Yep clearly. Apparently this is the billion dollar idea that was kicking around in his head back when he was still driving a truck.
I do know that preliminary back-end franchise work was done on this, obviously by Cameron himself but he had teams working on it. That’s pretty much unprecedented for that kind of stuff to be produced before the hit film comes out. Usually the way it works for that sort of continuity canon building is that the movies come out and then people pore over it with a fine-toothed comb and use the film (such as Star Wars) or primary medium (video game such as Halo) as the foundation for the canon where they bother creating a canon at all. That kind of foresight gives me hope, and people I know who are close to the project and who care about story very deeply have been assuring me that this online trailer really does it no justice whatsoever.
The Na’vi culture is apparently incredibly well-developed.
This is less of a concern than Uncanny Valley - making the aliens “humanesque” makes all the other breathtaking CGI look cheap/unrealistic. If they made the aliens more like District 9, it would easily be one of the best looking CGI meets Live Action films ever made, but as it stands those aliens look ridiculous, stupid, and cheesey which destroys any attempt to “lose yourself” in the film.
ZebraShaSha Hey sorry for this but I made a pit thread about that being my pet peeve even though it didn’t annoy me at all when you did it in this thread.
Actually on re-reading you I realize you meant that the aliens cheapened the OTHER effects. Sorry. So you didn’t do what I accused you of, but still I’m gonna roll with it since I already started the other thread.
I just saw the 15 minute preview screening on a 3-D Imax screen, and I have to say that it looked fucking awesome! Yes, there is a chase scene and it kicks **so **much ass! I haven’t seen the internet trailer, so I’m just going by how it will actually look in the theater. Now, the plot doesn’t seem like anything special, not that there was much of that revealed so it could be complete crap for all I know, this preview was just a few cool effects scenes, but the 3-D effect is the best I’ve ever seen of it’s kind. There were a few instances where the characters looked cartoony (i.e. they jumped and their weight didn’t seem real) but overall it really was quite a visual feat. I am definitely seeing this one in Imax 3-D when it opens.
OK, I just watched the online trailer and *wow *that made the effects look so lame! It was so incredibly much more realistic & impressive on the big screen in 3-D, you guys have no idea! All the characters looked fake & plasticky in the teaser trailer, that is **so **not what the actual film is like! I can see why the teaser trailer has people saying it looks like crap, because that trailer does look like crap.
I found my subconscious tugging at my pant leg. It was saying things like:
“If they have four fingers on each hand, why do they have 10 toes?”
and
“We have space faring, well armed, HUD mounted, depleted uranium bulleted ÜberNavySeals and you expect me to think the spearchuckers stand a chance? Really?”
There is a technological advantage the Na’Vi have too, but I can’t tell you because I will mangle it and because I can’t say ;). We’ll see how it works out in the film.
FWIW I was unimpressed by the online trailer, but I saw the theatrical trailer (same thing, larger screen) tonight before Inglorious Basterds and it’s a bit more effective there. Still not the best thing ever, but much more impressive than on my computer.
You get into Uncanny Valley territory when it’s not clear whether it’s supposed to look real or stylized. They use different parts of the brain and switching or trying to ride the fence makes our meurons bleed.
I’m not new to the 3D scene, i just think this will be a good film for it. How much the 3D adds to the experience depends on the film. It did not significantly amaze in Up I agree but it was pretty well done in Monsters & Aliens. This one has lots of vehicle and creature battles with multiple objects flying all over the place, so I think 3D will probably enhance the experience.
I saw Journey to the Center of the Earth in 3D. It gave me a headache until I got used to it, and getting used to it meant not noticing it anymore. I think I would’ve enjoyed the movie twice as much without it (insert yuks about still not enjoying it much.)
Well, I saw the 15-minute special preview last night, and was seroiusly 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).
I saw that movie in 2D on HBO. That was 2 Ds too many.
I’m thinking Pocahontas meets Black Hawk Down…but in SPACE!
In all fairness, the District 9 trailer looked like a crappy remake of Alien Nation or V: The Final Battle with better CGI. But people seem to like the movie so who knows?
Personally, I don’t see this plastic-y CGI everyone’s talking about. I thought the scenes in the hospital, with both the Jolly Blue Giant and humans, looked damn good. Light-years past FF:Spirits Within, at least (and I actually liked that movie). The least convincing thing in the teaser was that large land predator with the neck frills, and even there, Our Hero looked OK to me.
I dunno, maybe my brain wiring is off, Uncanny Valley stuff never gets to me or draws me out of things.
Will this movie see both 2d and 3d releases? If the latter, does that mean only special theaters capable of displaying 3d content (I get the impression you need specialized hardware) will have the film?
When they release 3d films to DVD and such, how does that work? Did they make 2 versions of the movie during development, one 2d or one 3d? Or do you start with one version and convert it somehow to the other?
Never really gave the issue much thought, and I’ve never tried to see a 3d movie. I’m not sure if I can - I have some visual/brain issues that might prevent me from being able to image it properly. I wonder if there’s some way I can test whether or not it’d work for me short of paying $15 at an imax 3d theater.
Because the 3d effect is created by using two near-identical 2d images (using polarized light and filters to make each eye only see one image), it should just be a matter of picking one or the other to make the DVD/2D cinema version.
