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Avatar is a 2009 science fiction / action / adventure / fantasy film written and directed by James Cameron, starring Sam Worthington, Zoë Saldaña, Stephen Lang, Michelle Rodriguez, and Sigourney Weaver. It was made by Lightstorm Entertainment and released by 20th Century Fox on December 18, 2009. The film is set in the year 2154 on Pandora, a fictional Earth-like moon in a distant planetary system. Humans are engaged in mining Pandora's reserves of a precious mineral, while the Na'vi — the sapient and sentient race of humanoids indigenous to the moon — resist the colonists' expansion, which threatens the continued existence of the Na'vi and the Pandoran ecosystem. The film's title refers to the remotely controlled, genetically engineered human-Na'vi bodies used by the film's human characters to interact with the natives.
Avatar had been in development since 1994 by James Cameron, who wrote a 114-page scriptment for the film. Filming was supposed to take place after the completion of Titanic, and the film would have been released in 1999, but according to James Cameron, "technology needed to catch up" with his vision of the film. In early 2006, James Cameron developed the script, the language, and the culture of Pandora. He stated that since Avatar was successful, there will be at least two sequels.
The film was first titled Project 880, and was released in traditional 2D and 3D formats, along with an IMAX 3D release in selected theaters. The film is estimated to have cost over $300 million to produce, and another estimated $200 million for the distribution and other costs, thus totaling to about half a billion dollars. Avatar is being touted as a breakthrough in terms of filmmaking technology, for its development of 3D viewing and stereoscopic filmmaking with cameras that were specially designed for the film's production. Opening to critical acclaim, it earned an estimated $27 million on its opening day and an estimated $77,025,481 domestically its opening weekend. Worldwide, the film grossed an estimated $232,180,000 its opening weekend, the ninth largest opening-weekend gross of all time, and the largest for a non-franchise, non-sequel and original film. It is also considered to be a front-runner for awards and nominations at the 82nd Academy Awards. So far, it has been nominated to 4 Golden Globes, 2 of which it won: Best Director and Best Motion Picture (Drama). The film was rated PG-13 by the MPAA for intense epic battle sequences and warfare, sensuality, language and some smoking.
The movie has grossed over $1 billion worldwide, a feat only four other films have managed. On January 25, 2010, Avatar surpassed Titanic as the highest grossing film of all time, worldwide.
In the Year 2154, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a former U.S. Marine paralyzed from the waist down due to wounds sustained in combat, is selected to participate in the Avatar program. Originally, the position was supposed to be filled by his identical twin brother Tom Sully, who was recently killed by "a man with a gun". Arriving from the six-year journey from Earth to Pandora, Jake awakes from cryosleep with hundreds of other personnel to work at the human colony on this inhabited moon of Polyphemus, one of three fictional gas giants orbiting Alpha Centauri A. Jake meets with Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), a hardened and seasoned military veteran who is in charge of security on the colony. Quaritch welcomes the new personnel and military soldiers and briefs them on Pandora. It is mostly covered with lush rainforests and wildlife, and home to the primitive Na'vi, a sentient race of tall, blue-skinned, cat-like humanoids.
The colony personnel and military are under the jurisdiction of the Resources Development Administration (RDA), a non-governmental organization back on Earth. Jake is introduced to Norm Spellman (Joel David Moore), a biologist who arrived on the same batch of personnel as he did, and Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver), a botanist as well as the leader of the Avatar program, which allows humans to control avatars, which are genetically engineered human-Na’vi hybrids who look like Na'vi. Using the avatars, Grace and her team have made some considerable progress teaching some Na’vi their ways and English as well as learning their language and culture. Grace is not pleased with RDA administrator Parker Selfridge’s (Giovanni Ribisi) decision to use Jake to replace his brother’s avatar position, as she will have to spend time training him in Na’vi culture as well as teaching him how to control his avatar. Parker stresses that RDA needs to mine the extremely valuable mineral unobtainium, which can be found in huge deposits on Pandora. Meanwhile, Quaritch makes Jake his informant to collect information on the Na’vi and their home, the Hometree (Kelutral), which has huge deposits of unobtainium buried deep below its surface. He wants Jake to gain their trust and convince them to leave their home within three months. After being trained for several weeks in his new body, Jake, Grace and Norm explore the native wildlife with Trudy Chacon (Michelle Rodriguez), a retired Marine pilot who is assigned to ferry them to their location. While Grace and Norm study the wildlife, Jake encounters a group of Hammerhead Titanotheres, a rhinoceros-like animal species. However, the Titanotheres flee from a Thanator (Palulukan), a terrifying land predator. Grace shouts at her group to flee. Jake runs from the Thanator, who is after him, and loses his equipment and weapon in the process. He narrowly escapes death from the predator and falls into raging rivers below.
