'Avatar' and the lessons learned

Dec. 5, 2009 8:47 PM PT

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‘AVATAR’ COUNTDOWN: 14 DAYS

It’s almost time to run through the jungle. James Cameron’s ‘Avatar’ is fast approaching and here at the Hero Complex we’re past the halfway mark in our 30-day countdown coverage and, yes, by the end you’ll be blue in the face. For our mellow Saturday installment, a roundup of the week’s ‘Avatar’ news, presented in terms of things we learned.

Lesson 1: Fox is not above using their scripted television shows to promote a film. There was consternation, eye-rolling and plenty of resigned shrugs this week when Fox used their smart and sexed-up forensics franchise ‘Bones’ to hype ‘Avatar’ by weaving the movie into the plot line. Joel David Moore, a star of both ‘Avatar’ and ‘Bones,’ was a key player in the episode’s winking plugs for the sci-fi epic and here’s what he told the Wall Street Journal’s Speakeasy blog:

Moore said “Bones” is an ideal show to pull off a marketing gimmick because “it doesn’t take itself too seriously.” “You couldn’t have done this on ‘CSI,’ where everyone takes themselves so seriously all the time,” he said. “And you never see a clip of me or my avatar in the TV episode. It does get confusing. You can understand how an actor can go crazy and start drinking at noon.” All kidding aside, Moore thinks the crossover is a good idea, noting that everyone has DVRs and fast forwards through commercials. “This is an ad you can’t fast-forward through,” he said. “And if it convinces a ‘Bones’ watcher to see it, all the better.” Read the rest

Here’s the preview for that episode, which aired Thursday (and was, in my humble opinion, too contrived to be especially effective as a promotion but also blatant and playful enough that it didn’t offend me nearly as much as the automobile plugs that have popped up in ‘Fringe’ ):

Lesson 2: James Cameron believed ‘Polar Express’ was on the wrong track. A while back, we interviewed a key member of the ‘Avatar’ team, production designer Rick Carter, who told us that Cameron and performance-capture specialist Robert Zemeckis are clearly philosophical rivals who keep an eye on one another. It’s easy then to read between the lines of these quotes in a Variety Q&A with Cameron: ‘I was unfamiliar with performance-capture technology, and the performance-capture technology I had seen I didn’t think would measure up to what we needed. So, basically, we threw out the book and started from scratch and built up our own system, and, of course, because I was unfamiliar with any other system and we were building it from scratch, it was sort of custom-tailored to this film.’ Read the rest

Lesson 3: Leona Lewis can get real mushy. On Friday, Popeater got a chance to let the world get its first earful of ‘I See You,’ the ‘Avatar’ theme song by British singer Leona Lewis. She also explained to the website that she visited Pandora before recording the track: ‘James and I spoke about the meaning and emotion of the song. He showed me clips from the film which gave me insight into the characters and this whole other world that he had created. The song represents the feelings shared between Jake and Neytiri, it’s very powerful and beautiful.’ Read the rest and hear the song

Lesson 4: Not everyone likes mushy.The often-acerbic Culture Vulture at the New York Magazine website was giggling when it listened to that Lewis track: ‘made in the mold of ‘My Heart Will Go On’ and fortified with a full range of late-nineties radio-schmaltz pyrotechnics ... maybe it’ll sound better in 3-D.’ Read the rest

— Geoff Boucher

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