Yesterday was Avatar Day and I was one of the several thousand people who got to see a special 16 minute preview for James Cameron’s “game-changing” movie, Avatar. We haven’t talked about it on the Bloglin before, but unless you haven’t been on the innenet for the past few months, you’ve probably heard about it. In case you haven’t:

In the future, Jake, 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. (source)

It sounds like a cross between Last of the Mohicans and John Carter of Mars. Apparently, Cameron first came up with this unoriginal plot 14 years ago, but production didn’t begin until four years ago, after Cameron and Co. developed new filmmaking technology adequate to achieve the visions in his head. (Sounds a little reminiscent of Mr. Lucas and the prequels, no?)

So did the Avatar Day footage deliver the goods? Yes. Well, maybe, to a degree. Viscerally, I’ve never experienced anything like it before. I couldn’t give less of a shit about 3D, honestly, but Cameron’s new approach to it – using “3D virtual cameras, which would produce stereoscopic 3D images simulating human sight” (source) – is brilliant. Thematically, it’s garbage. Shove the plot up your titanic asshole, Cameron. I just want to be immersed in an alien world with gnarly monsters and scenery that has my jaw hitting the floor. Because the footage had that; the flora and fauna of Pandora fucking glow off the screen. Granted, the Na’vi look wicked stupid, like they were pulled from a Nickelodeon show, but luckily they’re not the only beings on Pandora.

The only problem I had was that objects in the foreground tended to get blurry to a degree of making them hard to look at. At first I thought it was because I had my prescription glasses on underneath the IMAX 3D glasses, but my buddy Chris confirmed that they are in fact that blurry. I’m sure it’s just some technical thing that’s unavoidable and composing scenes for 3D has got to be painstaking, but I hope they can tweak it a little bit by the movie’s release date, December 18. But seriously, the plot sucks, the dialogue sucks, the Na’vi suck, but for 16 minutes, I was on an alien planet. And that’s all I want out of Avatar.

- Oh Mars