Brow Beat: Slate's Culture Blog

Fox’s Secret Weapon

Could James Cameron's Avatar kill 20^th Century Fox? According to today's New York Times, probably not. Michael Cieply reports that Fox has brought in outside investors to minimize the company's risk in the event that the $500 million Blue Man Group-in-outer space flick turns out to be a Heaven's Gate-style megaflop. Along with this smart financial buffering, the Times piece reveals that "Fox is backing up Mr. Cameron's movie with what an executive recently called the studio's ‘secret weapon.' " What is this secret weapon that has the power to stave off potential bankruptcy? Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel.

Fox's confidence in the Squeakquel is easy to understand: Despite rotten reviews, the company's first foray into computer-generated rodentia—2007's Jason Lee starrer Alvin and the Chipmunks—brought in $217 million. Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel, which opens on Christmas Day (a week after Avatar's debut), appears to follow the same high-pitched formula. Check out the trailer below—interspecies romance! the best furball football catching since Air Bud: Golden Receiver!—and judge for yourself if Fox's confidence is misplaced.

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Avatar = "Apocalypto" + George Lucas

More than 100,000 people were expected at IMAX movie theaters Friday night for "Avatar Day," a 16-minute sneak preview of James Cameron's science-fiction epic. In what the New York Times called an "audacious marketing ploy," 20^th Century Fox made an extended trailer for the film—which is due to be released in December—into a major theatrical event with ticketed showings on more than 100 screens. Yet despite all the hype (and all the hype about the hype), the screening I attended in midtown Manhattan was only one-third full.

It's too bad; I would have liked to see how the footage played to a crowd. The smattering of viewers at the AMC Empire theater watched in near-silence as the CGI-heavy, three-dimensional action sequences played on an enormous screen. No doubt some were put off by the movie's cornball heroes. As I watched a tribe of blue-skinned cat people wearing loincloths and glitter makeup wrestle their way through an enchanted forest of savage beasts and glowing jellyfish, I couldn't help but wonder whether this is what Apocalypto might have looked like had it been directed by George Lucas.

Much of the ballyhoo for Avatar has focused on Cameron's supposedly groundbreaking technical innovations, which may account for the film's estimated $240 million budget. (In March, a writer for Time wondered whether the revolutionary special effects might "be the thing that forces the theaters to convert to digital.") Here's what I can tell you based on the trailer: The 3-D effects do look pretty darn good—they're easy on the eyes and do a wonderful job of immersing the viewer in the film's alien-jungle psychedelia. My only complaint is that some of the off-planet scenes suffer from a rather pronounced dollhouse effect, with the real-life sets and human actors appearing weirdly small.

I'm less sanguine about the computer graphics. The scenes shown Friday were almost exclusively CGI: animated feline humanoids doing animated flips as they hurled animated spears at animated dinosaurs. I'm sure the algorithms used to construct these battles were as sophisticated as any in the history of filmmaking—but everything still looked a little off to me. The movements were too smooth and slippery, like Yoda's cartoonish acrobatics from Star Wars. For all Cameron's technical wizardry, the digital characters in Avatar remain lodged somewhere on the far slope of the uncanny valley.