Avatar trailer finally released

The long-awaited trailer for James Cameron's sci-fi spectacular Avatar has finally been released online: comments have ranged from 'awesome' to 'it looks like the Smurfs movie'.

The Avatar hype machine has been in overdrive this week, but finally reached critical mass this afternoon when the first trailer was released online. Watch it at Apple.com here.

It's hard to know what to make of it. One half of me thinks it's a little underwhelming and that the much-touted technological leap looks more like a hop, skip and jump in the right direction. A comparison to Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within is not a favourable one, but that only sucked because the story came second to the effects. Surely this will be different.

On the other hand, there's much to enjoy. The location design of Pandora looks genuinely stunning; lush jungles, floating islands, aerial battles... It's so much more aesthetically pleasing than your average gloomy sci-fi. Frankly I can't wait.

I've read comments that "it doesn't look real enough," but can't quite get my head around that. It's a similar criticism to those of Hulk in 2003, when people complained that the Hulk looked 'too CGI'. Surely, the point is that these characters do not look real - being alien is what they're all about. Remember too: the film will be universally released in 3D. It's hard to judge a 3D film from a brief 2D trailer when atmosphere is one of its main selling points.

I'm seeing 15 minutes of Avatar footage tomorrow and will report back then as to whether it really looks like living up to the hype or just ends up as Beowulf Without Angelina Jolie's Tits.