A few hours ago, I went to the 15 minute IMAX preview screening of James Cameron's Avatar which has been duly dubbed "Avatar Day". If you've already seen the trailer for Avatar, then you've seen short snippets from most of the extended scenes that were shown.Avatar Day opens with a sergeant giving a speech to a group of marines while on an alien planet called Pandora. At the close of the speech, we see a young marine in a wheelchair enter the room. The marine is Jake Sully (portrayed by Sam Worthington). The next scene shows Jake being placed in a coffin-like enclosure by a scientist (Sigourney Weaver) who begins a procedure in which she achieves a series of "mind congruences" until the entirety of Jake's consciousness is transferred into a biological avatar know as a Na'vi. Jake then 'wakes up' in his avatar (after a wild camera ride though the insides of a florescent cable), and proceeds to boldly march out the door much to the dismay of those trying to administer medical checks on his new body.
From there we see some scenes featuring Jake in his blue, fourteen foot, Na'vi body wandering the jungles of Pandora. The Na'vi, though they can be grown and used as avatars, also comprise the indigeneous people of Pandora. In one of the scenes, Jake faces off with a raveous ,dinosaur-sized, jungle beast. He tries to shoot it only to have the gun bitten out of his hands by the beast. The detail and animation of the beast is definitely enough to make you believe Jake is in danger. However, the immediate fate of our hero is not shown in this scene. We are then transported to a nightime scene in a beautiful, glowing forest. The forest is full of vivid violets, blues, and purples, all glowing in intense detail surrounding the camera and palpably existing in all depths the eye can percieve. That scene is really the scene that sells the beauty of this movie. In the scene, Jake is trying to fend of some wolf-like creatures when out of the blue (no pun intended) comes what we can assume to be an indigenous Na'vi female. She kills most of the animals and the rest run away.
The final extended scene is of what seems to be a Na'vi coming-of-age ritual. Jake is with the Na'vi female along with other Na'vi on a cliff edge. Before them are some dragon-like creatures, and she tells Jake that he will know which one is right for him because it will try to kill him. After scaring a few off, sure enough, one tries to kill him. He wrestles with it for a while, gets knocked off, resumes the tussle, and becomes victorious by inserting his ponytail into one of the dragon's antennae. Apparently, the Na'vi have part of their brain stem within their pony-tail. They can connect their brain to a dragon with it. Jake thus learns to fly with the dragon by thinking about what he wants to do and the dragon does it. The steroscopic (3D) aspect of the movie was used to great effect in this scene as Jake flies in front of a vast, mountainous landscape.
Overall, the CG was good in the scenes I saw. The Na'vi were well rendered and their animation felt pretty real. Their interaction with real people, though brief, was convincing enough that I didn't cringe while watching it. Cameron was really able to use the 3D vision well by filling the air with little details all the way to the furthest background of each shot. It seems to me that a big part of the experience of watching Avatar will be the environment and its vivid colors and detail. Even if the plot of the film isn't that good, I still think it will be worth watching just for the visual grandeur of it. Granted, much of the graphics didn't look totally photo-realistic, but it was still pleasing to look at.
Personally, I'm pretty excited about this film. Though I don't believe it to be as groundbreaking as some people are portraying it to be, I still think it will be a great watch, worthy of seeing more than once just for the spectacle. I hope Cameron was able to flesh out the battle scenes in this movie because they have the potential to blow you out of your seat if done right. For that matter I hope the whole movie is done right, because even though Avatar Day was pretty good, I wasn't totally blow away by it. The movie could be a bland movie, even with the great spectacle.
Let's hope Cameron finds a good balance and does this thing right!
So, that's my take on 'Avatar Day.' I hope to see you in theaters!
