Let me first get my complaints out of the way because there are so few. THIS POST IS ALL SPOILERS:

-The hammerhead creature: when Jake encounters this rhino, there is an angled profile shot of it stomping and growling. It looks out of place because it looks like something you’d see in a museum-produced documentary.

-20 mil a kilo: Selfridge explaining to Grace the reason they are on Pandora. It sounds like an info dump for us made more apparent because she’d already know the reason for the party.

-Last Shadow: Neytiri tells Jake that they nickname the greater banshee Last Shadow, and he follows up with “cuz it’s the last shadow you’ll ever see.” Seems like an unnecessary line since we already know this particular kind of banshee is king predator of the sky.

-Rally Call: wasn’t feeling Jake or Quaritch’s call to arms.

Now let’s start the love:

+Playful flying: my favorite scene is the sequence following Jake bonding with his banshee, particularly when him and Neytiri are diving full speed along the mountainside.

+Badass: the scene where Quaritch is escaping from the exploding Dragon, and when it crashes behind him when he lands. In the hands of a lesser director, the display of badassery would be Quaritch walking away tall from the explosion. Instead we get a cut to a close up of a cut up Quaritch, mad as fuck at Jake.

+Hometree collapse: very Titanic.

+The cut from the cremation of Jake’s brother to the shuttle diving through the clouds of Pandora.

+Concussive forces: the missiles that fire from the Scorpions, I love how the people and environment react. Bad special effects is when the only reaction from the actor is simply turning away. Explosions are not just fire. There is a violent rush of air. Not only do the Navi get thrown, debris gets blown outward also.

+The first time Jake runs in his Avatar. Awesome.

+The first time seeing Grace in her Avatar. Sexy.

+Neytiri has her hair loose in the mating scene. Awesome sexy.

+You’re like a child: and then those seedlings float towards Jake, who flicks one away. Neytiri grabs his hand. Jake then uses his free hand to smack another away. And later as he follows her, he smacks those bioluminescent petals.

+When Jake falls off the horse for the first time, his expression when Tsutey gallops in.

+When Wes Studi (forget his char’s name) has Jake and Grace bound. The scene ends with Jake closing his eyes, the Navi hollering because they are going to attack the sky people and show them how much damage a Navi war party can deal. And then it cuts to a squadron of Scorpions and Samsons led by the Dragon.

+Jake-Grace relationship: I like how she keeps having to force him to eat because all he wants to do is run around in his avatar. whoo whee hee.

+AMP design: the last movie I saw that got this concept right was Aliens.

+Hold your breath: during the final fight, Jake wakes up in the pod because the research base has a hull breach. He struggles to hold his breath. He finally closes his eyes, but before the camera cuts to Jake’s avatar, there is a quick cut to the tunnel of light that indicates transfer.

+The fact this movie doesn’t have a moment where the damsel is in distress. Sure you could say Jake saved Neytiri when the thanator is killed, but the moment is never drawn out long enough for it to matter. Actually, Jake is probably the one who could be labeled the damsel since Neytiri saves him more than he saves her.

+Zoe Saldana is fucking fantastic. Her expressions: when she meets up with Jake when he’s about to bond with a banshee; her wide-eyed relief after she and Jake escape from the Last Shadow; her mixture of anger and defeat when she decides to take on the chorus line of soldiers and AMPs; her petulant growl when her mother orders her to teach Jake the ways of her people.

ooh, just thought of a complaint: where’s Bill Paxton?

Twelve years I’ve been waiting for the next James Cameron movie. Two years I’ve been waiting for his vision of a scifi epic adventure in a time where, hell, I can’t name you the a recent example of its kind. Did Avatar live up to the hype? Is the technology behind the movie a game changer?

It sure is. And man do I fucking love this movie.

I’ve probably lost some of you already – sometimes a man with an erection for a director and his/her films is just not attractive. I’m passionate for only a few things, and when it comes to James Cameron movies, I don’t fuck around. So let me stroke one out for you because there are now four of his movies in my top five.

