After 13 long years and endless delays and date shifts, it’s finally time to return to the world of Pandora with the sequel to avatar. The first trailer for Avatar: The Way of Water will play before Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madnessand that will be the only official way to see it, at least for the next week.
The sequel brings back Sam Worthington as Jake Sully and Zoe Saldaña as his Na’vi lover Neytiri, and the first trailer oddly focuses on them rather than the beautiful alien world of Pandora. avatar 2 scheduled for release on December 16th.
Disney offered a preview of the trailer ahead of the preview screenings of Doctor Strange 2. Attendees at CinemaCon, an industry event for theater owners and operators, held in Las Vegas last week also got to see the premiere avatar 2
The first trailer for avatar 2 is largely wordless, instead being carried by the soaring music you might expect if you remember the first film well. His primary focus is on the Na’vi and the Avatars, the Na’vi bodies genetically engineered by humans and controlled via a remote brain interface. The trailer features numerous close-ups of Na’vi riding alien animals, walking with humans, and standing in or running through man-made structures. In other words, the trailer doesn’t offer nearly enough of Pandora.
If the original avatar Released in 2009, the blue CGI Na’vi characters looked gorgeous, with stunning facial expressions and surprisingly believable movements. But its real enduring power lay in the beauty and grandeur of Pandora’s digital landscape. After all, the planet was so beautiful that some people reported feeling deeply depressed because they couldn’t live there themselves. It’s even the basis for a hugely successful location at Disney World.
avatar‘s earliest followers focused on the beauty of Pandora’s flora and fauna. There were floating islands covered in glowing flowers and giant trees, strange alien creatures that looked like crossbreeds between panthers and lions, and huge flying beasts that took the characters – and more importantly, us – on a high-flying journey to explore teasing some of the planet’s stunning terrain.
The first trailer for Avatar: The Way of Water misses this majesty. By emphasizing the characters, the trailer reduces Pandora to a mundane setting that could be any forest or ocean on our own planet, save for the emphasis on creatures with four fins or four wings. There are brief shots of numerous new characters, all of whom look great again. These characters are often mounted creatures, but the camera is fixed on them, obscuring their mounts and making the watery expanses of Pandora’s new regions look dull.
The good news is that what little we’re seeing of Pandora’s new, mostly aquatic regions still looks incredible. The digital rendition is even more impressive than in the first film and it seems clear that there are many more glamorous shots of the planet to come. But it’s harder to get excited about returning to Pandora’s world when we hardly ever get to see her. And it’s not like the trailer focuses on plot rather than environments – there aren’t any clear story elements here, aside from a single voiceover line from Jake about how family is a fortress.
Along with some other recurring cast members, such as Sigourney Weaver and Giovanni Ribisi, avatar 2 will add a host of new actors and characters, including Kate Winslet and Michelle Yeoh. Some of the actors shared stories about their experiences making the film, which sounded like an absolute nightmare.
To prepare the audience for it Avatar: The Way of WaterDisney re-releases the original avatar in cinemas from September 23.
Director James Cameron has said in the past that he plans to do up to five Avatar films, and in fact has done so apparently shot several of them. As of now, the films are set to come out every two years through 2028, giving Disney a lot more opportunity to create trailers that focus less on unnamed characters doing obscure things and more on the world that the filmmakers invite us to reconsider .
