Brow Beat: Slate's Culture Blog

Avatar = "Apocalypto" + George Lucas

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," 20^th 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.

Will the 3-D Revival Go the Way of Pixar's Up?

The 3-D revival appears to be a success. With $68 million in receipts over its first weekend, Pixar's Up may become the highest-grossing 3-D film of all time. Only 11 3-D movies have ever pulled in more than $50 million over their entire runs-and five of them have come out since last fall.

The 3-D boom interests me for two reasons: First, because I've been a fan of the medium since I was a little kid; and second, because of a prediction I made in April that may soon turn out to be deeply embarrassing. In an article entitled "The Problem With 3-D: It hurts your eyes. Always has, always will," I declared that the 3-D bubble would soon burst because problems with stereo cinema technology had not been fixed. "Eventually, inevitably, perhaps unconsciously," I wrote, the eye strain 3-D movies cause will "creep off the screen and into our minds."

It may be time to start hedging my bets. I still think the future is dim for live-action 3-D movies, and I don't believe Jeffrey Katzenberg's claim that everything will soon be produced in stereo. But I now believe the revival could find lasting success ... in children's movies. Here are three possible reasons why:

1. Kids are too young to remember Jaws 3-D.
One of the problems facing the marketers of 3-D cinema is the medium's sketchy past. The last wave of 3-D films in the early 1980s comprised a run of dreadful horror and sci-fi flicks, from Friday the 13^th, Part III to Metalstorm. Hollywood has been aggressive in targeting youngsters this go-round, perhaps because kids are an audience that hasn't been tainted by 3-D's unsavory past. At least seven more animated 3-D children's movies are scheduled for release this year.

2. The 3-D effects are better in animated films.
It takes a lot figuring to get the cinematography right in a live-action 3-D film. For one thing, you have to decide how far apart to place the two cameras during shooting. (In general, the further apart they are, the more intense the illusion of depth, and the more eyestrain for viewers.) But the makers of an animated film have full control of the frame, since every pixel is generated by a computer. It may be easier to correct for imperfections in the stereo effect in computer-generated imagery—and that would in turn lead to a cleaner, more comfortable experience for viewers.

3. Kids may be less susceptible to eyestrain.
No one knows exactly why 3-D movies cause headaches, fatigue, and nausea, but the most intuitive theory has to do with what's called the convergence-accommodation disparity. In short: In order to see the 3-D special effect, you have to point your eyes at the screen while you focus them at a depth somewhere in front of the screen.