avatar - preview
avatar (2009)
starring: sam worthington, zoe saldana, sigourney weaver, michelle rodriguez, giovanni ribisi, joel david moore, cch pounder, peter mensah, laz alonso, wes studi, stephen lang
directed by: james cameron
u.s. opening date: december 18th, 2009
they say
avatar takes us to a spectacular world beyond imagination, where a reluctant hero embarks on a journey of redemption and discovery as he leads a heroic battle to save a civilization. james cameron, the oscar-winning director of titanic, first conceived the film years ago, when the means to realize his vision did not yet exist. now, after four years of actual production work, avatar delivers a fully immersive cinematic experience of a new kind, where the revolutionary technology invented to make the film disappears into the emotion of the characters and the sweep of the story.
the story's hero is jake sully, an ex-marine confined to a wheelchair. bitter and disillusioned, he's still a warrior at heart. all jake ever wanted was something worth fighting for – and he ultimately finds it in the place he least expected: on a distant world. jake has been recruited to join an expedition to the moon pandora, which corporate interests are strip-mining for a mineral worth $20 million per kilogram on earth. to facilitate their work, the humans use a link system that projects a person's consciousness into a hybrid of humans and pandora's indigenous humanoid race, the na'vi. this human-na'vi hybrid – a fully living, breathing body that resembles the na'vi but possesses the individual human's thoughts, feelings and personality – is known as an “avatar.”
in his new avatar form, jake can once again walk. his mission is to interact with and infiltrate the na'vi with the hope of enlisting their help – or at least their acquiescence -- in mining the ore. a beautiful na'vi female, neytiri, saves jake's life – reluctantly – because even in his avatar body, jake represents to her the human encroachment on the na'vi's unspoiled world.
as jake's relationship with neytiri deepens, along with his respect for the na'vi, he faces the ultimate test as he leads an epic conflict that will decide nothing less than the fate of an entire world.
we say
titanic director james cameron's first movie in ten years promises to be quite something: a $190 million hybrid of action and animation about a paraplegic war veteran is brought to another planet, pandora, which is inhabited by the na'vi, a humanoid race with their own language and culture. those from earth find themselves at odds with each other and the local culture.
in the 52-year-old director's own words:
"we're going to blow you to the back wall of the theatre in a way you haven't seen for a long time. my goal is to rekindle those amazing mystical moments my generation felt when we first saw 2001: a space odyssey or the next generation's star wars. it took me 10 years to find something hard enough to be interesting."
"i've wanted to make this movie from the time i wrote the treatment 11 years ago. i was just biding my time for when it was going to be technically possible. i'm so invested in the 3-d, and i love the challenge of creating an alien culture. we're creating a world from scratch, so it's really fun."
will avatar be a classic like cameron's other sf efforts — aliens, terminator 2: judgment day? we'll see . . .
