Avatar

I'm a huge James Cameron fan. I know, I know, "Titanic" has earned an after-the-fact reputation as cornball ("I'm the king of the world"), but there is absolutely no one better at transporting an audience into a wholly realized universe. Whether its "Aliens," "The Abyss," "The Terminator," or "Titanic," Cameron is, perhaps, the king of new worlds.

It's been 12 years since Cameron's last narrative film, after his love affair with the actual Titanic wreck led to him being part of the scientific team documenting the disappearing ship, and then to further deep-sea exploration, bringing us the IMAX documentaries "Ghosts of the Abyss" and "Aliens of the Deep." Now he returns to fiction with the new movie "Avatar," coming out this December.

I was part of a sneak preview audience last night that was treated to 17 minutes of the film in advance. Why go all the way to a movie theater to see what is essentially an extended trailer? Because James Cameron isn't just bringing us a movie, he's hoping to change the cinematic form. With Blu-ray and HDTV now bringing us closer to the movie experience at home, the movie theater, Cameron feels, needs to set itself apart as a unique experience. Just like the introduction of a movable camera, the introduction of sound, and the introduction of color, Cameron wants to add the next innovation: effortless 3-D.

In the three years Cameron has been developing and shooting this film, 3-D has become somewhat more common. Just this year, pretty much every animated film offered a 3-D version in theaters, and the IMAX version of the latest Harry Potter contained 15 minutes of 3-D. But as far as I can tell, Cameron's film would be the first full-length non-animated 3-D film released since those red-and-blue-lenses glasses were shortly the rage in the '50s.

I've often gone out of my way to catch new 3-D experiences. When I was in college in the mid-90's, I saw a half-dozen 3-D short films, including "Wings of Courage" starring Val Kilmer, a few documentaries, and one really terrible one about what life on a spacestation of the future would be like. The problem with those films was that the headset that you had to wear was bulky, heavy, and migraine-inducing. There was a reason those films were 45 minutes long. The headset also cut off a lot of peripheral vision, so it was kind of like watching a movie through binoculars.

I've seen a few 3-D presentations at theme parks, including a Muppets one that was quite clever, and "Terminator 2 3-D" (directed by Cameron himself), which used lighter plastic glasses which were more comfortable. The Muppets one harked back to the 3-D movies of old which featured a lot of gimmicks where things from the screen would come out and float in front of you. "T2 3-D" mixed a 3-D movie with live actors who appeared on stage and in the audience, and the clips were almost too short to take in the 3-D effect before it became actors again.

"Avatar" aims to eliminate the gimmicks and just straight-out immerse you in a new world. Cameron's approach is to draw you as an audience member into what is happening on screen. He's said in interviews (I've been following this movie for such a long time that I can't remember which website it was on right now) that the potential for 3-D to take over as the norm in storytelling, not just in spectacle, will become apparent as the drama in the film unfolds. The way he tells it, if you perceive the person in front of you to be a real person, flesh and blood, your empathy is raised and you become more involved and more connected than in seeing a photograph. Cinema can become a more emotional, moving experience that it has ever been. This, he says, is the promise of 3-D.

So: the preview. It starts out with an introduction by James Cameron. A completely three-dimensional James Cameron, who would be about 80 feet tall if he existed at that scale. It was a weird thing to see someone so clearly right there and yet impossibly huge.

Then we switch to a scene of a group of soldiers who are being lectured to by a commander of some sort. I'm looking over the room and it feels like I'm there. But then, wait! I'm for some reason following around the boots of the officer on the ground. And now I'm up in the air looking down! What's weird is that the 3-D is so perfect that I don't feel like I'm watching a movie, I feel like I'm in the room. But I keep jumping around the room as the camera angle changes, unlike a real person could. (It feels like being a ghost or something, appearing and disappearing.) It's hard to process all that for a while. I imagine that's what it was like when movies introduced close-ups and crane shots: it probably took audiences a while to get used to them as a convention.

The 3-D effect was so vivid that I just wanted to live in the environment at first. But unlike being in a real room, where you can choose to focus past people, in a movie, they blur the background and foreground for you to tell your eye where you should be looking. I kept wanting to take a look around the room (especially at what was outside the windows) and I couldn't bring that into focus. That took me out of the movie. But as some of the story started, and I began following what was being said and what the gist of the scene was, most of that started falling away and was able to process it more like a movie. An incredible vivid movie.

The basic plot of the film, as near as I could piece together, is that a wounded, paraplegic soldier is part of an experimental army program sometime in the distant future that allows his consciousness to transmit to an alien body; the body is therefore his avatar. His new self enters this alien planet, trying to stay alive against its jungle creatures and earn the trust of the others of his kind.

I forgot to mention that not only does "Avatar" aim to make strides with 3-D technology, but it also aims to create some of the most realistic CG characters put on film. I'd almost forgotten about that aspect, and then the film moves outside to the jungle, and virtually everything we're seeing is CG: the aliens, the foliage, the multitude of creatures. The aliens in particular are surprisingly lifelike. We're a long way from the "Final Fantasy" movie, "The Polar Express," and even Gollum in terms of how fully the mouth and eye movements mimic the real musculature of the human face. (Obviously, having the aliens be blue, cat-eyed, and fanged helps distract from any not-exactly-perfect moments that might show up in an attempt to be perfectly human.) What most impressed me about the CG, though, was the weight and heft of all the characters. That is the one thing that sub-par CG creators get wrong most often: the characters seem to defy physics, landing too softly and too rigidly, not like flesh on bone. From what I understand, Cameron has reinvented motion-capture technology and brought it to a new height, and must have hired some of the best animators in the business to handle everything too fantastic to be captured. I'm clearly aware that what I'm seeing isn't real — it's too alien, too fantastic, almost too art-concept at times — and yet it feels like I'm fully there anyway, as if in a waking dream.

So, once I finally had my mind around the 3-D and the CG, and began to get a sense of the story, I had about five or six minutes of left of fully being present in the film. (In fact, it was a shame to tease myself with the preview because as scenes ended I was desperate to know what happened next.) The extended sequence that most impressed me was one of the hero character taming a wild pterodactyl-esque creature on the edge of a cliff and making a bond with it. It was tense, exhilarating, foreign and fascinating. The scene ends with a maiden flight; I've seen a lot of filmic moments meant to approximate speed and flight (the hyperspace sequences in "Star Wars" and the flying carpet sequence in "Aladdin" come to mind), and this has to rank up there: the spinning, falling camera angles in 3-D give such a sense of weightlessness that I almost grabbed the armrests to hold on.

In looking for pictures for this post, I came across the internet trailer for "Avatar" and thought I'd post it so you could get an idea of the look of the film.

But the trailer looks nothing like what I just saw. The trailer feels so distant, so removed, from what I experienced, like a flipbook version of the story. The scene where a flying creature snatches that solider off the aircraft looks like some neat-o effect, but seeing it on the big screen with the glasses made it feel like we were right there on the aircraft, almost snatched ourselves. It really brought home to me that I wasn't just imagining how different 3-D was, that my positive reaction wasn't simply because I got a free preview. Seeing the two side by side within a day of each other leads me to believe that the cinema is about to give us something that we just can't replicate easily at home.

Can't wait for December.