Stan Winston is Dead
I have a bit of unfortunate news to report. Academy Award winning special effects and make-up artist Stan Winston died last night. Winston is best known for his work in the Terminator series (Winston designed the original Terminator Endoskeleton), Jurassic Park, Aliens, Predator, and Edward Scissorhands. A frequent collaborator of James Cameron, they co-founded Digital Domain in 1993. Winston was the second special effects artist to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Winston also worked on The Thing, Friday the 13th Part III, Alien Nation, The Monster Squad, Pumpkinhead, Interview with the Vampire, Congo, The Island of Doctor Moreau, Small Soldiers, Pearl Harbor, AI: Artificial Intelligence, Big Fish, Constantine, Batman Returns and Iron Man. His work will be seen in upcoming films: Black Mountain, James Cameron’s Avatar, and Terminator 4.
The Sarah Connor Chronicles: Pilot (series premiere)
(S01E01) TV Squad has already done an early look at this series. What follows is a more in-depth review of the pilot episode.
To recap, the episode begins in 1999. It takes place between the second and third movies in the franchise. Sarah Connor (played by Lena Headey) and her son John Connor (played by Thomas Dekker) are on the run from the future.
In the future, John Connor saves mankind from a supercomputer called Skynet that was built by a human creator and financed by the military. Shortly after going online, Skynet became hellbent on making the human race extinct. Unfortunately, future John wasn’t able to finish the job before Skynet invented a working time machine. Skynet also uses cyborg foot soldiers called Terminators to do its dirty work.
Sarah and John have to be careful not to leave any clues to their location while they’re on the run from both the law and the future. If they do, at best they’ll be arrested. At worst, Skynet can find them and send Terminators back in time to kill John before he saves the world.
Episode spoilers after the jump…
In 1999, Sarah and John are hiding out under the false last name Reese (which any Terminator fan would know is the last name of John’s father). John is going to high school and is befriended by a woman named Cameron (played by Summer Glau). The director of the first two Terminator movies is James Cameron. Coincidence? I think not.
An error is made a Terminator is sent back in time to kill John. Before the halfway point of the episode, we learn that Cameron is a Terminator sent back by John to protect him.
To protect them from an immediate threat, Cameron assembles a time 
machine in a bank vault that resistance fighters from the future hid there. The Connors and Cameron are projected forward in time to 2007 (ironic that the premiere is in 2008) where they arrive naked. The show is on Fox, people. Expect rampant nudity.
There are subplots galore. Sarah leaves her boyfriend suddenly when she is discovered by the Terminator in 1999. He sees her photo on television in 2007 looking no older. The team is also being pursued by FBI agent James Ellison (played by Richard T. Jones) who is a regular on the series although his appearance in the first episode is more of an extended cameo.
I think Terminator purists are going to dislike this series. It blatantly contradicts the existing Terminator mythology of the movies (as did Terminator 3. No surprise there since both the series and the third movie are by the same production company).
The pilot episode isn’t bad. I’ve certainly seen worse pilots. The saving grace of the pilot is the brilliant performances of Lena Headey and Summer Glau. Lena Headey is the latest of a series of British actors on American TV playing roles with an American accent. I guess since so much filming for American TV is done in Canada, they find the British actors to be cheaper to get. She’s best known for her role in the movie 300 (”You will not enjoy this.”).
Summer Glau is best known as River Tam in the series Firefly and the movie Serenity. She plays the “robot wanting to be human” character very well and still can do kick-ass fight scenes. Who knew robots had such grace?
I would give the series a chance. They are trying to build a more complex mythology than the movies could. However, between the writer’s strike and the fact that this is a science-fiction program on the Fox network, I can only hope that it makes it to a second season.
James Cameron’s Avatar to Overcome Uncanny Valley?
James Cameron revealed at the Microsoft Advance ‘08 event that Avatar will be the first film to feature photo-realistic characters which actually look real.
“Avatar will make people truly experience something. One more layer of the suspension of disbelief will be removed. All the syn-thespians are photo-realistic. Now that we’ve achieved it, we discovered CG characters in 3D look more real than in 2D. Your brain is cued it’s a real thing not a picture and discounting part of image that makes it look fake,” said Cameron. “Avatar is the single most complex piece of filmmaking ever made. We have 1,600 shots for a 2.5 hour movie. It’s not with a single CGI character, like King Kong or Gollum. We have hundreds of photo-realistic CG characters.”
Has Cameron overcome the Uncanny Valley? For those who don’t know, Uncanny Valley is basically a theory that “when robots and other facsimiles of humans look and act almost, but not entirely, like actual humans, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers.” Imagine a graph showing the progression of realism in computer generated characters. The “valley” in question is a dip in that proposed graph of the positivity of human reaction as a function of a robot’s lifelikeness.
The theory is that “if a entity is sufficiently non-humanlike, then the humanlike characteristics will tend to stand out and be noticed easily, generating empathy. On the other hand, if the entity is ‘almost human’, then the non-human characteristics will be the ones that stand out, leading to a feeling of strangeness’ in the human viewer.” For example, many moviegoers complain that the humans in Hironobu Sakaguchi‘s 2001 computer animated film Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within look like zombies (see image below).
Cameron says that he has created “a complete ecosystem of phantasmagorical plants and creatures, and a native people with a rich culture and language.” Hundreds of photo-realistic CG characters which supposedly surpass the uncanny valley? Call me skeptical. Call me excited. I’m really hoping that this movie will live up to the hype. Quotes like the one above get me really excited for the endless possibilities, but then the quote below brings me back to earth.
“I don’t know whether will be great film from narrative and critical standpoint,” said Cameron. “The experience of Avatar will be an experience unlike any other movies.”
I would also describe The Wachowski Brothers’ Speed Racer as “an experience unlike any other movie”, but at the end of the day, it doesn’t mean much. In other news, James Cameron also revealed at the event that Ubisoft will be releasing a 3D version of a game based on the movie, which will run on a standard XBox 360 - complete with 3D glasses! First-person shooters will become true first-person experiences, he said.
“If you play Avatar on a 50 inch monitor, you’re in the game.”
Again, very skeptical and very excited.
sources: searchenginewatch.com, marketsaw, cnet, wikipedia
James Cameron’s Next Movie Might Be The Dive
James Cameron told the Hollywood Reporter that he wants “to do something a lot smaller” after Avatar. It is possible that Cameron’s next project could be The Dive, about the romance between controversial Cuban free diver Francisco “Pipin” Ferreras and Frenchwoman Audrey Mestre. Based on a true story, Mestre became a free diver under his guidance, and went on to break several world records before dying in 2002 while competing. Ferreras was featured in the 2001 Imax documentary Ocean Men: Extreme Dive.
“It’s a drama, a love story,” Cameron said. “This will require underwater photography, which will look gorgeous in 3-D.”
Sounds well and good, but I was kind of hoping that with Avatar Cameron would be making his return to the genre of Sci-Fi/Action. I understand his fascination with the deep, I have enjoyed what he has done in the educational documentary space, and I respect what he is doing for the technology of 3-D filmmaking, but I think it’s time for Cameron to return to what he’s good at. It’s like when Michael Jordan left Basketball to play Baseball… And look how that turned out. Imagine if Cameron made a supehero flick or a video game adaptation how much he could elevate those genres. I understand he doesnt need to mae those type of films. And I also understand that he probably enjoys working under water and with the new 3D technology, but the world would be better serviced with another T2-caliber sci-fi/action film.