Cameron's Avatar Trailer Posted

graviplana was one of several people to submit that Avatar, James Cameron's 3D Sci-Fi epic has released a trailer to whet your appetite. There's a lot of very cool visual elements in there but no indication of any actual story. Here's hoping there is one.

Whet

[mmkkbb]

The correct word is "whet." To whet your appetite is to sharpen it, just as you would a knife with a whetstone. Wetting one's whistle refers to slaking or quenching thirst, but is entirely unrelated.

Re:doesnt work?

[TheSHAD0W]

BitTorrent download [mininova.org]

Direct download links

[vivekg]

480p [apple.com], 720p [apple.com], 1080p [apple.com] Enjoy!

no: "dances with wolves" in space

[circletimessquare]

cameron even says so himself:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/herocomplex/2009/08/james-cameron-the-new-trek-rocks-but-transformers-is-gimcrackery.html [latimes.com]

GB: There's also maybe some heritage linking it to "Dances With Wolves," considering your story here of a battered military man who finds something pure in an endangered tribal culture.

JC: Yes, exactly, it is very much like that. You see the same theme in "At Play in the Fields of the Lord" and also "The Emerald Forest," which maybe thematically isn't that connected but it did have that clash of civilizations or of cultures. That was another reference point for me. There was some beautiful stuff in that film. I just gathered all this stuff in and then you look at it through the lens of science fiction and it comes out looking very different but is still recognizable in a universal story way. It's almost comfortable for the audience - "I know what kind of tale this is." They're not just sitting there scratching their heads, they're enjoying it and being taken along. And we still have turns and surprises in it, too, things you don't see coming. But the idea that you feel like you are in a classic story, a story that could have been shaped by Rudyard Kipling or Edgar Rice Burroughs.

GB: Or Joseph Conrad...?

JC: Yes, exactly. And I think returning to classic tales is a powerful thing. Look, right now is a special time because we can basically do anything we imagine. I mean you have to work hard at it, and you've got to have the technique and you have to be willing to throw money at the problem. Sometimes you have to be a little bold and go out on a limb. But if you can imagine it, you can do it. That's why we're seeing this renaissance of visual imagination. It's just a growth. Films look better now than they've ever looked. Sometimes they get a little lost in it though. I'll go to a "Transformers" film for the fun of seeing the spectacle but, personally, my soul craves a little more story, a little more meat on the bone and characters and that sort of thing. Look, I think it's about finding a balance between story and all of this gimmickry. I think I veer toward classicism, being solidly rooted in the classic stuff. I mean really old-school science fiction. This is a movie I would have loved to have seen when I was a 14-year-old kid in 1968.

avatar looks amazing though, a must see

the bit with the blue guys riding flying dragons reminded me a bit of "the dragonriders of pern" too

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonriders_of_Pern [wikipedia.org]

now someone should make THAT into a movie

Re:Story?

[rhathar]

Is this the first Slashdot has seen of Avatar? Has no one else been reading about this movie? Geez, people. Here's the plot (as if it was hard to read wikipedia before posting a story):

The storyâ(TM)s protagonist, Jake Sully, is a former Marine who was wounded and paralyzed from the waist down in combat on Earth. In order to participate in the Avatar program, which will give him a healthy body, Jake agrees to travel to Pandora, a lush rainforest environment filled with incredible life forms â" some beautiful, many terrifying. Pandora is also the home to the Naâ(TM)vi, a humanoid race that lives at what humans would consider to be a primitive level, but are actually much more evolutionarily advanced than humans. Ten feet tall, with tails and sparkling blue skin, the Naâ(TM)vi live harmoniously within their unspoiled world. But as humans encroach on Pandora in search of valuable minerals, the Naâ(TM)viâ(TM)s very existence is threatened â" and their warrior abilities unleashed. Jake has unwittingly been recruited to become part of this encroachment. Since humans are unable to breathe the air on Pandora, they have created genetically-bred human-Naâ(TM)vi hybrids known as Avatars. The Avatars are living, breathing bodies in the real world, controlled by a human driver through a technology that links the driverâ(TM)s mind to the Avatar body. On Pandora, through his Avatar body, Jake can be whole once again. Moreover, he falls in love with a young Naâ(TM)vi woman, Neytiri, whose beauty is matched by her ferocity in battle. As Jake slides deeper into becoming one of her clan, he finds himself caught between the military-industrial forces of Earth, and the Naâ(TM)vi â" forcing him to choose sides in an epic battle that will decide the fate of an entire world.