…Star Wars! There’s that scifi epic adventure example I was hunting for. Not really fair to compare Avatar and the original trilogy (because of their eras, not because geek culture says I should guard the pedestal), but the prequel trilogy is a recent example – and also one that went big for the computer-generated at the expense of everything else.

Both Avatar and the Star Wars prequels have excellent computer generated effects. Given enough time and money, the prequels could look as great as Avatar’s. What separates the two is the blending of what’s real and what’s post production. Computer effects that involve people, for the most part, looks awkward in the prequels; look at Episode 3’s opening space battle and then watch Count Dooku somersault off the balcony to fight the Jedi. The photorealism in Avatar is fantastic, but if people and objects don’t move like they should, then the whole presentation looks dooku.

And movement is where Avatar dances. What Avatar, what The Volume, have given us is a new kind of prosthetic – one that can be anything, one that imposes nothing on the actors so that they can do what they excel at without worrying about dress. We believe in Pandora because even though it’s a world created by designers on their machines, beneath the Navi are actors, their performances captured.

I’ve ranted about the motion-emotion capture in previous posts, and what we saw in the trailer aren’t even the highlights. Despite Cameron’s need to push technology (and not just on the computer side, because remember, for Aliens Stan Winston’s company built the fourteen foot tall Alien Queen; and even though Digital Domain and ILM generated the effects, an actual full-scale Titanic was built albeit a functioning interior) he knows movies are not just about extravagant sets and explosions, that if you don’t give the audience a believable story and characters, then what’s the point? Every other director says character drives their movies, and most of the time we either don’t care for the performances or the story or both. With Avatar, performances are even more important because while the actor’s movements and expressions have been captured, for the most part they look nothing like their character. For us to care about them we need something familiar to hold on to. We see movies to be entertained; to see people act.

And nothing looks like Avatar because no other movie has had The Volume to work with; in short, The Volume allows Cameron to view a rough rendered world the actors perform in, meaning he has complete freedom to adjust shots instead of unnaturally shifting actors or effects in post. Another way of looking at The Volume – think what Peter Jackson did with Gollum, but on a larger scale. Nothing looks like Avatar because the shots Cameron sets up doesn’t have to conform to what will be added later; a scene’s environment is already created on the computer, so while in production he already knows what the actors will look in relation to what is actually not there on the set. Everything looks uniform. If there is one thing I desperately want to get across, this is it. Know the reasons for Avatar looking the way it does and the reasons for Cameron pushing this technology.

Cameron has always been a clean director in terms of speed and camera angle. His action tends to run at normal speed, and the rare slow motion is used to heighten tension or a mood instead of allowing us a frame-by-frame as though the projectionist was working the machine like Quicktime. Look at how he uses slow motion in T2, when both Terminators have found John at the Galleria; look at how nothing slows down in the Operations scene in Aliens. As for the camera, Cameron doesn’t go for the artsy or gimmicky angles, which pleases me to no end, and he also doesn’t go documentary – for the most part I’m not a fan of this style because I like to see action framed clean and clear.

Put aside the technical. Avatar is just a goddamn fun movie.

So what if the story is space Dances With Wolves. So what if it has action movie tropes, particularly the kind where a gunpowder civilization abuses the tree-hut warrior culture. Sure it’s reductive to say all action movies are the good guys versus the bad. Broad strokes does not equal blah story. What makes Avatar exciting is the way it’s executed; the way it looks; the way the actors emote despite their appearance. The writing might not be as sharp as The Dark Knight’s, but Avatar doesn’t fall apart in the third act because of a convoluted plot and characters whose motivations flip flop in the absence of a rationale collision. Telling is more important than story.

Cameron described Avatar as a scifi fantasy adventure. And what a fun ride it is. There are no complicated setups or mythologies you have to know beforehand. Even though this is a big budget studio movie, it doesn’t have to please all demographics to make its money back; there are no kids to save-the-day; there are no funny sidekicks to entertain morons. Characters live in the moment, are not troubled by their past or at least there are no dedicated scenes a monologue for sympathy.

