London, England — Following our fairly negative response to the “Avatar” trailer released yesterday, we’ve just got back from the first European screening of the Avatar Day footage at the BFI IMAX in London. And unfortunately, the longer look at James Cameron’s sci-fi epic hasn’t changed our minds.
As far as we can tell, the footage is a slightly trimmed version of what screened at Comic-Con, clocking in at just over 15 minutes, and all the clips come from the first half of the movie. After a video introduction from Cameron, we cut to black and hear a gruff voice: ‘You’re not in Kansas anymore.’ The screen fades up to Stephen Lang’s heavily scarred character, Col. Quaritch, giving the recruits, including Sam Worthington’s wheelchair-bound Jake Sully, a speech, warning them that “My job is to protect you. I will not succeed. Not for all of you.” In the second, technobabble-heavy scene, Sigourney Weaver’s character, Grace, helps Jake into a machine, which enables him to connect to his ten-foot tall Avatar. Much of what follows can be glimpsed in the trailer, as he wakes up as an avatar for the first time. Following this, Grace, Jake and a third Avatar are on the surface of Pandora, confronted by a beast which starts to chase Jake.
Two final clips follow – the first involving Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) saving Jake from a pack of dog-like creatures, and leading him through a glowing forest at night (lit in a slightly naff 70s black-light style…), the second with Jake undergoing some kind of Na’vi initiation ritual – a sort of dragon rodeo, where he eventually tames the creature and flies it off a cliff. The package ended with a brief montage of money shots, most of which also feature in the trailer.
The audience reaction was very muted – when the lights came back up again, there was a sort of awkward silence, and then people started to shuffle out, like someone had died. Which is slightly unfair, as there was plenty to like in the 15 minutes. What impressed most was the sense of place – Pandora seems like a coherent world, with a landscape and ecosystem all of its own. In places, too, the effects are genuinely impressive – not revolutionary certainly, but the facial movement of the Na’vi is at least as good as Davy Jones, the current benchmark in the motion-capture field, and the stylized design of the characters gives real life t0 the eyes. If nothing else, Cameron seems to have escaped the uncanny valley.
But the effects work also seems inconsistent, at least at this stage (a problem that also plagued “Beowulf,” where the impressive detail of the main characters was countered by the fact that the extras appeared to have been copy-and-pasted from Shrek). The night-time sequence looked rubbery and unconvincing, and the later scenes in the selection are entirely CGI. Obviously, this would be par for the course in a fully CGI-animated film, but once you establish that this is a world in which real, photographed humans exist, removing any live-action elements from it robs the film of any weight it might otherwise have, and your eyes start to glaze over a little bit.
Aside from this, the design work in the film seems unexpectedly weak. Yes, Pandora appears to be a coherent world, but it’s also reminiscent of, as has been pointed out earlier, the likes of the Star Wars prequels, or the justifiably-forgotten “Ferngully: The Last Rainforest.” Furthermore, the film’s biggest problem may be the design of the Na’vi and the Avatars themselves. It’s great that they are genuinely alien – no Star Trek-style latex foreheads here – but when set against live-action actors, the height of the creatures (they measure at about ten foot) is pretty awkward, and it seems like it’s going to be hard to connect to them. When Fox’s hopes for the film revolve around the romance angle connecting with mainstream audiences, that’s going to be a huge problem. Both Neytiri and Jake seem unlikeable, the former coming across as aloof, the latter as arrogant, although Worthington is at least a charismatic presence in his live action moments, and doesn’t seem to be replicating his globe-trotting accent from “Terminator: Salvation,” which is strange, as Avatar was shot first.
More surprisingly is that for a 3-D pioneer like Cameron, the action sequences seem to have been shot and cut for 2-D. Because of the nature of the technology, the brain takes a fraction of a second longer to register the 3-D images, and the best uses of 3-D in the modern era (We’d point to “Coraline,” and maybe Gil Kenan’s “Monster House”) have taken this into account. But the sequence where Jake is pursued through the jungle by an alien creature seems to be shot hand-held (or a digital approximation of the technique) and is full of rapid fire editing. Which is immersive, yeah, but it also means it’s hard to tell what’s going on. We’re not against quick cuts as a rule, but it seems like Cameron isn’t taking the drawbacks of the medium to heart.
This is based on five short scenes from early in the movie (and, in fact, it might have been better if Fox had showed fewer, longer sequences – the disjointed nature of the reel certainly didn’t help matters), and our faith in Cameron is strong enough to justify the price of a ticket. But, in a summer when “Star Trek” put a real sense of awe and wonder back in the sci-fi genre, we were left wanting more from even this brief glimpse. Plenty of you will be catching the same footage later today, we’re sure, including other members of The Playlist, so the debate’ll be raging for the rest of the weekend…