Shot of the Day #155: Avatar Rising...

Shot with iphone. Click to enlarge.

...so it's Thursday, the final official day of E3, and with such a massive event, with two halls highlighting the future of video gaming, you'd think I'd be just running around all day playing games right? Wrong. I haven't touched a controller all week, and now that I had 2 hours in the very start of the morning (before the crews started bringing me P2 cards filled with footage to digitize), I was determined to play SOMETHING. Will it be LEFT 4 DEAD 2? Or BRUTAL LEGEND? No...I had to go with my geek gut and wait in line for an HOUR and change for the highly-secretive, closed-doors presentation of James Cameron's AVATAR video game. What makes this game so hush-hush and super special? Well, Cameron himself came to the convention to hock it's wares, that they made the game in tandem with the movie (which is going on 5 years into production and post now, jesus!) and while he didn't show any movie footage (DICK! MAJOR BUZZKILL JIM) this was the first chance I'd get to see anything of his Stereoscopic worlds that I've been dying to see. Cameron, like Spielberg, is one of those few filmmakers that can truly create new worlds on-screen, and that he's been so passionate and committed to this particular one, a film so shrouded in secrecy that a few scant images have been leaked while it's still racing to the finish line (December 09), only gets my blood pumping more. I remember first seeing THE TERMINATOR on HBO and being blown away, then ALIENS in the theater...and throughout his filmography, he has a knack of making me believe. Today...I was ready to believe a little.

Here you see the ROBOTECH-like contraption featured in the film, which reminds one of the Lifter from ALIENS. It got my geek hackles up, enough to endure the hour-long wait and a non-disclosure form to sign. When we finally went into the cramped room and threw on our 3-D goggles, I was ready for anything.

Long (legalized) story short? The games was like any old 3-rd person shooter, but the 3-D was totally immersive. The world Cameron created, however, was downright astounding; imagine an entire rain forrest-like world made up of an iridescent ecto-skeleton, similar to the aliens in THE ABYSS, how they glowed from the inside out. Just this one moment in the game, combined with the creatures therein, made me feel 12 again, pumped to finally pay 14 bucks to believe.

The game wasn't worth the wait (and ended up being the ONLY thing I saw at the event), but the hint of what's to come with the movie was.
Bring it King of the World, I'm ready.

Joe