Traditionally, August is something of a slow news month. Anything, however apparently inappropriate, seems to be used to fill in valuable airtime or column space during the holiday season. You might, for instance, have happened to hear yesterday morning Evan Davies interviewing august cricket commentator Henry Blofeld on the BBCโ€™s flagship radio news programme Today about whether heโ€™d prefer to commentate on the 100 metres at the World Athletics Championships. Today, it seems everyoneโ€™s got in a palaver about Avatar, James Cameronโ€™s 3D sci-fi epic of which 15 minutes was shown during a series of screenings rolled out at hundreds of cinemas round the world.

Advertisement

Perhaps inevitably with this kind of blockbuster, itโ€™s all about the numbers. Avatar is Cameronโ€™s first film since Titanic, 12 years ago, which took $1.8 billion at the box office. He originally sketched the outline for Avatar in 1994 but held off making it until he thought technology was advanced enough. It has, apparently, cost $237 million. And, as those of us who saw it today at Londonโ€™s IMAX were told by the head of the UK distributor 20th Century Fox, so far 2,000 people have seen the official trailer, released yesterday, online.

Itโ€™s perhaps irrelevant to wonder whether Avatar will be remotely good in any field other than the visual effects. Having learned from Hawks, Hill, Carpenter and Corman that characters in certain types of genre films can be defined more effectively by their actions than by exposition, Cameronโ€™s never exactly been one to get bogged down in character and dialogue. Which is why the first 90 minutes of Titanic, before the ship went down, was so woeful and why his best films โ€“ the two Terminator movies and Aliens โ€“ are action-driven adrenalin rushes.

Indeed, based on the five sequences we saw from Avatar, it seems like Cameron is happy to recycle some of his own films, alongside a number of tropes and set-ups familiar from other sources. We open, for instance, with Stephen Langโ€™s Marine corps colonel explaining to a platoon of grunts that theyโ€™re about to embark on a tour of duty on a hostile alien planet, Pandora. โ€œThink of Hell. You might want to go there for R&R after this,โ€ he snarls. Aliens..? Well, maybe.

Advertisement

Avatarโ€™s central character, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) is a Marine, crippled during combat. Heโ€™s given access by Sigourney Weaverโ€™s scientist to an Avatar creature, part human and part Naโ€™vi, one of the planetโ€™s many colourful creatures. Now resembling nothing less than a greeny-blue Thundercat, Sully is sent to Pandora where he befriends his fellow Naโ€™vi and love interest begins to take shape with one of their kind, Neytiri. Itโ€™s possible Sully is part of a covert military operation: the planetโ€™s atmosphere is poison to humans, but it seems that if successfully immersed in Avatar hybrids, Earthโ€™s military could conquer Pandora.

Anyway, thatโ€™s yr plot. But, like I say, I suspect the story is really just an excuse for Cameron to unveil his latest, and admittedly deeply impressive, box of tricks. Of course, it looks fantastic. Thereโ€™s one sequence on Pandora where Sully first experiences the planetโ€™s landscape close-up โ€“ a weird, lush, rainforest that looks like it should: totally alien. Gone, we can safely assume, are the days when George Lucas fudged it by getting Tunisia to double for Tatooine. Or worse: quarries near Dorking masquerading as Skaro in Doctor Who.

Iโ€™m reluctant to get carried away in the hype, but you do get a sense of Cameronโ€™s incredible visual accomplishments here. And this, inevitably, is what Avatar will stand or fall on. Plenty has already been written about how the director helped pioneer โ€œthe future cameraโ€ developed to capture the actors and integrate them into his virtual world; how the other great technological innovators of the modern cinema age, Spielberg, Lucas and Peter Jackson, were all invited down to check out Cameronโ€™s posh new gadgets. If you find the idea of โ€œthe future cameraโ€ slightly self-important, then certainly you wonโ€™t fall for the talk of how Avatar is going to revolutionise cinema. Certainly, once all the bluster about the 3D technology is out of the way, thereโ€™s the simple truth that only 320 cinemas out of 3,600 UK cinemas are digitally equipped, and so Avatar will also be released in creaky old-fashioned 2D come December 18.

You can see the trailer here anyway.