Avatar preview
James Cameron has spent the better part of a decade sat in a tiny sub whizzing around the deck of the Titanic, making guest appearances on Entourage, and sitting in his huge “King of the World” throne.
So when Friday 21st August was announced as Avater day, those of us that had awaited the return of a slumbering cinematic God to our screens began to stir at the thought of a fifteen minute preview of a film years in the making. This was the guy that created The Terminator, The Abyss, ALIENS, and the biggest grossing movie of all time; a film that shouldn’t just be remembered for that one stat, Titanic is a really good, old school cinematic spectacle.
15 minutes of what was hyped to be “groundbreaking cinema” had been preceded by the official teaser trailer launch the day before. Mixed bag you say? The overriding feeling was one of Jar Jar Binks: The motion picture, slightly more cartoonish than we had been expecting when an Abyss level of seriousness had been hinted at with the first glimpse of the Na’vi all those moons ago. Impressive as it looked, it didn’t seem to be any more “groundbreaking” than Clone Wars with a bigger budget.
When the general hubbub died down and the Fox executive had given us his confused spiel about “one of the greatest storytellers of all time”, the 3-D glasses were donned, and the 60ft IMAX screen gave us a huge Jim Cameron explaining that we were to see a selection of clips from the first half of the movie, so as not to give away any spoilers.
The first thing to note is that the footage works a lot better in context. Your eyes are given time to adjust to the style of motion capture Cameron has used. But for all of the impressive digital trickery it’s the human aspects that click the most.
It’s great to see Sigourney Weaver back in the Sci-Fi realm again. Her playful banter with Sam Worthington – the paraplegic soldier sent to the planet Pandora to infiltrate the indigenous life forms, all whilst occupying the body of a giant blue cat thingy called a Na’vi – is already a noticeable plus point. As is Worthington himself, both as the human aspect of Jake, and more impressively as the Na’vi, in these short sections you can already see that he has been able to impose his personality on the CG façade.
Similarly, Zoe Saldana is a creation of beauty, her characters ears flick back and the eyes react naturally to the threat of danger. A criticism of a film like Beowulf was the “dead eyed” nature of its characters, here Cameron and his technical bods have so much life in the eyes, like they were a start of point. It’s the most impressive aspect of a canvas smothered in CGI beasties and backdrops.
If anything, at points there was too much onscreen. The jungle pursuit glimpsed in the trailer is so frantically edited, and gloriously detailed that focus becomes a problem.
The scenes that made the most indelible impression were those between Worthington and Saldana in their Na’vi guises. There is an electric chemistry between them, and as strange as it may sound for two actors mapped in CGI it was completely natural.
Who knows what the end result will be? Apocalypo meets Star Wars Episode III meets Aliens? Lets hope that by December 18th Avatar finds an identity of its own, because at the moment it feels like a spectacular retread, an intriguing one at that.