Re:Story?

[rhathar]

Dammit, formatting. Sorry about clicking 'submit' a little too fast:

The story's protagonist, Jake Sully, is a former Marine who was wounded and paralyzed from the waist down in combat on Earth. In order to participate in the Avatar program, which will give him a healthy body, Jake agrees to travel to Pandora, a lush rainforest environment filled with incredible life forms - some beautiful, many terrifying. Pandora is also the home to the Na'vi, a humanoid race that lives at what humans would consider to be a primitive level, but are actually much more evolutionarily advanced than humans. Ten feet tall, with tails and sparkling blue skin, the Na'vi live harmoniously within their unspoiled world. But as humans encroach on Pandora in search of valuable minerals, the Na'vi's very existence is threatened â" and their warrior abilities unleashed.

Jake has unwittingly been recruited to become part of this encroachment. Since humans are unable to breathe the air on Pandora, they have created genetically-bred human-Na'vi hybrids known as Avatars. The Avatars are living, breathing bodies in the real world, controlled by a human driver through a technology that links the driver's mind to the Avatar body. On Pandora, through his Avatar body, Jake can be whole once again. Moreover, he falls in love with a young Na'vi woman, Neytiri, whose beauty is matched by her ferocity in battle.

As Jake slides deeper into becoming one of her clan, he finds himself caught between the military-industrial forces of Earth, and the Na'vi - forcing him to choose sides in an epic battle that will decide the fate of an entire world.

Re:CG-wise? Disappointed. Storyline-wise? We'll se

[stoolpigeon]

Weren't the humans in Final Fantasy the Spirits Within CGI? Wouldn't that make this film 8 years late in being the first?

Re:Story?

[Anonymous Coward]

This seems rather similar to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_me_joe which was originally published in 1957. All the elements are there: cripple who telepathically controls a foreign species due to hostile environment, who then loses his grip on who he is. It's a great story but I hope it gets credit as the "seed" for this movie.

then prepare to have your mind explode:

[circletimessquare]

http://www.aintitcool.com/node/42087 [aintitcool.com]

lol

1-It's a teaser; 2-go watch it in 1080p.

[denzacar]

Over and out.

Re:Whet

[Mexifries]

"you must be new here".

Re:Cliche scenes, undercooked CGI, no apparent plo

[Wraithlyn]

I'm a little stunned at the lack of faith here.

This is the guy who directed (and even more importantly, WROTE) Terminator, Aliens, The Abyss, and Terminator 2. The latter two in particular also pioneered groundbreaking CGI effects for the time, and the stories certainly didn't suffer as a result.

Cameron has proven himself a visionary and gifted storyteller (particularly in the sci-fi realm) many times over. Your self-assured criticism of the story (based on a TEASER, ffs) is unwarranted and premature. This isn't Michael Bay or McG we're talking about here, it's a man whose previous forays into sci-fi are widely considered classics of the genre.

Re:Only a little

[Anonymous Coward]

There was a "scriptment" (Cameron's term, a mish-mash of "script" and "treatment") floating around the net since around the time Titanic came out, perhaps even before. I read it. It was pretty lousy. This trailer and the official entry on IMDB makes it pretty clear that the scriptment was in fact real, and very little has changed since then (spoilers below):

