This Friday, Fox is showing a free 16 minute preview of James Cameron's Avatar in IMAX 3-D at various theaters all over. You have to RSVP online to get the confirmation email, but the website (not so surprisingly) got all bollocksed up with the rush. I managed to get a reservation at one of the "fake" IMAX screens in Manhattan. Anyone else going?

If you feel you're missing out, catch the preview at this link.

I didn't realize today was April 1st ;)

Vincent

Wow, all $300 million is definitely on-screen in that trailer. :)

Yup! Photo-real CGI! Game changing!

But seriously, here's the real link for the movie and the screenings:

AVATAR site

You can hear some of James Horner's music for the film there. And a completely real, no foolin' teaser will be available through Apple/iTunes this Thursday.

I haven't seen anything of the actual film yet, of course, but I know for a fact that I'll be in the minority of those who would much rather watch a film based on that fake silly trailer than the real thing.

:rolleyes:

Dear 20th Century Fox: We are now in the TWENTY-FIRST century. Get with it.

Ah, but this IS 20 Century F***ups, home of Team Rothman. Would we have expected anything else?

Here is the REAL trailer:

http://www.slashfilm.com/2009/08/20/james-...teaser-trailer/

The goofy design of the blue aliens doesn't really inspire confidence.

Yeah, I couldn't watch that trailer without thinking of this:



"The alien has a sweet, heavenly voice... like Urkel! And he appears every Friday night... like Urkel!"

Hell, just watch it in HD here.

I don't understand the complaints at all. I think the aliens look just fine, even if they're not as believable as the District 9 critters.





For me, as a die hard Aliens fan, the real appeal of this trailer is getting a peek at a massive budget James Cameron outer space epic with more marine drop ships, weapons tech, battle scenes, and growling monsters than I could ever point my 3-D peepers at.

Bring it on. I'm psyched.

I watched the trailer today. CGI buildings, machinery, and ships, great. CGI aliens who look like various members of the Jackson family post-surgery, nyeh. Or maybe like Amy Irving having a hissy fit. Or maybe the human cast of the B'way version of FINDING NEMO. Or like those Walter Keane paintings of sad clowns, pets, and kiddies.

The trailer shows two of these characters, standing together in the classic "we're gonna have sex, aren't we?" pose, generating absolutely no heat.

Feh and double feh. Let's see a film of TIME AND AGAIN, using CGI to recreate old New York, and leave the fishy aliens in the tank!

Ps. I hope Jenette Goldstein is not going to be in this, attempting to do a trout or flounder accent. I may be the only one, but I find her a liability in ALIENS, as she sounds about as Latina* as Debbie Reynolds. Her shot at portraying a doomed Irish mother in TITANIC is laughable. I can just about buy her as a foster mother in T2, but that could be because she is not using a "foster" accent.

*I was born and bred in NYC, and I KNOW from Latina.

Agreed. This does not look promising at all.

Well, colour me underwhelmed too. I couldn't see anything groundbreaking or original in the trailer - just regurgitations of stuff I'd seen before. Maybe it's just me, but why put bras on blue aliens? Looks too much like the FINAL FANTASY cgi films with a touch of HELLBOY, MINORITY REPORT, ALIENS et al.

Victor

Best thing I saw online today was "Smurphs on steroids with Tom Cruise's hair."

. . . sorry to say, this was also my reaction - after all of the buildup about this movie, and all of the groundbreaking stuff we were told Cameron was working on, I sat there saying "there's ALIENS, there's THE ABYSS, there's the flying monkeys from THE WIZARD OF OZ, gosh, the frame looks way crowded, and those CGI effects look about like all the stuff we have been seeing for the last several years" - now, Cameron can certainly be an excellet director of this sort of thing (can 3D help?), and I will no doubt turn up at the cinema to check it out, but I have certainly lost my enthusiasm . . . maybe he should have followed his ex-wife into the desert and done something new, something lean, mean, and low budget . . .

I too was completely unimpressed by the trailer. I really haven't had any expectations for this at all either. After hearing about photo realistic CGI and whatever else, I just dunno. The outer space stuff and the battle scenes look somewhat interesting, and really that's all I want from a Cameron film. But the aliens don't seem to be anything groundbreaking at all. I think Cameron might have talked all this up a little much, at least at this point. I'll probably still go check it out in December, but I can't say I'm super excited right now.