As darkness falls, Jake creates a fire torch using a sap substance on the trees, and once more runs and fights a large group of small sized Viperwolves (nantang). A female Na’vi named Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) rescues him and kills several of the Viperwolfs before they all flee. Neytiri is at first angry with Jake for having caused her to kill the Viperwolfs needlessly and leaves him. Jake goes after Neytiri, who tells him not to follow as she knows he is an avatar hybrid - a dreamwalker from the sky people. Jake is caught by her fellow Na’vi, but Neytiri defuses the situation by telling her people that she witnessed him being chosen by the seeds of Eywa, a spiritual entity that the Na’vi worship, which indicate him as a pure spirit. Meeting Eytukan (Wes Studi) and Mo'at (C. C. H. Pounder), the king and queen of the Omaticaya Clan, who are also Neytiri’s parents, Jake presents himself as a warrior "dreamwalker", a term the Na’vi used to call the avatar hybrids, with his intention to learn from them. Eytucan and Mo’at agree to teach Jake, making a reluctant Neytiri his tutor. From that day on, Jake spends his time learning the ways and culture of the Na’vi warriors, while jumping back to his original human body to report to Parker and Quaritch on information regarding the aliens. Grace arranges the movement of the Avatar team to a remote camp in the Hallejuiah Mountains after finding out from Dr. Max Patel that Jake has been having regular communications with Quaritch about the Na'vi.
In his avatar form, Jake learns how to bond and control his flying Banshee, while gaining respect and admiration from the Na’vi, his relationship with Neytiri continuing to grow, but also earning the jealousy and annoyance of Tsu'Tey (Laz Alonso), Neytiri’s betrothed and next in line to be the clan leader. Reporting back to Quaritch, the colonel wants Jake to begin his plan to convince the tribe to leave the Hometree, but Jake is now reluctant and weary of his fellow humans to exploit the moon’s resources. He tells Quaritch that he will attempt to convince the tribe once he is made part of the People, a ceremony granting the greatest honor to an avatar. That night, Jake undergoes the ceremony where Eytucan considers him as one of their own and made part of the People, with Grace and Neytiri looking on. Jake is now part of the Omaticaya Clan, and with this he can choose his mate; he and Neytiri choose each other and spend that night Mating, and they are now mated for life. When Jake and Neytiri awake they encounter several bulldozers, sent by the RDA, destroying the nearby forests. In his attempt to stop them, Jake destroys one of the machine’s camera arrays. Returning to the Hometree, Jake reveals he was sent by his superiors to convince the tribe to leave. He attempts to explain to the tribe that the humans will destroy them and their home if they don’t leave, but they are too upset by his apparent betrayal to listen. Neytiri refuses to listen to Jake’s explanations while Tsu’Tey attempts to kill him. Before anything else can happen, Jake and Grace are suddenly sent back to their human bodies when soldiers sent by Quaritch arrive and open their pods to take them back by force.
Quaritch and Parker have seen footage of Jake destroying the bulldozer’s cameras and have checked his entry logs, indicating him as losing interest to participate in the plan as well as committing possible treason. Grace tells an unbelieving Parker that the trees and plant life make up a huge network which connects the spiritual consciousness of all life, including the Na’vi, and must not be destroyed. Given a chance to attempt a final plea to the tribe to leave their home, Jake and Grace return to their avatar forms but are instead caught and binded by the Na’vi, who intend to defend themselves. A large strike force led by Quaritch destroys the Home Tree, burning it to the ground, while killing large numbers of the tribe, despite their attempts to retaliate. Mo’at releases Jake and Grace from their bonds and pleads them to save her tribe. Eytucan is killed in the destruction, leaving Neytiri devastated. She tells Jake to stay away when he tries to comfort her.
