Avatar (the IMAX 3D preview) (2009)

On December 18, James Cameron will release his first film since he overwhelmed the world cinema with Titanic 12 years ago. And he may just do so again with Avatar.

Posters and trailers and other traditional marketing tools can only generate so much buzz, and not everyone is willing to travel to San Diego and suffer the crushing fanboy and geek crowds of Comic-Con just to attend a sneak peek in an overstuffed auditorium. So Cameron and 20th Century Fox took an unusual step and offered free screenings in IMAX 3D, for one day only, of a 16-minute preview of selected scenes, all “spoiler-free” and from the movie’s first half, according to Cameron’s introduction. The announcement of these screenings brought on such a demand that their server crashed, and those who registered first and received confirmation e-mails (myself included) had to void those messages and re-register. I’m not sure if that technical problem contributed to the actual attendance or the locals just didn’t know or weren’t interested, but I went to the second of two screenings in Dallas and there were only about 100 people in the audience; it wasn’t anywhere close to capacity. However, I sat near a couple that had driven four hours from Shreveport, Louisiana just to see this preview, and a man who had registered for both screenings came out of the first one and circled back to stand in line behind me for the second one, wide-eyed and raving about it being the most amazing experience he’d ever seen. Now I understand how he felt.

So what did we see? 22nd-century space soldiers for a start, echoing my personal favorite Cameron film, Aliens. They’re engaged in a battle on a planet called Pandora, populated by tall, blue-skinned, long-tailed aliens who are “very hard to kill.” There’s a paraplegic soldier named Sully (Sam Worthington, “Markus” in Terminator: Salvation) who is somehow implanted in or changed into a simulated alien or “avatar” with the help of another holdover from Aliens, the wonderful Sigourney Weaver. (I love her so much, I could watch her read the phone book.) She becomes an alien avatar also, with other aliens played/voiced by Zoe Saldana (Uhura in the Star Trek movie) and Michelle Rodriguez (Ana Lucia on LOST). We see several moments of dialogue between these aliens, and their facial expressions are remarkably realistic; Cameron wrote the script years ago, but says seeing Gollum in The Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers convinced him the effects technology had advanced sufficiently to make his vision a reality. Peter Jackson did amazing work bringing the world and peoples of Middle Earth to life, and his influence is felt watching these characters emote so realistically that they blur the line between computer-generated and actor-generated. A startling sequence in an operating room where Sully awakens after his alien transformation also illustrates the amazing effects, pioneered by Jackson filming hobbits and dwarves, of having humans and humanoids of wildly divergent sizes coexisting and interacting in the same scene.

Then there’s the Pandoran jungle, which is so eye-poppingly colorful and luminescent it exhausts my supply of adjectives, and an encounter and subsequent jungle chase with giant, ferocious alien animals that is so breathtaking and jaw-dropping in 3D I found myself applauding the scene when it ended. And all that comes before you get to the cliffside dwelling of dragon-like flying creatures, in a sequence that simply dazzles in 3D and builds the preview to a swift conclusion, leaving us all begging for more.

This preview was a very savvy marketing ploy, generating buzz four months early for a movie that might otherwise get lost in the crush of high-profile releases around the holiday season. (Hey, it worked on me!) The IMAX 3D market is also increasingly important; though the theaters are relatively few in number and scattered around the country, they’re an “event destination” for those willing to travel some distance to attend one, and they’ve contributed significant box office revenue to films like The Polar Express, Spider-Man 3, and the Harry Potter series. I’m not a raving fanboy for James Cameron — I thought The Abyss and Titanic, though visually impressive, were poorly written and overlong — nor do I enjoy movies that are all about the special effects but lack interesting stories or characters. So I won’t try to predict whether the movie itself will be worthy of accolades. But I do predict I will be back at that IMAX theater on December 18 to check out Avatar in its entirety.