Friday, August 21, 2009

New Avatar trailer is out

http://www.apple.com/trailers/fox/avatar/hd/

This movie is being sold as a lot of things. One of the main things I have heard about it is how it will bridge the uncanny valley. It resoundingly fails to do that. It looks like World of Warcraft.

Don't get me wrong, it's pretty, but District 9 bridges the uncanny valley, this one does not.

It's all in the eyes and the corner of the lips. Basically, in high concept computer animation such as this facial movement looks very stiff and stilted like everyone has had their eyelids stretched and injects botox into their eyebrows and lips, in otherwords, they have sacrificed expressiveness for fullness. Meaning that the stills will look great, in terms of the animation it will be lacking.

I still look forward to it as I look forward to every sci fi epic, even though the last three major sci fi epic trilogies have pretty much straight up sucked: Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, The Matrix. I find the overwrought environmentalist paganism to be a little sketchy, but I'm willing to watch Fern Gully meets Halo. ;)

2 comments:

Jd said...

Trailer didn't make sense to me.

Erek said...

Yeah the trailer didn't have anything about the plot.

The plot essentially is that this planet has this race the Na'vi who are in tune with their planet. A human company wants to exploit it's resources so they send in a handicapped marine who pilots a Na'Vi clone to infiltrate their society. In the process he falls in love the scales fall from his eyes and he turns on the human company in order to try and protect this sentient species.