Avatar

All the stuff that happened between Tim Burton being awesome and James Cameron's Avatar will be in a later post. Stop.

It's Avatar time.


Yo. All right. Ladies and gentlemen check your boarding passes please.

Here. We go.

Epic scope and intimate emotional storytelling were the keystones of Lawrence of Arabia which the moderator (insert name here) worked on and never thought he'd experience again. We waiting for this footage and this panel do not doubt in the slightest his claim that this film, James Cameron's Avatar, is the closest he has since come to that experience.

Fourteen years after venturing into the world of this project, James Cameron seems remarkably well adjusted and not at all wound up. He honors the fans by thanking them for their dedication cuz he a classy sumbitch.

Because he's also smart, the clips are self explanatory and add up to about 24 minutes. We are excited. We are grateful. He is also both of these things.

Let's go.

And that was the footage. Not since I saw Jurassic Park, 8 years old and at what I had thought was the height of my dinosaur obsession, have images excited me and my imagination, quite that way. That was exhilarating, breathtaking, transportive- the film we just viewed actually took me someplace else. It was freakin' awesome.

My greatest hope is probably that we'll see a lot more, in the final film, that involves both the avatars and the Nav'i interacting with humans and practical sets actual environments. Personally, it's when these two things blend seamlessly that a true victory can be called with this technology and for this film. But that's just me. So, to sum up, OMFG AVATAR.

And now they're gonna talk. I like it when they talk. Oh Sigourney. Your hair is never not awesome.

The training for Zoe was intensive in multiple ways, as the role was not only physically demanding but the dialectical work required not only learning a new language and ways of making her mouth work (glottal stops!! Theater kids, throw up the horns!) but then learning how to speak English with a Nav'i accent, so essentially learning two languages. Creating entire culturally unique physicalities required "a lot of research and inventiveness". Bet they did. The degrees of thoughtfulness and attention to detail here is going to be... significantly impressive. Yeah. Significantly impressive. That's what I'm gonna go with.

So, Zoe, tell us: How hot IS Sam Worthington the Third?

Good question, moderator.

The answer is extremely.

Cameron talks about how the Nav'i, and the film, explore the basic human conflict of existing in and doing battle with nature. I'm intrigued.

david is going to be all over this with another write up, I'm sure, but this panel and the footage shown will probably go down in Comic Con history as in the top five Most Awesomest Things Shown in Hall H Ever.