Avatar

Avatar is a 400 million dollar picture, and I'm not quite sure that money is being put to good use. From this trailer I'm not at all convinced that you couldn't use actors in makeup shooting on location to create an equal if not superior effect. Is the green screen and motion capture necessary to service the story? I doubt it. In fact with all my previous experiences with motion capture (think Robert Zemeckis), the motion capture technology is strictly inferior to real human faces emoting. Maybe that changes with this movie. Maybe those computer generated faces will be just as good as a real face(and while they certainly look good in the trailer, they don't try to do much emoting) but that brings us back to the question of, why? If a computer generated, motion captured face can only hope to be as good as a real face and never surpass it, why not just use a real face in makeup.

The other part of this huge budget is that the entire alien planet is rendered in a computer. None of it is real. Now it seems to me that for story purposes the important element is that it is an alien world. Shouldn't the film makers be able to create an alien world using locations and sets on earth. Especially a world that is mostly jungle, something we have plenty of on our beautiful planet. Well so what if the movie doesn't use special effects to service the story, the trailer certainly proves they use it well for the spectacle of it all, isn't that good enough. It is, well except to maybe 20th Century Fox whose accountants probably weep over the cost of this thing. But Camerons last blockbuster grossed over 600 million domestically so potential is there. The risk creatively is that too much spectacle will distract from the meat of the story.

Lets talk about the story for a second before we continue discussing the look of the film. The trailer features a lot of relatively interesting plot, but little in the way of interesting characters which worries me. From what I can tell, the plot of this movie is roughly: Mankind wants to loot alien planet for resources, but those pesky natives get in the way. Mankind sends in a marine in the body of one the aliens to find a diplomatic solution. That man falls in love with a pretty alien girl and has second thoughts about his mission. Mankind invades anyways. The marine fights for the aliens. There are some interesting parallels here to current and past events the film can explore as well as some interesting themes about culture, war, and race that could also be explored. The problem is that the film seems to to side with aliens almost exclusively, casting the invading humans as the bad guys. There's no ambiguity, and that is just less interesting to me than a movie that makes you think about things from both sides. The other issue here is that there if the parallels to recent US invasions is too obvious and the film is too one sided, then it could end up feeling preachy, which is something I hate in my blockbuster Sci-Fi pictures.

Now the main character as displayed in the trailer seems alarmingly bland. Zero personality. One of the other characters basically makes a crack about it, "Just relax and let your mind go blank, shouldn't be hard for you." Movies with dull main characters always struggle to entertain over the course of two hours and the supporting cast seems to do little better, albeit we see little of them in the course of the trailer. This makes me nervous but 3 and half minutes isn't a long time to develop a character so...

But boy does the film look pretty. Pandora is gorgeous. The action looks exciting, and the score is appropriately epic. The sense of scale is fantastic; this truly feels like a big movie. My only complaint about the look of the film is that Cameron's aliens look like blue monkey people. A goofy looking design in a movie that does not at all seem goofy. I'll get over it and get used to them over the course of the two hour movie, (I don't know if that's the actual running time; I just assume all movies are two hours until I learn otherwise.) but for a movie that looks so great elsewhere the character design is a weak point.

I know I've been awfully critical of the trailer, but don't think I won't be sitting in the audience with my goofy 3D classes because I still haven't talked about the most effective part of the trailer. The part where it tells me its from James Cameron the director of Terminator, Aliens, T2, True Lies, and Titanic. That's quite a resume. I'm willing to give this one my $7.50

On a final note about 3D: This will surely be the way I see the film because its the way the director intends I see it, but there is nothing about the format that impresses me. 3D can be just as pretty as 2D but never prettier, just like Color isn't necessarily better than B&W. Just different, and probably a waste of money, but hey what else are you going to spend 400 million dollars on 20th Century Fox.