James ‘king of the world’ Cameron has finally shown some footage of his long anticipated return to feature films, the science fiction epic Avatar. A select industry audience at the Cinema Expo in Amsterdam were allowed to see 24 minutes of footage from the film. According to the BBC site there is a ban on actually reporting on the clips (so why bother showing them if you don’t want anyone to talk about them? Anyone else think that’s a marketing strategy to increase interest?) so most such reports have come anonymously, with terms like ‘jaw-dropping’ and ‘industry changing’ being bandied about. Since they are mostly anonymous and since most of us mere mortals haven’t seen anything yet I’d tend to treat this with a pinch of salt for the moment until we actually get to see some of it and read attributable reports.
(a visualisation from Avatar, (c) 20th Century Fox, borrowed from the Ecranlarge photo gallery)
The film, which uses a mixture of live action, CGI and motion capture, has a lot riding on it, considering a budget reputed to be north of £180 million and the fact it is Cameron’s first feature film since Titanic. Sigourney Weaver is onboard, as is Terminator Salvation’s Sam Worthington and Star Trek’s Zoe Saldana. Still, as some of his other SF genre work like the first two Terminator films and The Abyss showed he is a director who seriously pushes the technical envelope of what can be achieved in film, so perhaps those anonymous quotes about the clips won’t prove to be far of the mark. Avatar is due to be released in the UK and US just before Christmas and I’m sure we’ll be hearing a lot more about it in coming months.
June 25th, 2009 at 2:39 pm
My friend Norm Cates has been working on it at WETA. He’s not allowed to say anything, but he sure looked excited when he mentioned it.