Snacking with Adel

(First published 0n  08/26/2009 12:05 AM; http://abs-cbnnews.com)

When the Avatar title card faded in in big letters hovering in the air in front of the screen, right after James Cameron spoke to the audience, a friend who was with me at the preview, a big, strapping, mature, serious man with a wife and grown-up responsibilities and not given to silly childish utterances at inopportune times, loudly and audibly …giggled. The rest of the audience tittered at the sound, but didn’t begrudge him the reaction. James Cameron does that to people; I wanted to giggle myself; there, but for the grace of God, go I. Crazy, right?

But it was a crazy event we were at. It was part of a simultaneous worldwide screening in IMAX 3D theaters all over the globe of 15 minutes of Cameron’s new film Avatar, a science-fiction adventure done in ground-breaking (people say game-changing) new three-dimensional film technology. Fifteen minutes. Crazy! Who’d do such a thing? And who’d watch it?

We would. And millions would, across the world.

We waited a full hour-and-a-half in the lobby of the new IMAX Theater in SM City North Edsa last Monday to catch a free preview of just 15 minutes of footage from the first half of the film, and for which we waited gladly. We’d waited years for any morsel of info about Avatar, any precious few seconds of advanced footage from this legendary production. Fifteen minutes of it was a feast. Sight unseen, except for the quarter-hour of selected scenes we were giggling over in anticipation of, we have might have as well declared it a success then and there, for all the objectivity we tried to muster.

The hype for Avatar is unmatched in the annals of cinema history. For years, people have been chattering about it online and endlessly theorizing and speculating about James Cameron’s next project since his Oscar-award winning film Titanic 12 years previous. Cloaked in impenetrable secrecy, fans waited hungrily online for tidbits of info, casting details, bits of behind-the-scenes gossip and (often-fake) leaked photos about Avatar. They didn’t get much.

If there was a category for it, whoever is handling the viral marketing strategy for the film deserves an Oscar this early. For the campaign’s first major salvo, lucky attendees of the San Diego Comic Con last month were treated to the same footage we were about to see, but I’d venture to say seeing those scenes in a conference hall, without the plush theater seats, polarized 3D glasses and Dolby Digital sound systems couldn’t have been as impressive as what we were about to experience.

Yet the reaction was wild and enthusiastic and stoked the fires even more. The night before Global Avatar Preview Day, August 21 (the Philippine preview got pushed back a few days) Apple released online a special two-minute movie teaser-trailer that some people, me included, stayed up late to catch. Smart move. It only served to turn up the heat past red and made people crazy for the 15 minutes to screen the following day, and pine for the December release date even more.

(Not to worry, Avatar should be filmfest-proof. Despite a ban on foreign movies, it will likely get screen time over the holidays, as Warner Bros. Marketing Director Sionee Lagman told me, “There are no digital local movies for the moment, and no Imax 3D festival entries as yet, so the D3D and IMAX theaters should be free to show Avatar this December, in time for the simultaneous international opening.”)

Scalped tickets for the complimentary one-day only preview were selling for US$500 on E-Bay. Crazy, right? I pulled strings to make sure that I got invites (I’d be damned if I missed this), but I needn’t have bothered, the PR group had already made arrangements to accommodate us.

The footage we saw yesterday lasted just 18 minutes in total. There was a one-minute personal introduction to the five scenes we were about to see by James Cameron himself, speaking directly to the audience (in 3-D), then the much-awaited fifteen spoiler-free minutes from the film’s first half, and then finally the just-released two-minute teaser trailer I’ve watched a couple of dozen times over the weekend, but in Cameron-3D and Dolby Digital sound this time.

So, does it live up to the hype?

In a word, spectacularly.

We’ve all seen lots of 3D fare this year. Up, Monsters vs. Aliens, the first five minutes of the new Harry Potter, the latest Ice Age, Coraline …only Cameron’s 3D is light-years beyond everything we’ve seen thus far. But if you asked us to pin it down to a specific characteristic or feature, we’d be hard pressed to explain it to you—I guess the simplest way to put it is that it’s more 3D than anything 3D I’d seen previously. Tech-wise, I’m sure there is a concrete scientific explanation; the gear was engineered by Cameron himself and is said to be revolutionary.

But in viewer terms, it’s less concrete. Maybe they’ve calculated the optimal optical stereo-separation math to make depth more realistic, and figured out the perfect fore/mid/background ratios, but the closest thing I can describe it with is the term that’s been bandied about since the footage was first shown: photo-real. And that it’s not precisely something you see. It’s more something you experience.

The first scenes weren’t too striking. It was the 3D we’ve grown used to, albeit clearer and brighter, but Avatar came into its own when the battle scenes in the forests of Pandora got started. I was astounded.

It was crazy. It was all I could do to take it all in …and keep from giggling.

Three major things occurred in my head rapidly.

First, being awestruck at how …real it all looked, with the bright swirling action and the unselfconscious and natural 3D-ness of it all, done without the artifice and manipulation common to most 3D features.

Second, marveling at the technology and how it was done – it all looked so solid and real and with weight, without anything ever physically, actually being there. Intellectually, I knew it was all just bits and bytes, it was just numbers. But …it was also all there, hanging off and within the screen, running, galloping, flying, fighting, shooting.

And third, and most astonishing of all, amazed that I was able to just effortlessly settle in and forget completely about the first two things after a couple of minutes, and just unconditionally accept the reality of an alien world with ten-foot-tall blue aliens, floating islands and savage flying creatures and just get lost in the story and the action popping off the screen.

I believed.

I can’t wait for December 18.

Damn you, James Cameron, you wonderful son of a bitch, for making movies that make grown men giggle.