Trailer #2: Avatar

Assuming you care at all, you’ve probably already seen the crappy looking bootleg or the Thai version that’s been floating around or maybe you even saw it playing in theaters last weekend. Either way, Yahoo finally put up the 2nd official trailer for James Cameron’s Avatar this morning.

If corny lines like “Ladies and gentlemen, you are not in Kansas anymore. You are on Pandora” give you a masculine chill, then you’ll probably be all over this thing. Me? Despite the fact the trailer gives a much more detailed look at what the movie is all about (we even get to see Giovani Ribisi doing the Paul Reiser part from Aliens), I’m having a hard time letting go of my skepticism.

Originally, Cameron promised a revolutionary visual experience. When that kind of crashed and burned on Avatar Day, it became clear marketing  needed to do a better job of selling the movie itself and this is an attempt to do that. The problem is, it lays bare a lot of the flaws in Cameron’s style – the cartoon dialogue, simplistic characters and thin story – and no amount of Enya-like music will ever cover that up.

Still, now that the hype wave has crested and rolled back a little bit, this new trailer does a much better job than the teaser and it shouldn’t draw so many awkward Delgo and Thundercats references. Despite recent attempts to pin Avatar to a Poul Anderson story, this is still an original sci-fi work that isn’t a sequel or a remake and that’s something that makes me want to put my skepticism away.

Dana Goodyear’s recent profile of Cameron in New York Magazine made the guy look like the arrogant, macho asshole I’ve always imagined him to be, and yet by the end I kind of had to admire him. It’s easy to mock his annoying Oscar acceptance speech for Titanic or the petulant rebuttal he wrote of Kenneth Turan’s pan of the film, but it’s important to remember what a huge chance he took  on that film and how much of the media was gunning for its failure. The guy threw himself into a dream project – the failure of which probably would’ve ruined him – and just when it looked like he was going to fumble the ball, he scored the game-winning touchdown. I probably would’ve come off like an asshole too.

My big concern with Avatar has been all the talk about the revolutionary effects and 3-D. Cameron has even said in interviews the story idea sprang from his desire to push forward the technology of how characters and creatures are created in CGI. That seems to me to be putting the CGI cart before the horse, but near the end of the NY Mag piece Cameron says this:

“Too much is being said about the technology of this film. Quite frankly, I don’t give a rat’s ass how a film is made. It’s an emotional story. It’s a love story. They’re not expecting that. The sci-fi/fantasy fans see the trailer and they think, Cool—battles, robots. What you really need to get to is, Oh, it’s that, too.”

On one hand, it’s good to know he’s at least paying lip service to story and character, but on the other hand it also feels a little like he’s just trying to redo the Titanic formula that worked so well at the box office and at the Oscars. Special effects and action for the boys and a love  story for the girls.

If he pulls it off, he may well have another Titanic on his hands (for better or for worse, depending on your perspective) and if he doesn’t, it might be more like Michael Bay’s wretched and laughable Pearl Harbor.

At this point, I’m prepared to cross my fingers and give him the benefit of a doubt.

Filed under: Trailers
Tags: Avatar, James Cameron