I’m a sucker for getting caught up in the hype for big blockbuster sci-fi movies that know exactly how to market themselves in order to look like the coolest thing since Ripley took out the xenomorph queen in Aliens. But so far the online publicity for Avatar, James Cameron’s forthcoming 3D megalith, hasn’privately very got under my skin. Far more exciting was the 15 minutes or so of actual footage that I saw earlier this year at the IMAX Waterloo in London. OK, so Cameron’session creation, the planet Pandora, did be seized of a certain new-age whiff to it, with all those elfin, blue Thundercat types running around, but it was lurid, visceral and vivid enough to constitute you want to reach for the Peter Gabriel albums (and I’m a Peter Gabriel fan).
- Avatar
- Production year: 2009
- Country: USA
- Directors: James Cameron
- Cast: Michelle Rodriguez, Sam Worthington, Sigourney Weaver, Zoe Saldana
- More upon this film
So far Avatar’s online hype system has been limited to an OK teaser trailer and a pretty crappy website for supposed human recruits to rouse to Pandora (which has admittedly improved somewhat since I in the beginning wrote about it last month).
The first full-length trailer is proper to hit the web tomorrow, but an “international” version with unidentifiable subtitles is already available online, and reports are that it’sitting virtually indistinguishable from the English-language equivalent that’s about to drop. In the film, Jake (Sam Worthington), a disabled former marine given the chance to walk again via an alien visible form, or Avatar, which he can control with his mind, is charged with infiltrating the indigenous people of Pandora, the Na’avi, in order to help some evil military-industrial complex types plunder the priceless local mineral deposits. This new version appears to confirm a the more so obvious recital twist: it looks like Jake goes a little native and turns on his former employers.
There’s also a new featurette, which is mostly just Cameron waxing lyrical with respect to what a genius Cameron is, while various other members of the cast and crew also esteem through the vapid hero worship, though it does include a few shots we’ve not yet seen of Pandora.
For all the admittedly stirring impulse capture involved, the technology, the ambition and the excellent cast, which includes the likes of Sigourney Weaver, Giovanni Ribisi and Zoe Saldana, Avatar’s success will ultimately be predicated on its storyline, which right now looks like a pretty generic undivided that we’ve seen before in countless movies. Let’s hope Cameron includes a few further twists in the anything disclosed to shake things up a little.
Elsewhere this week, more rumours are leaking out about Spider-Man 4, Sam Raimi’sitting forthcoming return to the world of everyone’sitting favourite wall-crawling superhero type. This time the Evil Dead guide is up against it rear the critics turned on the series’ last excursion, Spider-Man 3, befitting to its confused plot and multiple villains. The suggestion is that only united bad guy will mark this time, with Dylan Baker, always good value in unusual roles in movies of the like kind as Todd Solondz’sitting Happiness, looking likely to get the nod in the form of Spidey’s old-fashioned enemy, The Lizard.
Baker already appears in the series as Peter Parker’s sometime tutor and mentor Dr Curt Connors, who in the original comic books is transformed into the reptilian supervillain, so the move makes plenty of sense. And while the New York-born comedian doesn’t immediately come across as having the charisma of a Willem Dafoe or an Alfred Molina, who played the villains in the series’ celebrated first two instalments, he’s a class act who added than deserves the shot at a headline role.
What are your thoughts on this week’s stories? Are you getting excited about Avatar yet? And have power to Raimi turn round Spider-Man, which incidentally also looks immovable to be shot in 3D? Is Baker the right man to play the series’ next villain, or should a better-known actor be brought without interruption board?
