How does a gargantuan zillion dollar global blockbusting visually groundbreaking 3D tour de force get born? Little words on plain paper.
“Avatar,” a live action film with a new generation of special effects, takes us to a spectacular world beyond imagination, where a reluctant hero embarks on a journey of redemption and discovery as he leads an epic battle to save a civilization. James Cameron, the Oscar-winning director of “Titanic,” first conceived the film years ago, when the means to realize his vision did not yet exist.
Now, after four years of actual production work, “Avatar” delivers a fully immersive cinematic experience of a new kind, where the revolutionary technology invented to make the film disappears into the emotion of the characters and the sweep of the story.
Avatar movie trailer
ABOUT THE PRODUCTION – by Visual Hollywood
BEGINNINGS
“AVATAR is the most challenging film I’ve ever made,” says writer-director James Cameron. And that is a declaration with resonance, given Cameron’s global renown as a master storyteller: his “Titanic,” “The Terminator,” “Terminator 2: Judgment Day,” “Aliens,” “True Lies,” and “The Abyss” were groundbreaking films featuring a mix of spectacle, compelling narratives and characters, and technical wizardry resolutely in service of story and emotion.
AVATAR’s central figure, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) is a relatable everyman who unexpectedly rises to become a hero, as events draw him deeper into a clash of civilizations, between the Earth corporations bent on “developing” Pandora and the indigenous Na’vi. Jake is a former Marine who places honor and duty above all, but he must eventually choose between his personal honor, in defense of what is right, and his supposed duty to those who have tasked him with his mission.
“I wanted to create a familiar type of adventure in an unfamiliar environment, ” Cameron explains, “by setting the classic tale of a newcomer to a foreign land and culture on an alien planet. The story is by design classic in its broad strokes, but we have plenty of twists and turns in store for the audience. I’ve dreamed of creating a film like this, set on another world of great danger and beauty, since I was a kid reading pulp science fiction and comic books by the truckload, and sitting in math class drawing creatures and aliens behind my propped up textbook. With AVATAR, I finally got my chance.”
WHERE AND WHEN
AVATAR takes place on Pandora, a moon with an Earthlike environment that orbits a gas-giant planet called Polyphemus in the Alpha Centauri-A star system. At 4.4 light years away, Alpha Centauri is our nearest stellar neighbor, and when it is discovered that Pandora is rich in a rare-earth mineral called Unobtainium, the race is on to mine the new world’s resources. Unobtainium does not exist in our solar system, but it is the key to solving Earth’s energy crisis in the twenty second century, so the Resources Development Administration (RDA) is spending hundreds of billions of dollars to mine the distant world. Our story takes place in 2154, three decades after a mining colony was established on Pandora. The encroachment by human activities into the territory of the indigenous Na’vi has created increasing tension between the two species and has set them down a path to war.
Director: James Cameron
Screenwriter: James Cameron
Starring: Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver, Michelle Rodriguez, Giovanni Ribisi, Joel David Moore, CCH Pounder, Peter Mensah, Laz Alonso, Wes Studi, Stephen Lang, Matt Gerald
Genre: Action, Adventure
Official Website: Avatarmovie.com