Is Avatar Going To Be Rubbish ?

I like many film fans, have allowed myself to get quite excited by James Cameron's new film 'Avatar'. His first feature since 1997's 'Titanic', the film is a sci-fi flick, shot in 3-D and featuring elements of motion capture, as seen in 'Beowulf'. In fact these new technologies are also currently being employed by Spielberg, Jackson and Zemeckis. All these directors claim that these techniques are the future of cinema. I am not so convinced. For starters, mo-cap films look like a nasty Fly-like combination of animation and live action. So far the results have been weird rather than compelling, and have ended up resembling something that you'd expect to get from a mutant version of Pixar.

But then I thought, well, if anybody can make this technology fly it's James Cameron, he who brought us some of the very first CGI effects in Terminator 2. Not only that but there has been intrigung mystery surrounding 'Avatar' and a post production time of two whole years to finish the special effects. And then the trailer came out. You can see it at Apple Trailers, and I can confirm that it looks really dull. Obviously this opinion is widespread as the very, VERY, funny video above shows. The trailer looks like a mix of eco-babble and fake looking special effects. But they will no doubt say you need to see it at the cinema, in 3-D, in totality to get the full effect. But doesn't that mean that they are relying on the technology to wow you, rather than the story ?

Personally I'm bored with big budget films that are more like a theme park ride than a movie. I don't just want to see billions of pixels thrown round a screen hung on a story as thin as a starved mouse. I can get that on my PS3, and I actually get to play that story, not just watch. So, is it as Bruno Ganz (a.k.a. Hitler) says, that the greatness of these film makers has disappeared into a hard drive ? Having seen recent Spielberg, and Zemeckis output it is starting to seem that way. Maybe I'm wrong and it'll all be okay, but throughout all my years of film watching I've always held one rule of thumb to be true, i.e. if they can't even find enough decent stuff to make a good trailer out of, God help the finished film. We shall see in December, but I hope to God he's actually spent some money on the script as well as the computers.