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The Avatar Trailer Sucks, But Don't Give Up HopeBy Katey Rich: 2009-08-20 09:54:44
Hopefully by now you've been able to see the Avatar trailer, despite the technical problems that seem to now be required when it comes to any Avatar-related event. Whether you managed to get through to Apple's high-res versions or watched it through our embed, you've at least got an idea of what James Cameron is going for in the movie he says will change the world.So what did you think? For me, the trailer sucks. Having seen 25 minutes of the film at Comic Con, I was able to piece together which footage came from which scene, and hazard a guess at what the hell was going on when blue people rode on the backs of dragons and wielded spears at one another. But for the people who have never seen footage of the film before-- which is a whole lot of people-- the trailer seems needlessly disorienting and vague. Why not a single word of dialogue? Why not even an indication of the plot, beyond the basic plot description "Sam Worthington lives inside his avatar and runs around an alien planet." Why only show your hand halfway? I get that they're trying to follow up on the promises that Avatar looks like nothing ever has, and would rather show off as many flashy scenes as possible rather than ease you into this world. But the Quicktime format is so limiting, especially for a 3D movie, that the impact of all the CGI wizardry is muted anyway. Already people are complaining that Sam Worthington's Avatar doesn't look realistic, that the blue skin looks fake, because they haven't had enough time to see it move like a human, hear it talk, or see it respond to its world. Having seen it in Hall H, I promise it works. It just needs time to settle in, and just by showing one complete scene at Comic Con, they sold the effect entirely. Cutting together all the random scenes in the trailer just makes you more disoriented. But even if you can't show off your technology in a trailer, you can at least hint at the story, which I wrote from Comic Con was the most exciting part of the movie. This isn't just a big-budget spectacle about people running around in space. It's a deeply felt, mythic story, the kind that Cameron has proved time and time again he's great at telling. Even if the Na'vi will take some getting used to, the hero's journey is an instantly recognizable story, and the hook that will get people to take a chance on this strange sci-fi. The footage shown at Avatar Day should definitely get that across, but I'm worried that the word online will remain that the CGI looks weird and fake. My best hope is that, after Avatar Day, Fox releases just a bit of a complete scene online, giving the rest of the world a chance to see these characters with more context, and understand that, at heart, it's a story as old as the written word. This trailer, for all its visual magic, just wasn't capable of getting that across.
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