SAN DIEGO — James Cameron is ready to transport moviegoers to a breathtaking new world in Avatar, the ambitious 3-D movie he’s been working on for four years and dreaming of for a decade more.
“How many of you have ever wanted to go to another planet?” Avatar's revered writer/director asked the Comic-Con crowd Thursday before playing approximately 25 minutes’ worth of scenes from the eagerly awaited movie, which comes out Dec. 18.
“Are you ready to go to Pandorum?" asked Cameron (pictured). The crowd roared and the film rolled, giving 6,000 or so fans the world’s first glimpse of the visually stunning flora and fauna of Avatar’s lush planet.
(The world -at - large will get its first look at Cameron’s stunner on Aug. 21, when Twentieth Century Fox debuts the film’s trailer everywhere and screen extended footage at “select cinemas and IMAX theaters,” according to a press release. A Fox spokeswoman said the number of theaters running the Avatar Day event has not yet been determined.)
So, what did Comic-Con attendees see in between the oohs, ahs and applause? A first look at a movie formerly shrouded in secrecy; a film that builds on Cameron's impressive cinematic track record (Aliens, Titanic, the first two Terminator movies); and a project that boasts the kind of big-budget, mind-blowing sci-fi with a conscience that a new franchise could be built upon. In other words, Avatar could be Cameron's Star Wars.
Avatar is a mind-expanding adventure on a beautiful world filled with plants and creatures both ferocious and whimsical. Giant, dinosaur-type beasts; jellyfishlike creatures that float through the air; and all manner of other imaginatively bizarre beings that fight and fly through the bioluminescent, black-light forest Cameron and his talented artists have brought to life. It's filmed using special stereoscopic 3-D cameras invented by Cameron and his cinematic wizards, and the immersive onscreen imagery looks astonishingly crisp.
Perhaps the most amazing creatures are the avatars themselves: 10-foot-tall, slender blue beings, genetically engineered to look like the planet’s indigenous people, the Na'vi.
A scene shown at Comic-Con introduced the avatars as giants floating in fluid-filled tanks, awaiting the medical procedure that binds humans to their new bodies. One such earthling is Jake Sully (played by Sam Worthington), a paraplegic whose first moments in his oversize new body prove captivating.
In other scenes, Jake, in his new avatar body, stalks through the Pandorum jungle, encountering menacing predators and eventually meeting Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), a lithe Na'vi with wicked archery skills.
For all the eye candy dished out to Comic-Con fans, Cameron said after the screening in a press conference that the scenes shown were not cherry-picked to show Avatar’s most exotic scenery: It’s all that vivid and otherworldly. He also said the movie is about much more than just the incredible visuals.
“There’s a story” beating strong at the heart of Avatar, he said, one that involves military men that see the Na'vi as nothing more than violent threats.
“It’ll wring ya out," he said,
Sigourney Weaver, who plays Grace Augustine, a scientist who has spent her life studying the Na'vi and their primitive culture, called the movie a “rip-roaring, old-fashioned adventure-romance,” with plenty of envelope-pushing elements to keep famously detail-oriented sci-fi fans happy.
“I think this is the kind of movie that changes the way movies are made,” she said.
Cameron said working on his underwater documentaries for most of the past decade gave him ideas for Pandorum's startling plant and animal life, and helped him develop the necessary filmmaking muscle to pull off Avatar. But even with all the prep, there was one scene that took two years to figure out how to pull off.
That scene is the movie’s action-heavy finale, and Cameron wouldn’t reveal what takes place other than to make a solemn promise to his fans: “It’s a corker,” he said.
Photo courtesy Twentieth Century Fox
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