Avatar – Teaser Trailer and disappointment?
Posted by Stephen Fairbanks on August 21, 2009
Sam Worthington gets Na'vi savvy.
So, the teaser trailer for Avatar: the $200m film that will shatter the film world forever with its incredible high-tech 3D amazingness – was released yesterday, in glorious 2D. And it seems the overwhelming response is: ‘meh’.
The film, set in the 22nd century, sees the human race invading a distant planet called Pandora to mine for valuable minerals. Or something. The only problem is, human’s can’t breathe or operate very well on the planet without large Transformer (GRR!) type machines, or more cleverly – the use of 10 foot tall blue people who they can control using a sun bed.
That’s pretty much all I can fathom so far from the teaser. There’ll be lots of explosions involved, and floating mountains (which looked pretty cool) and some thrills and spills which recall Peter Jackson’s overweight but enjoyable King Kong. There’ll also be some romance. And a wheelchair.
If Cameron was serious, and not just blowing smoke about this being ‘such a big fucking deal’, and if he hadn’t name-checked the genius that is 2001: A Space Odyssey, and if he – from the start – had let us all know it would look more like a Disney film than a believable photo-realistic alien war type film, maybe people wouldn’t be so dismayed.
That said, I’m holding off the tears until Cameron comes up with a proper trailer. With more talking and less; look-there’s-action-in-it.
And… is the moral of the story really as simplistic as ‘people are aggressive and should be more respectful of other cultures’? – do we really need a $200m film to tell us that? Not really. But Cameron isn’t an idiot. Not by a long way, so let’s hope his 12 year absence from directing hasn’t made him assume audience is stupid. Then again… he may have been keeping an eye on Michael Bay and thought: ‘Huh… people like this?’.
Over to you again, Cameron…
Reader Comments
Disney? You might be right. Pocahontas, i thought.
Ok, its pretty harsh to judge Cameron, the genius behind Aliens, especially with Weaver in it… If we’re lucky we’ll get Weaver with a flame thrower again.
The trailer is taken exclusively from the first half of the film he says. Not that that has to mean anything. Example, a cool trailer in my opinion was Moon and surprisingly most of that footage was in the first 3 minutes!
Ok, onto what I thought. Why bother was my main question. Theres nothing really new in here. Why blend in what doesnt work. CG just cant look real and more fool directors for believing it does. CG has a place and it shouldnt just be for entire battle scenes, it just turns into a video game cut scene and then back to a highly airbrushed movie again.
What I mean is, why not just make it an anime such as what Final Fantasy 7 did.
So overall, lets hope the film can save itself from the trailer
I think modern trailers are all edited so it appears to be all the about the action. This is probably because Hollywood thinks action = ticket sales. Which I don’t think is 100% true.
Cameron has always said, although this film is a technologicial step forwards, it’s still all about the story. If you look at how amazing Aliens and Terminator 1 & 2 were, he usually does care about the characters… it just so happens that he uses special effects better than pretty much anyone.
I wanted to go see the 25 mins preview! how dare they deny me!