I think the "complaints" are because for a long time now we've been told that AVATAR was going to be a literal redefinition of cinema as we know it, and while that trailer looks kind of neat...

Well, that's about it. It looks kind of neat. Not bad at all, and pretty neat to boot, but not even close to any sort of redefinition-of-cinema-as-we-know-it as has been promised for the last couple of years while this film has been in production.

Now, maybe they're holding off the really "knock-your-socks-off" stuff for the movie itself, but I dunno... What I saw in that trailer was kind of neat, and nothing more.

Vincent

Yeah, that trailer is disappointing. Cheesy looking aliens and tons of CGI that doesn't look one iota better than the effects in the STAR WARS prequels.
And this being a James Cameron movie we can't really expect an exciting story either.

For sci-fi buffs like me this will be a fun movie but I doubt it will be "groundbreaking".

The 3D is supposed to be the transporting element here. Looks OK to me in any event; I don't expect trailers to rock my world anymore. (Though the one for LEGION, a PROPHECY-type picture minus Christopher Walken, is hilariously bad--the distillation of a typically lame January release.)

Funny you should mention the Legion trailer. The audience I saw it with last Sunday sure got a laugh out of the Uncanny Granny. And I was thinking to myself "This looks like Prophecy with a lot more CGI.. and a hell of a lot less Christopher Walken!"

But, back to Avatar Day. I caught one of the minImax added screenings with a friend tonight and we were both fairly blown away by what we experienced. I'm guessing the other people in the theater were too. After it ended, the audience applauded after a somewhat stunned silence. The 3-D is transporting, allowing the viewer a sense of the many layers of depth to the laboratories, jungles, waterfalls, and skyscapes. Even little details like Stephen Lang's badass claw scars had perceptible depth. And the trippy colors of Pandora will most likely be keeping stoners smiling for decades.

But let's get right down to the Navi. Seeing them in 3-D on the big screen in full scenes delivering dialog did make a big difference. Cameron nailed this naturalistic tone with the performances and handheld camera style. I believed I was seeing a performer giving truthful acting, almost at times like it was improv. But no, they never look totally "real". Got damn close though. The smooth skin, primary blue skin, and primary yellow eyes were a stylistic choice that would never make these things totally believable. Same deal with Spider-Man or The Hulk. We just don't see brightly colored super-beings leaping around in real life, making a perfect illusion impossible for CGI animators. The important thing for me was that I could look into their eyes and believe that thoughts, feelings, and passions were brewing behind them. That is the achievement here. WETA Digital has moved the next step up the "real" ladder after their Gollum and King Kong. Not there yet, but a definite improvement.

And, what can I say? I live with cats... and I dig cats. And the Navi are big blue cats jumping around a Heavy Metal jungle kicking dinosaur ass and taming dragons. I can't really complain about that. The experience was so much more satisfying than the teaser everyone saw yesterday. At the end, my only real disappointment was that the 16 minutes had flew by and I was hungry for more.

Good thing I didn't pay to see something in fake IMAX though. They should be ashamed of themselves calling that IMAX. It's just the size a normal cinema screen should always be. We should pay extra for that? How about squeezing me for color, stereo sound, and air conditioning while they're at it?

That is such a silly and gross-looking trailer. If no one knew what AVATAR was, everyone would be laughing at this and wondering how a SyFy Original got an IMAX release. The last shot looks like furry fan art. Why would someone spend 14 years making this?

The AVATAR trailer preceded last night's showing of INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS at the Ziegfeld. It's the exact same trailer we saw on the web on Thursday. It doesn't look any more interesting on the big screen.

Here is a funny article comparing screen shots from AVATAR to the recent bomb DELGO.

http://filmdrunk.uproxx.com/2009/08/avatar...tting-in-a-tree

Underwire support?

Jerry Beck posted a link to a similarly-themed article at the Cartoon Brew blog:

http://www.cartoonbrew.com/cgi/comparing-a...r-to-delgo.html

The 7 Eeriest Parallels Between Avatar and Delgo

One of the people who commented on the article posted a link to more Delgo/Avatar screencap comparisons:

http://img.denihilation.com/delgovatar.html

Why do I get a feeling that we're going to be seeing a hilariously bad Brazilian knockoff version of Avatar along the lines of The Little Panda Fighter or Gladiformers in the near future?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c42u5VACtHs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gx9-U7eBraU

Question to sciptwriter: How do those giant floating rocks defy Gravity?

