I’m trying to get free tickets to the 8/21 preview of James Cameron’s Avatar. The official Web site (http://www.avatarmovie.com/ticketing/) just went online, and it says “Select a theater below to reserve your ticket,” but I’m not seeing a list of theaters when viewing the site with either Firefox or IE (and adblockers turned off).
Is anyone else seeing the list, or is it me?
Thanks.
Okay, now the site is displaying database errors, so it probably wasn’t me.
Overwhelming demand, no doubt. Are there any available on eBay yet? 
Can any Web masters or IT experts explain the difference between:
and
I don’t have any details besides what I heard on the radio.
It’s something like 16 minutes from the film and I heard that it was attached as part of the previews to whatever Imax film is showing in the theatre that day.
So buying a ticket to Harry Potter 6 would include viewing that preview.
I knew that (although I think it’s entirely separate from any regular screening, and it’s free). I was originally wondering, before timeout and connection problems cropped up, if anyone was seeing the list of theaters that was supposed to be on the landing page.
Now that I can’t even get through, my question becomes, is anyone else getting in? have you successfully gotten tickets?
I’ve gotten all the way to the RSVP page (contact info, choice of theater, etc.) but haven’t gotten through that final step yet…
I got through, finally. It took about 40 minutes.
Pretty much the same thing, unless the first one was during the middle of a database connection switch (because the original connection was too overloaded) and the second one was just an indication of the database server being overloaded.
Whatever the case, seems like the server is overloaded.
It just takes me to the list of theaters and then says “This movie is currently unavailable for RSVP” whenever I click on a screening.
It’s strange, the servers seem to have been overwhelmed for a couple of hours, but the number of seats still available is quite high, except in a few locations in L.A., which have sold out. I would have assumed that, with the interest so high, most seats would already be gone. But there are a few theaters that still have most of their seats available.
And now they’re no longer showing how many seats are left.
Well, got my confirmation so will be heading out tomorrow night (probably early, to be on the safe side) to see what all the fuss is about (which means I’m specifically avoiding the online trailer until then).
Well, I saw the 15-minute special preview last night, and was seriously underwhelmed. It felt like a weird hybrid of Ferngully and Starship Troopers, with all the cliches one would expect from merging the two: tough-guy soldier macho-characterizations, zany day-glo creatures in whacky alien environment, and really terrible dialogue. It’s hard to tell, at this stage, with any certainty how the acting is, but everything I saw suggested that it’s going to suck–both the live acting and the voice acting (of which there will be a lot, obviously). It shouldn’t be too surprising–Cameron is not known for being an acting director, and every good performance from one of his films (Weaver, Harris, Winslet, di Caprio) come from actors who are good most of the time anyway. F-ing Sam Worthington? I’m not optimistic.
Of course, this being Cameron, it’s all about the visuals, but I have to admit that for a 15-minute preview, I got bored half-way through. Setpieces to highlight different monsters–check. A running chase (overly edited) and a flying chase (unconvincingly rendered)–check. Male/female hostility bantering–check. The avatar premise is potentially interesting, but it feels like an excuse just to flex the film’s CG arms to full capacity (by dispensing with anything real for huge chunks of the running time).
And the 3D! Ack! If anything, this teaser showed me that I will definitely be seeing the movie in 2D. Given how much time and effort Cameron has been spending on this film to push the technology, I was expecting to see 3D used in a way I’d never seen before. Nope. Just lots of multi-planing shots mixed in with rapid action scenes that gave me a headache because of the glasses. Hate to break it to you, 3D fans, but this is still just one big cinematic gimmick, nothing more.
I do have to admit that some of the CG was impressive, but just like the SW prequels, how could you possible have so much FX work and not have at least some of it look good? And motion capture technology has progressed to the point that you would expect this to look effective, and quite a bit of it does (though conveying emotions believably is still a decidedly mixed bag). But some of the other character animation (jumping, running, etc.) still looks over-cartoony. There was only one sequence that mixed human characters with the alien ones (and the result was only so-so), but I’m hoping that these scenes are done well enough to sustain a higher standard of suspension-of-disbelief.
But for now, I think it’s going to be a tough nut to make that $350M back w/o some seriously heavy lifting from the foreign markets. My wife is exactly the type of audience member he’s going to need to get that cross-over dollar (not a hard genre fan, but loved Star Trek and enjoys good animation), and she has zero interest in the film. Of course, the inflated IMAX/3D pricing will help, but fantasy (even more then scifi) is a genre that I think a lot of people will automatically rule out*, and this looks and feels (aliens notwithstanding) like a fantasy film, from the creature design to the garish neon pallette (Mrs. AG likened it to blacklight “art”).
Will I see it when it comes out? Probably (out of curiosity), but I work in the industry, so I’ll likely see it for free. But for all the hype (I intentionally avoided the internet the trailer released on the web before seeing last night’s preview), it delivered very little that I found interesting or exciting. And for all its money and excess, it can’t touch District 9 so far in terms of visceral impact (to these eyes at least).