"Avatar" Eve: Eleventh Hour Promo Push Finally Means Business

The critical do-or-die advertising rollout for James Cameron's legendarily expensive "Avatar," which is guaranteed to be a wild cinematic experience whether or not it becomes a box office behemoth and/or attains classic film status, finally seems to have hit its stride. 

The bewilderingly polarizing WTF reaction back in August to the first trailer left a collective first impression of "Avatar" as a cross between "Fern Gully," a Final Fantasy video game and something George Lucas might cook up were he to take "Star Wars" any further.  Starring a bunch of shockingly unattractive blue aliens who ride on the backs of hybrid pterodactyls, which are rendered in a color scheme inspired by rainbow sherbet or LSD, "Avatar" was immediately recognizable as a much riskier gamble than the already massive one previously assumed.  Given its five-year production schedule and a negative cost approaching $400 million, you'd think that the Cameron and 20th Century Fox would have only given audiences the first official glimpse at "Avatar" after taking the most painstaking of measures to blow us out of the water and maximize anticipation.  Even the trailer's font was unsettling, using a skinny, reptilian typeface that registered as both amateurish and unconcerned with evoking "epic" in any way. 

While the official "Avatar" title card has retained the initially ubiquitous font, it's the only word in the trailers and TV spots that have followed in the wake of that first, instantly notorious trailer (thank Gods). Since leading man Sam Worthington won't become a household name until next year, once "Avatar" and next spring's "Clash of the Titans" establish certain movie star status, and Sigourney Weaver is the best they've got in terms of marquee names, the major selling point of all subsequent ads has been the director himself.  A rarity among filmmakers, James Cameron shares bragging rights with only Steven Spielberg, Peter Jackson, and M. Night Shyamalan (the latter of whom is quickly falling off the short list) as directors whose name alone can make a movie an event for the average moviegoer.  There are a fair number of filmmakers who can claim household name status (Martin Scorcese and Tim Burton come immediately to mind) but their appeal is too niche and fan bases too artfully inclined to generate commercial crossover success every time out. I can't stress enough how much more appealing "Avatar" became once ads trumpeting the film as "From James Cameron...Director of Aliens...Terminator...The Abyss...Terminator 2...True Lies...and Titanic" spelled these words across the screen in brawny blue boldface, which irrefutably means business and makes implicit that the film itself actually aims to join the ranks of Cameron's resume of strictly blockbusters and represents the typeface equivalent of an antidote to that slithering nightmare of a font that haunted the first trailer and definitively informed the collective first impression of "Avatar" for audiences worldwide.

With just a week to go before "Avatar" finally opens, and hopefully makes good on its legendary hype and having spent the majority of this decade in production, Fox has released the movie's official one-sheet. It does not disappoint, evoking romantic allusions to "Titanic" and other great cinematic epics -- a truly impressive feat given that its romantic leads are in fact not cute, nor human, nor physically tangible in any way -- and cementing my faith that "Avatar" will, indeed, mean business.