James Cameron has often been hailed as a living legend giving us such wonderous films as the Terminator, Aliens and the Abyss. All of those movies involved special effects that give life to inanimate objects so it makes sense that these iconic benchmarks would be in the background of the man intending to break one more. James Cameron claims that his upcoming film the Avatar will bridge 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.
This brings us one step closer to the syn-thespian theory that people speculated when CGI characters were given such life that we feared they would eventually replace actors altogether.
This theory was often challenged by the Uncanny valley. Basically saying we cant make CGI people that are convincing enough to replace the real thing. The most popular example of this was the CGI Final Fantasy The Spirits Within which had such staggering effects that you often forgot you were watching an animation. Yet when you looked into the eyes of a character, they tended to look empty or lifeless.
James Cameron’s Avatar has photo-realistic characters that Cameron brags are SO GOOD that they will bridge that valley of discomfort.
I myself am excited just to see another James Cameron film. He hasn’t let me down. But to know that he is setting this goal to shatter the current standards makes me even more fascinated with this film.
Hopefully this film will differ from Final Fantasy and will actually be a good film instead of just staggering to look at.