So for now let’s stop this essay, and in the next post I’ll talk as though we’re dining after having watched the movie.

Thank you, James Cameron and the cast and crew of Avatar.

Ever since the theatrical trailer I’ve said I’m on an Avatar blackout. I’ve snuck in a few videos here and there; I’m incredibly picky, limiting myself to the occasional TV spot and not touching any character/creature/vehicle profiles or even listening to the James Horner score cuz I read somewhere that the music titles are spoiler-tastic. Jake’s Avatar Kills Quaritch By Punching Him in the Chest (Piano version).

Yet there is one video I watched that further reinforces my erection for all things James Cameron. It’s a video I watched carefully – which pretty much means that I skipped the first few minutes when the actors started talking (not that they automatically have nothing interesting to say, I’m just wary they might give away story/character bits I’d rather see for myself) and then praying to Christ I don’t see anything that spoils. It talks about the technology behind the movie; the Volume where the actors perform and the director chooses his shots from wherever angles. And even though Cameron, as usual, praises the technology he had to create to make the film, he always says something that proves why he is more than just a technical director.

“What we were most worried about was this [Cameron frames his face from the eyes to the mouth] because this is where movies live and breathe, in the tight close-up.”

Performances are usually what excite me about a movie, but I never realized how much I’m enamored with close-ups. Quickly going through my favorite movie scenes/shots, the majority are close-ups; Hicks shining the light across the crawl space; Ripley tilting her head and having enough when she meets the Queen; Eli’s final shot in Let The Right One In; Murray and Johansson hugging at the end of Lost in Translation; the T-1000 reshaping its head after the Pescadero elevator doors close.

Only 17 more days till opening day.

I’m having trouble embedding, so here’s the link.

The Avatar trailer premiered in theaters last Friday, with the online version coming up Oct. 29 – why on Thursday instead of tomorrow doesn’t make sense to me. Cam versions have been up since Friday morning, but since I have standards in resolution, I refused to watch the bootlegs. Which means I had to buy tickets for Saw’s fifth sequel.

But man, it was worth spending 12 bucks to see the trailer.

At 3 minutes and change, the Avatar trailer is the longest I’ve seen – not including Extended trailers which I don’t really count as trailers since they’re cut for a particular venue and not for the general audience who I’m guessing see most if not all their movie previews in theaters.

Why is Avatar’s a minute longer than the average trailer? The movie is a science fiction epic that is comparable to a very few (Star Wars), a science fiction epic in a time when every other movie is either a sequel or remake. Yes, the movie makes use of new camera technology, which most people won’t realize or care to know (though they should because it has attracted directors like Steven Spielberg and Peter jackson). Yet Avatar is a movie event and James Cameron is the reason. The trailer makes damn sure to remind you he’s responsible for the best action movies and the highest grossing of all-time. They pretty much title card his entire filmography.

I’ve already gushed over the special effects and how the motion/emotion capture is what separates Avatar from other movies of its kind. There is a shot in the trailer where Neytiri pulls back on a bowstring; there is tension in her movements that gives her weight – and there should be weight because, again, beneath the computer renders the movements and expressions are still the actors. Look at that shot of her turning toward the camera, look at the way her upper lip moves. If she was an animator’s creation, I’d think the lip-twitch a nice touch; since it’s an actor’s performance, I like to think there was a reason behind the motion.

Perhaps my favorite shot is one of Col. Quaritch (Stephen Lang) drinking coffee as his gunships in the background unload their ordnance. In the hands of a lesser director, conveying the antagonist’s attitude toward human life would involve something that feels like comic-book knowledge. Selfridge (Giovanni Ribisi) might have the lines that show he views the Navi as nothing more than tribals in an industrial universe, and while your first impression of Lang is nail-tough general, by the end you’ll know he’s not only as heartless as Selfridge but also comfortable within the slaughter.

