Avatar Trailer Goes Online

James Cameron has released a trailer for Avatar, not to be confused with M. Night Shyamalan’s upcoming movie version of the Avatar cartoon series The Last Airbender (and seriously, how pissed must he be that he can’t use the title Avatar because of Cameron).

Anyway, Apple has a full-HD Quicktime of JC’s Avatar trailer, which is definitely worth checking out to give some reasonable sense of how the visuals look. Which, for a movie being sold mostly on its visuals, is pretty important.

First impressions? Some truly gorgeous looking moments, combined with others that look like a (very good) video game. And I think the decision to include live actors “beside” the CG might prove to be a mistake. But we’ll wait and see…

Things I Learned From Trailers Today

If the trailers I saw before Moon are to be believed, then:

1. Audrey Niffenegger’s beautiful and epic piece of romantic/sci-fi(?) literature about a love that transcends the barriers of space and time has been turned into a rom-com complete with lush colours and tasteful coffee shop acoustic guitar balladry on the soundtrack.
2. All the money for Pandorum‘s trailer went on the fancy “incorporate the taglines into the footage” effect, rather than on actually coming up with creative taglines (“What if you woke with no memory?” “What if the world you knew was gone? What if you discovered… you were not alone?”)
3. Martin Scorsese’s next film is going to be a psychological horror. Or something like a high rent version of Ghost Ship (but on an island), going by the trailer.
4. People who go to see films like Moon only want to see other sci-fi movies or horror.

Trailer Talk: Duplicity, Knowing and Star Trek.

Movie Trailer’s fascinate me, especially when I try to get my head around how the marketing people’s minds work. It’s like a badly programmed version of an “If you like this, you might also like these” list on Amazon: here to see Persepolis, a poignant animated coming-of-age tale set around the Iranian Revolution? Then you might also like to see Sex & the City. (Yes, when I went to see Persepolis, they played the Sex & the City trailer beforehand.) With this in mind:

• I wish they’d hurry up and release Duplicity, because I’m getting pretty sick of seeing its trailer before every movie I see. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear I saw it before Iron Man last summer. Also, when Julia Roberts refers to a thong as “them,” it confuses me grammatically.
• It shouldn’t be possible for a trailer to become stupider with each viewing, but that’s what’s happening with Knowing. Can’t poor Nick Cage catch a break? Or at least learn to spot when a script has either been written by someone who’s never watched The Simpsons and so has unintentionally ripped them off, or has been written by someone who has watched The Simpsons and is deliberately ripping them off. (The trailer reminds me of the episode “Thank God, it’s Doomsday” when Homer is convinced the Rapture is coming.)
• Star Trek better be really, really good. But I think that’s a given.
• It’s possible I need to stop going into the cinema 20 minutes before the film is due to start.