With trailer for Avatar sequel, 3D innovator James Cameron takes us to a wonderful underwater world

Can James Cameron surprise us again with his 3D magic? The first trailer for . will be released this week Avatar: The Way of Waterthe years-delayed sequel to the most lucrative film of all time.

The idea that you have to wait for something, Andy Warhol once said, is what makes it so exciting. The pop art emperor’s musings became famous and flaunted on T-shirts, mugs and posters. But can you also wait too long for something?

‘You will shit yourself with your mouth wide open’† James Cameron roared long, long ago about the intended visual splendor of the sequel to Avatar† The sequel to the world’s most lucrative feature film ever (with tickets sold for $2.8 billion so far), initially announced for December 2014, was delayed about eight times. Writing the script took longer than intended and the technical innovation for the necessary 3D shots turned out to be insufficiently advanced.

After the 67-year-old Canadian film pioneer Cameron, who is never too bad for a game of overtopping, dismissed the reports about the umpteenth delay with the announcement of four more expensive sequels, of which he would run several at the same time, another series of delays followed. Avatar became a joke: ever-moving release dates for more and more parts of the film. And then there was the pandemic, which pushed planning another year or so further into the future.

And so it became 2022. From December 16, Avatar: The Way of Water can finally be seen in cinemas, thirteen years after the release of the first part in 2009. The title of the sequel was announced this week with the presentation of the first trailer, which can be seen exclusively from Wednesday ahead of the new Marvel superhero adventure Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness†

3D as it was meant to be

Refresher course Avatar: In the first adventure, paralyzed ex-serviceman Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) crawled into the blue skin of a ten-foot Na’vi through an ‘avatar’ program, to be taken in by this forest folk from the planet Pandora. He fell in love with Neytiri (Zoë Saldana), daughter of the chieftain, and fought with the Na’vi against advancing humans, who, after exhausting their own planet, are now mining and destroying alien ecosystems.

Avatar was presented as the ‘third revolution’ in film: after the arrival of sound and color, there was – finally – 3D as 3D was intended. For years, Cameron had honed the previously gimmicky stereoscopy and combined his refined technique with the motion captureacting, where the expressions of actors in Lycra suits are turned into animation one on one, as with the groundbreaking character Gollum in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings†

And it worked. Fans went to the cinema two, three, sometimes even five times to immerse themselves in the fluorescent colors of the Pandorian flora and fauna with film glasses on. Avatar even bumped Cameron’s own doom epic Titanic (1997) at the top spot as the highest-grossing film ever. The superhero ensemble Avengers: Endgame was briefly the new frontrunner from 2019, but Avatar then returned to the top thanks to a Chinese re-release, which garnered a few extra millions in box office revenue.

Meanwhile it seemed Avatar not necessarily mature well, as a film classic. Those blue Na’vi, with their fantasy language partly based on Maori sounds, never got to the core of pop culture; it was less for the general public than the Batmans and Spider-Mans, or Star Wars† During ecological protests, a blue-painted demonstrator with pointed ears occasionally appeared, but that too gradually died out. The ‘flat’ television broadcasts of Avatar did the status of the movie little good: without the 3D effect, the film tasted like cola without carbonation. The depth of the film was not in the carried dialogue, or the predictable plot twists. so won Avatar no new generations of fans ahead of them either. Although you can hardly call the ecological message of the film outdated.

underwater world

The added value of this new, second Avatar-part must be searched for in that word ‘water’ in the title. Fascinated by underwater explorer Jacques Cousteau since childhood, Cameron is a diving enthusiast and hobby submarine builder. The kind of man who descends for fun into the kilometers deep Mariana Trench. The one after Kate Winslet complained that she once nearly drowned while filming Titanic, calmly stated that the actress had no idea what it felt like to really nearly drown. He does.