Sure, the story when reduced is Space Dances with Wolves, but that doesn’t bother me. I prefer simple premises over high-concept because they are the most reliable. The more complicated you make the premise the more difficult it will be for the audience to see the plot and make sense of the characters’ purposes and growth.
Even though the trailer is 3-minutes long, the first few seconds gives you all the information you need about Jake and his story – “I became a marine for the hardship, told myself I could pass any test a man could pass. All I ever wanted was a single thing worth fighting for.”

And this is why James Cameron is the king of the world. He knows how to direct action. He knows how to tell a story – and despite the technology he created and the amount of detail he put into the world around Jake and Neytiri, he knows these ultimately serve the story – “Film-making is not about sprockets. It’s about ideas, it’s about images, it’s about imagination, and it’s about storytelling.”

And just as important to me, he knows how to frame performances. Cameron is known for his technical and logistical prowess as a director and his perfectionist attitude when it comes to the details. Yet he still understands the power of the actor’s performance – “When we unpack these shots, sometimes our jaws just drop at the verisimilitude to the actors. And that’s what thrills me most. I’m kind of over all the design stuff. That was the first two years. I’m kind of used to that stuff now, the floating mountains and thousand-foot trees. But when I see Sam Worthington captured exactly at a critical-performance moment – that still gets me.”

A story’s premise is the easy part, and for better or for worse, we already know the ending. The fun is how the story is executed and if it can deliver the dilemma’s without betraying our trust. And Cameron has never allowed gimmicks to define his storytelling.

…Ok, my favorite shot – the first appearance of Sigourney Weaver. She may not be Ripley of Aliens, but it’s Weaver in a Cameron movie.

The more I hear, the more I read about people dismissing Avatar’s CG and expressing disappointment in the Navi – how they look like cartoons – makes me wonder if people know what makes a special effect stellar.

The designs of the Navi are subjective, so whatever on that point; although I do have strong, positive opinions about their designs, but at the moment, they’re not germane to my argument.

But their special effects – c’mon. If people want them to be a physical presence in front of the camera, then they’re most likely going to get stuff that looks like Tim Curry in Legend or everything larger than a midget but smaller than a house in the Hellboy movies. Curry and Perlman had less latex on their faces for expressions – which is always the mark of excellent make-up effects, because it’s easier to showcase empathy – but the rest of their appearance, they looked like giant action figures.

The Navi don’t suffer from a uniform plastic sheen. Look at the shot in the teaser where Jake wiggles his toes. His skin has pigmentation. It has a porous quality, that if you were to place a flashlight flush against their fingers, some light would reflect and some light would pass through as physics orders.

Or how about the shot where Neytiri darts her eyes at those luminescent critters that flutter around Jake? Facial expressions, people.

And in a less seen scene – Avatar Day footage – Jake wrestles with a banshee so they can bond, and shuffling along the sidelines is Neytiri. The way she flexes and squats, but just as important, how her facial muscles twist that’s not out of alignment with the rest of her body maneuvers – you’re not gonna see that kind of lithe stretching if the actor is buried under latex and prosthetics. And even though everything you see onscreen is computer-generated – inhuman flesh and blood – the skeleton of the Navi, of Jake and Neytiri, is all human. Sam Worthington and Zoe Saldana; motion and emotion captured.

Probably the main reason for the underwhelming response to the Avatar teaser is the hype; that special effects anything but perfection are a failure. I think we’re at the point where texture detail is now only limited by the artists’ proficiencies. That isn’t going to make a difference if the lighting on the set doesn’t match with what will be digitally inserted later, or vice versa. This is the other important aspect of good special effects: lighting.

Let’s take for example the Pescadero escape scene in T2: when the T-1000 passes through the bars; when the T-1000 re-molds its head after taking a shotgun blast pointblank. Even after nearly two decades those effects still look amazing partly – or mainly – because of the lighting. The cold silver and blue lighting of the hospital matches the cool silver and blue on the T-1000.

And another reason why those frames are a stellar example of CG: while his split head melds back into a whole, Robert Patrick’s eyes move.

Facial expressions, people.