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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," 20th 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.
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If we are what we Google, then Google Hot Trends—an hourly rundown of search terms "that experience sudden surges in popularity"—is the Web's best cultural barometer. Here's a sampling of today's top searches. (Rankings on Hot Trends list current as of 9 a.m.)
No. 15: "Angelas Ashes." Frank McCourt, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir Angela's Ashes, died yesterday at age 78. McCourt wrote the book chronicling his miserable childhood in Ireland after more than three decades teaching in New York City public schools. In 2007, McCourt wrote in Slate that "when the book was published in Ireland, I was denounced from hill, pulpit, and barstool. ... Citizens claimed I had disgraced the fair name of the city of Limerick, that I had attacked the church, that I had despoiled my mother's name, and that if I returned to Limerick, I would surely be found hanging from a lamppost."
No. 46: "nomura s jellyfish." What's with July and huge sea creatures? Last week a 20-foot-long shark washed ashore in New York while jumbo flying squid terrified residents of Southern California; now massive Nomura's jellyfish are ballooning up from the deep off the coast of Japan. The jellyfish can grow as large as 6 and a half feet in diameter and weigh as much as 450 pounds—big enough to destroy Japanese fishermen's expensive nets. This is the third invasion in less than five years: During the 2005 episode, an estimated 300 million to 500 million of the jellyfish passed through Japan's Tsuhima Strait daily.
No. 59 "Michael Collins." As Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin traipsed about the surface 40 years ago today, Michael Collins—the oft-forgotten third Apollo 11 astronaut—was sailing around the dark side of the moon in the command module. "I am alone now, truly alone, and absolutely isolated from any known life," Collins wrote in his 1969 memoir Carrying the Fire. "If a count were taken, the score would be three billion plus two over on the other side of the moon, and one plus God knows what on this side."
Photograph of Apollo 11 Astronaut Michael Collins courtesy of NASA/Getty Images