In The Way of Water Jake and Neytiri join a sea clan of the Na’vi natural people. Ten years later, they have Na’vi children, plus an adopted human son. This film, producer Jon Landau already reported, is also about the perils of a ‘modern’ blended family. Where the first Avatar-movie mainly set in sky and jungle, now the magical underwater world of Pandora is being explored. Cameron has already experimented with underwater 3D in his marine documentaries Ghosts of the Abyss (2003) and Aliens of the Deep (2005), but now encountered all kinds of new cinematic challenges: light and reflections hinder the required precise registration of the motion capturegame. The swirling bubbles of any compressed air also gave the crew a headache. Letting actors float on ropes and only fit in the sea later was not an option for Cameron, that didn’t seem enough truthful. He hired “freedivers,” diving experts who can live for minutes without air, to train the actors on how to hold their breath for longer during underwater scenes. Winslet, who plays a supporting role as one of the sea Na’vi’s, took the set record: seven minutes and fourteen seconds.

3D since the first Avatar-movie

After the success of the first Avatarmovie, more 3D blockbusters came quickly. Every studio bet on it, but Cameron’s technical sophistication was rarely, if ever, matched. Cheaper or quickly turned into 3D titles like Clash of the Titans (2010) curbed the enthusiasm. Because stereoscopy also turned out to be a plague; it often looked a bit blurry or diorama-dead (when moving).

In the Netherlands, Reinout Oerlemans delivered the first 3D feature film in 2011, the sea epic Nova Zemlya, with a scene in which Doutzen Kroes came rocking into the room. ‘It’s just like pancakes,’ joked host Theo Maassen that year at the Gouden Kalveren, ‘the first one always fails.’ There was no second 3D film in the Netherlands. 3D did not disappear from the arsenal of the cinema chains, but gradually became a visual extra again: nice for a certain type of popcorn movie, such as those dinosaurs bulging out of the screen in the Jurassic Parksequels. Cameron’s promise that it could become a new standard for the spectacle film was ultimately fulfilled mainly by Cameron himself.

And now the director has his back against the wall. Can he shake up the movie world once again with his love for 3D? Cameron also took the third Avatar-divide up. And will soon start on parts four and five. Each with a production budget of about $250 million. The Fox studio, which released the original, has since been swallowed by Disney. There, people will be comforted to think that Cameron makes a habit of excelling when he tries the technically impossible, over budgets and flouting all planned production schedules, while the press, rubbing hands, counts on a flop.

‘Blub, blub, blub’, headlined Time Magazine before it also came about with great difficulty Titanic premiered. The unassuming Cameron, concluded The New Yorker once featured in an extended profile of the filmmaker, has been a career-long ‘creepy’ man that makes people love to see him fail. Not to do that every time.

Loch Nessian

On Tuesday evening, the room of the Kinepolis theater on the Jaarbeurs site in Utrecht will be filled with all kinds of fans dressed as superheroes, for a special preview of Doctor Strangewith the promised premiere of the trailer of Avatar: The Way of Water† In 2D, unfortunately.

One floor below, in a room that has just finished, where the smell of popcorn still hangs, the 3D version, which will also be shown in the Netherlands from Wednesday (only in 3D prior to 3D performances of Doctor Strange) has already been tested. One and a half minutes Pandora, is it enough?

The first seconds show some tall Na’vi hopping over the vegetation between two floating rocks: Avatar as we already knew it. But then there are the underwater flashes. See that Na’vi man hitching a ride on the fin of a huge cetacean animal, as in the ultimate new agedream. Or the Na’vi woman (Winslet?), gazing at an anemone, while the most wonderful fish pass by in the background. By the first Avatar Cameron said he was averse to those typical 3D tricks, where something suddenly sticks out very far into the room. Now we see the neck and head of a Loch Nessian sea creature reaching deep into the room. fabulous.

The sparse dialogue in the trailer sounds familiar: “I know one thing,” Na’vi father Jake exclaims, “wherever we go, this family is our stronghold!”

Cameron knows exactly how the public will react to his film, he already predicted in the magazine Vanity Fair† “If you loved the first one, you’ll love the new ones too. If you hated the first one, you’ll probably hate this one too. If you loved the first one, but later said you hated it, you’ll probably love this one too.”