• Humans are on the planet to mine a mineral that is naturally superconducting at normal temperatures. The floating mountains seen at 0:34 in the trailer are full of the mineral, and float because of it interacting with the planet's magnetic field.
• The original scriptment called the superconducting mineral "unobtanium". I have a feeling that word might not appear in the final movie because "The Core" used it already (yes I know it's an old sci-fi in-joke, but still).
• To mine the mineral, humans are encroaching on and destroying the habitat of the planet's native intelligent species (the blue cat-people, aka the "Na'vi"). The story revolves around the conflict between the humans and Na'vi and has a very strong anti-colonial and almost anti-industrial slant to it.
• The native flora and fauna on the plant had lots of blue bioluminescence. The trailer seems to stick with this, although it's not as strong as I would have expected based on the description.
• The guy with the scars on his head at 0:39 is the main military meat-head bad guy, Quaritch. His character in particular is paper-thin and badly written.
• The guy in the wheelchair gets his mind transferred to a synthetically grown Na'vi body, and by the end of the movie, "goes native" including mating with an actual Na'vi female.
• Cameron completely ignores any philosophical implications of the mind-transfer mechanism (is it a "transfer" or just a copy? what happens to the human left behind? what kind of mind exists in the synthetic body when no human mind occupies it? if the body has a mind of its own, does the human mind merge with it or override it? what are the moral implications?). It's just a plot device.
• The scriptment contained a lot of sentences like "what follows is a balls-to-the-wall chase through the forest". I know it's not a full script and it's supposed to summarize, but it just came across as really silly. I've never seen a script use the word "balls" so much outside of dialogue.

Overall the story in the scriptment was very hokey and sophomoric. The only thing was supposed to separate this from other movies was the dazzling technology behind it, but looking at the trailer it just doesn't seem all that impressive. When one of the Na'vi speaks at 1:18 in the trailer, the face looks very stiff and mask-like. The guinea pigs in "G-Force" look more expressive, for crying out loud. And like most CGI these days, the lighting is far too even on the CG'd objects to look real. The girl looking through the leaves at 1:29 and the ships launching at 1:36 were the only shots that even remotely looked convincing.

The hype behind this movie is completely out of whack with reality. People use terms like "game changer", "groundbreaking", etc. I even read one breathless article that compared the arrival of the movie with the arrival of sound or color. In interviews, Cameron talks as if he invented CGI and 3D, and no one's ever used them before. If this trailer didn't have Cameron's name attached to it, what kind of reaction would it really get?

People who've seen it say this movie looks better in 3D, but really how much better could it be? The faces in "The Polar Express" looked marginally better in 3D than in 2D, but honestly we've been over that ground before. They should tone down the hype. It could backfire, if it hasn't already.

Re:Cliche scenes, undercooked CGI, no apparent plo

[Anonymous Coward]

Those 3 movies you mentieoned were made 20 years ago, before everything he had the most tenuous connection to was anticipated more than the second coming and hailed as genius before it went into production. Then he made a whole bunch of shit movies. No one can keep the streak going forever, especially when his driving force has seemed to change from cool stories that have cool effects to cool effects that need a story to allow him to use them in a movie.

Re:Whet

[jo_ham]

Not in the UK. That's a style issue, not a grammar one.

Re:user-agent manipulation needed

[agm]

Yes, that works. Thanks:

wget -U "QuickTime/7.6.2" http://movies.apple.com/movies/fox/avatar/avatar2009aug0820a-tsr_h1080p.mov [apple.com]

I've read the screenplay

[jabber]

I read the screenplay for this about 5 years ago at this point. Honestly surprised it took so long to get made. I guess Cameron wanted technology to catch up to his imagination.

The basic plot is a) humanity discovers alien world, b) populated by weird creatures, the most intelligent of which are the blue humanoid ones - you can think of them sort of as Native Americans; and c) that's pretty much the plot. Humans come to conquer this new world.

To do this they d) grow "avatars" who are biologically like the aliens but into which human consciousness can be uploaded. This is done to e) interact with the aliens and convince them to let humans take over their planet. f) The aliens are not so keen on the idea and g) fight back. h) it turns out that they're not just primitives but that they i) live in close consciousness-sharing harmony with other creatures on their planet and j) their entire planet via plants.

See, they k) have nerve bundles growing in their hair and these let them connect with other living beings, such as l) the pterodactyls which they're able to pilot by mind control. m) One particularly nasty human soldier scalps one of the main aliens and this is a very dramatic thing. n) the protagonist is a crippled Earth scientist who can't walk, but when loaded into his "avatar" he can, and so he wants to stay in his alien body. o) When an alien dies they get absobed by the foliage and become part of the planetary consciousness. p) Because the protagonist helps to chase off the nasty humans q)by wiping out the invading force and sending Earth a fake message about a lethal virus being on the planet, r) the aliens make him a permanent alien. s) there is also the obligatory love story.

There, aren't you glad I just saved you 2 hours and $20???

Sure, it'll be visually pretty but the plot is lame. Unless you're 13.