I ventured out through some rain soaked traffic to hit a not so local Cineplex where I had been able to procure ‘Avatar Day’ Passes. While there were some fanboys in the small line outside the theater waiting to be verified and let in, I was kind of surprised that the majority of the line contained your average Joe and/or Mrs. Shmoe popcorn muncher that made me think “Hmm.. how did they hear about this?”, though the giant crowds of James Cameron faithful that supposedly crashed the Avatar site to get free passes didn’t seem to be in full force. Our theater and showing had supposedly sold out but seemed only three quarters full at best. Could all of that been just more hype to fuel the Avatar machine?
Just prior to the showing, a representative from what I assume was ‘Fox’, gave a little ‘James Cameron ego building speech about the “Epic” film and then turned things over to the theater management who tried to convince people to go pay for an actual full length flick after the preview (can’t blame him for trying).
The lights went down, we were told to put on our 3-D Glasses and we were then treated to trailers (in 3-D) for ‘Cloudy with a chance of meatballs’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’ which was then followed by a breif introduction from James Cameron and finally the footage.
We start with a military introduction scene that was very Aliens-esque, in which Colonel Quaritch (Stephen Lang) warns the new recruits about the dangers of Pandora, and promises that, even though his job is to protect them, he’ll fail at that job. Rolling in to view at the end of that scene is Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), apparently a new recruit like any other except for the fact that he’s in a wheelchair. Thanks to the avatar technology that Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) and her staff have developed, his being wheel chair bound makes no difference as Jake’s brain can be transplanted into an avatar figure, a hybrid of humans and the Na’vi, the native inhabitants of the planet who are lanky, blue creatures that are somewhat cat-like.
Once Jake is implanted into his avatar body, able to use his legs for the first time (presumably) in years, he gets a little understandably excited and goes a bit wild, swatting things with his new tail and breaking out of the operating room before he’s permitted to. Next we see him out in the jungle with the avatar of Sigourney Weaver’s and Joel David Moore’s avatar characters, and they have to protect themselves from a couple of beasts, the first of which is a Triceratops/Rhinoceros Hybrid with a Hammerhead Shark like protrusion on it’s head and the second, which separates Jake from his companions chasing him through the jungle is a very unique creation that doesn’t resemble much of anything that I can recall.
The next scene shows Jake meeting up with Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), a Na’vi who saves him from a series of charging beasts and then gives him a very hard time for forcing her to kill them because their death was unnecessary. Jake and Neytiri then walk through the bio luminescent forest.
In the last scene, Jake is being both encouraged and taunted by Neytiri and other Na’vi to train a dragon (or something like a dragon) in what I assume is some sort of ritual to prove himself to the tribe.
Audience reaction in our theater was fairly hushed with only mild, muted applause and hushed conversation, followed by walking out of the theater. I was surprised that Fox made no effort to really make “Avatar Day” an EVENT. The footage aside, I really would have thought that Fox would have ponied up a theatrical poster or some digital goodies only available with a password from the screening or something of that nature for the folks who attended but it was pretty much “Thank you for coming to see a sneak peek of James Cameron’s Epic Blah,Blah,Blah ‘Avatar’.. watch it and be on your way!”
With the hype (which I disregard) and the lofty claims that people (including Cameron himself) have made about Avatar and how it will change the world of film (etc.), I was afraid that they were building peoples expectations too high for this movie. I usually set my bar pretty low and when people say they’re “going to change the world”, I take it with a few thousand grains of salt. This time, I throttled back the salt because of James Cameron’s impassioned speeches at E3 and Comic-Con when he talked about basically working on Avatar for 14 years and waiting for the technology to catch up so that he could bring it to life. That fact alone made me want to believe him and I really wanted something that someone is so passionate about to be a huge success because you could tell he truly believes in Avatar. Even then, I worried that they could be overstating their accomplishments a bit and setting themselves and the movie going public up for a huge let down.
While there are plenty of visually exciting films around, I usually use two films as benchmarks for visually blowing me away and to give you a bit of perspective on how I judge a films “Wow” factor from purely a visual standpoint, I thought I would share them.
To begin with, the first time I saw the opening scene in ‘Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope’ when the Deathstar Destroyer flies in from behind the audience and seems to go on forever (establishing a scale unseen before) as it chases after the Rebel blockade runner, that’s a “Wow” moment and the second is the very first glimpses of the dinosaurs in the first Jurassic Park, those are my most memorable visual “Wow” moments. Those films are 32 and 16 years old respectively and both made great advances in visual effects and cinematography that are still lauded today by some of the industry’s best, and from a personal standpoint are the only films that have ever given me that type of jaw-dropping moment in a theater.
I really wish I could say that James Cameron’s Avatar is a new addition to that line up or something like “it was amazing, it will cause a revolution!”, but that would be disingenuous at best. I’m sure that like most Cameron films, it will be very well done, it will be a good story and it will most likely earn the G.D.P. of some foreign country in box office receipts during it’s tenure in theaters but is it a “Wow” movie? or a game changer? Absolutely, unequivocally not.
It is visually beautiful and slightly ‘different’ but it is neither wholly unique, nor an epic masterpiece of biblical proportions. Someone in my theater made the simplest and most intelligent vocal description, which I am going to take as my own. It’s not a PIXAR movie, but it looks like the greatest PIXAR movie EVER.. nothing more, nothing less.
Will I go see Avatar in the theater when it is released? Yes, to do a review for the site I will.. but if it weren’t for that, I’d wait for the DVD.
