosting it in the US, but you can see it in 1080p with this link, or at the French MSN site.
Here’s the quick recap: Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) arrives (in his wheelchair) on Pandora. He sees the planet’s beauty and, though him, we’re quickly introduced to the ten-foot tall alien Na’vi avatars. Implanted in his Na’vi body, Jake leads us on an exploration of Pandora. We see Zoe Saldana’s Na’vi character and Jake’s imprinting session with Pandora’s version of a dragon. (Hey Anne McCafferey, did you get a royalty check?) There’s even a glimpse of Pandora at night, and a little bit of the new power suits in action, which weren’t much seen in the Comic Con footage. We don’t see Sigourney Weaver, but do get a glimpse of Drag Me To Hell’s Dileep Rao as one of the Avatar technicians.
And, much as I thought when seeing footage in Hall H, it all looks a bit like a big adult Pixar movie. Which people are probably going to take as a pejorative, given that the whole thrust of Avatar so far has been that it is a game-changing experience. But when is being compared to Pixar ever an insult?
The real insult is from Fox, which keeps mismanaging Avatar’s debut. First there was the Avatar ticketing server crash and subsequent confirmation confusion, and now the teaser launch has been screwed up. In the long run this isn’t a big deal, but creating hype for a film is all about getting the moment right and that hasn’t been happening so far.
Official Plot Synopsis: AVATAR takes us to a spectacular new world beyond our imagination, where a reluctant hero embarks on a journey of redemption and discovery, as he leads a heroic battle to save a civilization. The film was first conceived by Cameron 14 years ago, when the means to realize his vision did not yet exist. Now, after four years of actual production work, AVATAR delivers a fully immersive cinematic experience of a new kind, where the revolutionary technology invented to make the film, disappears into the emotion of the characters and the sweep of the story.
Yet another "We're such bastards..." movie where the noble savages are abused, exploited, murdered by the mean'ol military.
I heartily raise my middle finger to you Mr. Cameron.
I’d been looking forward to Cameron finally putting the Titanic behind him and doing some SF again, then I heard the story for this one and just about puked. It’s so sad when good directors go bad.
Fictional worlds
Fictional countries
The movie is made as eye candy.
What did you want? A remake of The Green Beret?
I guess the whole Jesus’s bones thing didn’t work out too well.
Artists produce their best work when they are hungry, have to deal with consequences, and actually relate to normal people. Once they really make it, that all ends and it becomes all about them and the fantasy world of fame they are free to inhabit.
From what I’ve read, it’s an incredibly stupid story. Oh well, it’s been several years now since I insulted my own intelligence by enduring Hollywood’s tripe—no harm in missing this one as well.
Still, the movie looks awesome. Especially the special effects.
Very cool that Rachael Ray lost 34 pounds.
Yes, actually.
Am I the only one who thought Titanic was a wonderful film? Cameron is an action director first and it put his talents to great use.
That sounds like the plot of a bunch of 1950s alien invasion films. Were you offended by E.T.? Spielberg portrayed goverment agents as virtual storm troopers.
So, if in this "fictional" story the aliens had the appearance of black humans and the "invaders" were all white humans that slaughtered them just for the f**k of it...hey it's just a fictional story in a fictional world.
That’s the CW but I think it’s often bogus. Experience and knowledge contribute a lot to the artistic process, plenty of guys actually get better as they get older (Ridley Scott comes immediately to mind, still makes great movies). I think part of the problem with this one is he came up with the story around the time he was working on Titanic (14 years ago he was filming the wreck as part of the early stages of principle photography). So it’s a story that comes out of that same section of his life.
And it’s not like he’s always been the awesome SF guy either. Remember in between Terminator movies he did Abyss (GAG). So maybe he’s really a bad director who happened to make a couple of really good movies on accident.
I am a huge fan of Cameron. I loved Aliens, The Abyss and The Terminator films that he was involved in. I am with most people though on Titanic. I just fast forward to see the boat sink. :)
‘Yet another “We’re such bastards...” movie where the noble savages are abused, exploited, murdered by the mean’ol military. ‘
That’s usually how you take over a country. It worked here.
Actually, now that I think about it, there as was a straight to DVD movie that came out about a year ago called “Battle for Terra.” It was an animated movie, but it seemed to have similar elements to this one, including humans wearing breathing equipment in an alien planet. That one was a whole environmental-nutjob orgasm about the evils of modern industrial society.
Despite some shortcomings, The Abyss was terrific.
When somebody makes that movie let me know. In the meantime we’re talking about Avatar.
There’s action in Titanic? Honestly I’ve never seen anything but the previews for Titanic because they just about put me to sleep, and that is back when DiCaprio still looked 12 and was simply not believable as a leading man. My biggest problem with Cameron on the Titanic front is that he just can’t seem to leave it behind. After the movie he kept doing documentaries and semi-documentaries about it for all the nerd channels, and even with this movie it’s something he wrote while working on Titanic. The boat sank, James needs to get over it.
That’s true. While I liked The Abyss, the story certainly had a lefty “people are bad” angle to it. The class warfare scenes in The Titanic annoyed me, too.
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