A: Shut your gob. This is a $300 dollar movie and we can have whatever we like in our film.

Roger Ebert saw the 15 minute preview of the film and was a little underwhelmed:

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.d...INION/908219995

Like Ebert, I hope that the completed film will turn out to be good, but I have my doubts. I detect a slight John Carter of Mars vibe in the trailer, and I would like to see a good movie that incorporates those influences. Of course, we're supposed to be getting an actual John Carter of Mars movie within the next couple of years, but I'm still not certain that it will actually see the light of day.

Why on earth (or any other planet) would you spend years honing cutting-edge CGI technology to create animated extraterrestrial beings... and then make them look not much different from actors in the same old makeup and costumes from the OS STAR TREK era? Not just the cheesiness, but the lack of imagination, in Cameron's alien design is head-scratching.

Looks kind of like a whole movie starring Jar-Jar Binks and his extended family.

This from SLATE:


Avatar = "Apocalypto" + George LucasPosted Saturday, August 22, 2009 11:08 PM | By Daniel Engber
More than 100,000 people were expected at IMAX movie theaters Friday night for "Avatar Day," a 16-minute sneak preview of James Cameron's science-fiction epic. In what the New York Times called an "audacious marketing ploy," 20th Century Fox made an extended trailer for the film—which is due to be released in December—into a major theatrical event with ticketed showings on more than 100 screens. Yet despite all the hype (and all the hype about the hype), the screening I attended in midtown Manhattan was only one-third full.

It's too bad; I would have liked to see how the footage played to a crowd. The smattering of viewers at the AMC Empire theater watched in near-silence as the CGI-heavy, three-dimensional action sequences played on an enormous screen. No doubt some were put off by the movie's cornball heroes. As I watched a tribe of blue-skinned cat people wearing loincloths and glitter makeup wrestle their way through an enchanted forest of savage beasts and glowing jellyfish, I couldn't help but wonder whether this is what Apocalypto might have looked like had it been directed by George Lucas.

Much of the ballyhoo for Avatar has focused on Cameron's supposedly groundbreaking technical innovations, which may account for the film's estimated $240 million budget. (In March, a writer for Time wondered whether the revolutionary special effects might "be the thing that forces the theaters to convert to digital.") Here's what I can tell you based on the trailer: The 3-D effects do look pretty darn good—they're easy on the eyes and do a wonderful job of immersing the viewer in the film's alien-jungle psychedelia. My only complaint is that some of the off-planet scenes suffer from a rather pronounced dollhouse effect, with the real-life sets and human actors appearing weirdly small.

I'm less sanguine about the computer graphics. The scenes shown Friday were almost exclusively CGI: animated feline humanoids doing animated flips as they hurled animated spears at animated dinosaurs. I'm sure the algorithms used to construct these battles were as sophisticated as any in the history of filmmaking—but everything still looked a little off to me. The movements were too smooth and slippery, like Yoda's cartoonish acrobatics from Star Wars. For all Cameron's technical wizardry, the digital characters in Avatar remain lodged somewhere on the far slope of the uncanny valley.

Thanks, guys. You just gave me nightmares for the next ten weeks. I may never go to another movie again for fear of what I'll see. :o

That's ok, you were probably going to stop going to movies anyway, what with newspapers pulling showtimes.

Here's a link to Drew McWeeny's take on the teaser, the 3-D preview, the difference between hype and buzz, and the Internet backlash.

Hitler was not impressed with the trailer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAPyipuT-Jg

Wonder how he feels about the new Tarantino?

On a scale of 1 to 10, he gave it a 9, 9, 9, 9!

The makers of Delgo are actually planning a lawsuit:

http://www.slashfilm.com/2009/08/26/more-p...avatar-lawsuit/

Me thinks Doran has not been reading this thread. :)

Sorry, must have skimmed over the previous link to that video.

Ha! That is about the only way DELGO is going to make money. I have to say, most of it is commonplace looking stuff, but the city of floating rocks looks nearly identical.

I'm glad I didn't have a beverage in my mouth when I read this.

It's funny, because it's true.