My hype is officially and utterly deflated for this film, and I’ve got James Cameron himself to thank. The man doesn’t exactly seem at ease in front of a huge audience, but his 15 minute speech at Ubisoft’s E3 conference about how awesome Avatar and Ubisoft’s video game are will drain away your interest in this film. First of all, he describes the entire film. A paraplegic war veteran named Jake, played by Sam Worthington, is sent to Pandora, the moon of a gas giant orbiting Alpha Centauri, where mankind is trampling all over a not-so exotic planet. Basically it’s a jungle, but with thousand foot tall trees. Using some kind of genetic engineering and remote control via consciousness (see the same basic process in the upcoming Surrogates) and Jake becomes a 10 foot tall blue alien with a tail and tiger-like stripes and cavorts around with the planet’s intelligent species, the Na’vi. Echoing Dances with Wolves, he falls in love with one and begins siding with them in the conflict. You know, you can make me suspend my disbelief in a lot of ways and make me empathize with all sorts of personality traits, but I can’t imagine sitting down for this and having the film make me think like a furry. Anyway, the film inevitably climaxes in a giant battle between humans and the Na’vi, who use primitive tools and wild beasts for their fighting. It’s Dances with Wolves, in the future, in space, and with big blue aliens replacing the Native Americans.
The second thing that is a drag about Cameron’s presentation, nay, speech, is that he mostly just talks about the technology that lets him do all this and generically brags about how awesome his film and the game are. Between stereoscopic stuff and new performance capture methods, that seems to be where his focus has been. No one cares if your camera system took nine years to develop if the movie is the same stuff we’ve seen over and over again except with a flashy new coat of paint. This is sounding more and more like another Titanic, a rather lame story taking place against an effects-laden world, except this time there won’t be any teenage heartthrobs to keep people interested. Maybe this is irrational and premature, but after all these years, this is our first look at the universe James Cameron has been crafting, and it doesn’t feel fresh or interesting at all and the actual story seems consistently treated like an after thought. Even the flying creatures look like the dragons from the Panzer Dragoon video games.
Ubisoft also issued a couple screenshots for the game, which will give a further look at the film’s universe. The shots are obviously retouched though, so bear that in mind regarding the graphical quality of the game. Check those out after the jump.
