“Well duh, its a CHARACTER IN A GAME in the movie.”
-Rodney

I’m 99.99% sure that is NOT the case. To my knowledge, there is no “virtual world”, real life video games, The Matrix, or any sort of virtual game characters in Avatar, whatsoever. There is a real alien moon and in order to inhabit it, some humans can transfer their consciousness into an Avatar (which is either a real Alien or some sort of replica of the aliens, not a virtual or video game being, a real-life flesh and blood one).

So yeah, no video game worlds, just an alien planet, and no video game characters, just aliens (some with human consciousness). I could be wrong, but I don’t think I am (and hope I’m not, I’d be much less interested in this film if they were playing around in a video game).

You need to google the images of the characters. Aside from being bipedal humanoids, they are CLEARLY not just people in costumes and if you saw the full body picture you would see that.

Physical proportions are impossible for the characters to just be painted people. Even just the face picture is obvious that its not just a human painted blue. Theses are CGI near human like aliens.

“Except that in Star Trek from the 60’s it would just be some woman painted blue.”

… Are we looking at the same picture? Both designs are just a human painted blue. And given the enormous range of freedom that designing an alien species should allow, that just shows a severe lack of imagination on Cameron’s part.

But I’ll be fair: Besides the tail and blue skin, what exactly is alien about this design? And then tell me how its any different from the “like a human, but with pointy ears” school of alien design from 60s star trek.

Titanic freakin rules.

I never backpedal, and I never claimed you didn’t get the point of the film.

You repeatedly try to put words in my mouth in order to make your point. I am used to it already.

My statement stands and is completely accurate. You criticized that the facials look unrealistic. Well duh, its a CHARACTER IN A GAME in the movie. So yeah, you don’t get it. It’s underwhelming? Well its a teaser. Its supposed to be. Just a hint. Hints don’t blow you away. They lure. People will wonder what the blue girl is. Mission accomplished.

But you will dance around it to save face and we will just roll our eyes at you.

The movie is very likely to fail financially considering the money put behind it. But Cameron’s technology will prove itself and this will be a 90 minute commercial for the technology and studios will line up to use it in their next effects based blockbuster.

My statement about the ‘Titanic’ tagline is not a complaint about the teaser poster Rodney. It’s just an observation about the potential success of this film. It’s costing so much, and I’ve seen a lot of people online saying that this will be hugely successful just because Cameron is the director. I think the fact they don’t even use his name on the poster means even the studio realizes this is not automatically the case. For a poster it makes sense, since sadly Cameron’s name alone won’t be a selling point the the masses.

And I understand the purpose of the poster is just to give a tiny hint of the characters. But you specifically said that I had missed the entire point of the film. Don’t try to backpedal that. As someone who knows nothing about what the film is about, this small peak of the character isn’t that impressive, since it just looks like a cartoonish CGI face. If I hadn’t already been aware that this film is supposed to have the most elaborate CGI ever seen, this poster alone doesn’t show me anything to get too excited about, because I don’t think this picture does a good job showing off how impressive the CGI is supposed to be. I think the composition because of how the picture is cropped makes the face look worse than if the whole head were shown, perhaps partially covered by shadow.

That is the point. Its a teaser. It doesn’t have to spell anything out for you. You don’t have to know anything about the film. Its a tiny peek. That is the point.

And the mass public is more likely to associate with actors names than a director. Most people can’t name the director of their favourite films (TMB Readers tend not to be “most people” in this statement) but they know what their favourite films are.

This isn’t the first time that a name drop is reinforced with a reminder of their biggest film. Its really not that big of a deal.

12ft naked cat lady? That’s starting to remind me of Beowulf.

@ Rodney

I don’t know anything at all about the film. So I haven’t “missed the point” of the film. I don’t know the point. So if this teaser makes me think it looks silly, then it’s failing to do it’s job at getting me hyped up, at least for me as an individual.

If the name James Cameron means anything to the masses, why didn’t they use the tagline “A James Cameron film”? Because that means nothing to the public. I know that all of us film fanatics pay attention to directors, but most people don’t.

A director alone will never sell a film. Actors can. Directors can’t. And a lot of people have been saying this film will be HUGE simply because Cameron is the director. While I agree this means it is likely to mean it will be good, and if it’s good, that will likely lead to it being popular… but not necessarily. Quite often good directors make good films, but they just aren’t big hits.

I think this film is likely to end up being very good, because Cameron has a great track record. But his huge hits also all had huge stars like Leonardo Dicaprio and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Did people see Titanic and T2 for the name Cameron… or for Leo and Arnie? That’s what Avatar doesn’t have.