Deep Media

Avatar: It's All About the Eyes

One of the most intriguing comments I heard while reporting the making of Avatar for Wired came not from James Cameron himself (though there were plenty of those) but from Richie Baneham, the film's animation supervisor. Richie, revered among animators for leading the breakthrough realization of Gollum in The Lord of the Rings, was describing his technique for avoiding the "uncanny valley," the weirdly lifeless look that creeped out viewers of earlier performance-capture productions like Beowulf and The Polar Express. “We as human beings will process an image to see if there’s something we need to look at,” he said in his soft Irish brogue, “with an emphasis on finding eyes.” This observation fascinated me: What does it say about us that we're hardwired to seek out these small, photosensitive, very expressive, mostly gelatinous orbs? And what does it mean for the movie? 

There's an obvious evolutionary benefit, of course. That's on display early in the movie, which I saw in 3-D at Friday's New York press screening. Jake's avatar, lost and alone at night in the hostile Pandoran jungle after he's wandered away from his comrades, finally succeeds in lighting a pitch-dipped stick—and realizes to his horror that staring back at him are dozens if not hundreds of eyes. Where there are eyes there are teeth, and these eyes belong to a pack of viperwolves, a particularly vicious Cameron-invented species that's sort of a cross between a hyena, a greyhound, and a meat shredder. Unfortunately, this realization comes too late for Jake to do much about it—barring a miracle, he's not going to survive the night. (Don't worry, there's a miracle: Her name is Neytiri, and she kicks viperwolf butt.) 

But this isn't the first time in the movie that Cameron focuses our attention on eyes. The opening shot is an extreme close-up of Jake (Sam Worthington, seen above in a detail from the French movie poster). What we see is one of his eyes, viewed from above in a clinical fashion, the camera seemingly just inches away. This is followed by an even more discomforting shot of the same eye viewed from the side, so close you can make out the cornea resting atop his iris. It's safe to assume that a lot of what Cameron wants to say in this picture has to do with eyes, or seeing, or both.  

Avatar: The Game: Building a World, or Marketing a Movie?

Ubisoft, developers of Avatar: The Game, are fond of saying that the world of Pandora can be experienced through both their game and James Cameron’s movie. This ability to explore a fictional universe in multiple media and through multiple storylines has been the goal of many failed efforts, most notably Enter The Matrix. So it was up to the team at Ubisoft Montreal, makers of Assassin’s Creed II and Prince of Persia, to assuage the doubts of skeptics and live up to the promises made in their developer diaries. Unfortunately, Avatar: The Game offers all too little insight into Avatar the universe.

It’s no secret that movie tie-in games are generally atrocious. Just this year we’ve had the displeasure of experiencing another round of The Lord Of The Rings games, Terminator Salvation, The Godfather II, Up, and a slew of others. It’s not just that these games were poorly designed and hastily put together; they are also unabashedly derivative. None of them provide more in terms of story than their cinematic counterparts; instead of offering a fresh experience, they expect players to play through a plot they’ve already seen at the theatre. Even the few titles whose developers were given the time and license to provide compelling gameplay—King Kong and X-Men Origins: Wolverine, for instance—fell victim to the issues of poorly constructed games: Their storyline and characters felt all too familiar.

A rare few have succeeded in being more than being a decent clone. The first Riddick game, The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, not only pushed the boundaries of first-person combat and stealth but created a new story arc separate from, but consistent with, the films. As Riddick, the player could experience first-hand what being a feared, ultra-violent assassin was like without knowing every plot twist. But Starbreeze wasn’t finished there: The developers released another game in the series (the only film-game sequel I can think of besides Star Wars), Assault on Dark Athena, that built on their previous success and added yet more mythology to the Riddick canon.

In 2003, Enter the Matrix had promised to bring the integration of games and film even closer. Conceptually, the idea was brilliant. The writers of The Matrix Reloaded—the second movie in the series—created a subplot that would be seen only in a very peripheral way through the movie. The game put the player in control of the characters introduced in this subplot, letting the player watch the movie’s story unfold from a completely different perspective in an interactive environment. But even great ideas can falter with poor execution.