In the chaos, Jake and Grace are sent back to their original bodies to be placed under arrest for treason, along with Norm, who tried to stop the military from disabling their avatar forms. Trudy Chacon rescues the Avatar team from prison and flies them to safety, however Grace is shot by Quaritch when he attempts to stop them from leaving the colony. The team has the camp container holding the avatar transfer pods sent near the Tree of Souls, where the remaining Omaticaya tribe has fled to safety. Jake makes his intention to redeem himself in the eyes of the Na’vi and successfully tames and controls a Great Leonopteryx, an enourmous flying creature related to the Banshee, which a Na’vi has yet to accomplish in 4 generations, since Neytiri's grandfather's grandfather. Jake makes a plea to Mo’at to save Grace from dying. This is done by trying to have her consciousness transferred permanently to her avatar form, using the Tree of Souls, before her human body expires. However, it is too late, as Grace is too weak to be transferred. Before she passes away, she tells Jake that she’s seen Eywa and the holy entity does exist.
Following Grace's death, he asks Tsu’Tey, who has been made clan leader, and the entire tribe to stand with him and face the humans. Having earned back the tribe’s trust, Jake makes plans to join with other clans to strike back at the human forces. Surveying the Na’vi, Quaritch learns that other clans have converged with the Omaticaya at the Tree of Souls and decides to destroy them and their holy ground to put an end to their defiance once and for all. A huge military fleet commandeered by Quaritch approach the Tree of Souls, beginning the Assault on the Tree of Souls. Thousands of Na’vi warriors led by Jake and Tsu’Tey take to the skies and attack the fleet, causing huge losses on both sides. Neytiri is knocked off her Banshee and flees the military ground forces, while Norm’s avatar is shot and injured, forcing him to jump back to his original body and continue the fight as a human. Tsu’Tey makes a valiant attempt to take down the shuttle carrying the explosives, but is killed in the process. Trudy makes a valiant attempt to protect Jake from Quaritch's Dragon, but is outgunned and killed.
When all things seem bleak, the native wildlife of Pandora strikes back in force, seemingly responding to Jake's earlier plea to Eywa for help. The ground and aerial troops are scattered by the wildlife, while the shuttle carrying the explosives is destroyed before it reaches the Tree of Souls. Neytiri hitches a ride on a Thanator. Jake manages to bring down Quaritch’s ship, but the colonel manages to get into his AMP mech and escape the ship’s destruction. Finding the camp containing the avatar pods by chance, Quaritch attempts to destroy Jake’s body but Neytiri and her Thanator attack him. However, Quaritch kills the Thanator with his AMP and is about to kill Neytiri when Jake arrives to challenge him. After a short fight, Jake destroys the AMP’s life support and canopy but is caught in the mech’s grip. Neytiri saves Jake by planting two arrows into Quaritch’s chest, killing the colonel. The camp is damaged during Quaritch's attack and leaks deadly Pandora air, leaving Jake's human body almost dying from the poisonous gas until Neytiri helps him put on his exopack. Having put an end to the military’s attack, the Na’vi round up the remaining humans to be sent back to Earth, never to return, while allowing a select group to stay with them on Pandora, which includes Jake, Norm, the avatar team and RDA defecters. Jake decides to stay in his avatar form forever, and concludes his final entry log of his experiences on his birthday. Returning to the Tree of Souls, he undergoes the consciousness transfer from his human body to his avatar form, and awakens to a new life as a Na'vi.
In 1994, director James Cameron wrote a 80-page scriptment for Avatar, reportedly in just two weeks. In August 1996, Cameron announced that after completing Titanic, he would film Avatar, which would make use of synthetic, or computer-generated, actors.The project would cost $100 million and involve at least six actors in leading roles "who appear to be real but do not exist in the physical world". Visual effects house Digital Domain, with whom Cameron has a partnership, joined the project, which was supposed to begin production in the summer of 1997 for a 1999 release. However, Cameron felt that the technology had not caught up with the story and vision that he intended to tell. He decided to concentrate on making documentaries and refining the technology for the next few years.
In June 2005, Cameron was announced to be working on a project tentatively titled Project 880, concurrently with another project, Battle Angel. It was later revealed in a Bloomberg BusinessWeek cover story that 20th Century Fox had fronted $10 million to Cameron to film a proof-of-concept clip for Avatar, which he showed to Fox execs in October 2005. By December, Cameron said that he planned to film Battle Angel first for a mid 2007 release, and to film Project 880 for a 2009 release. In February 2006, Cameron said he had switched goals for the two film projects – Project 880 was now scheduled for 2007 and Battle Angel for 2009. He indicated that the release of Project 880 would possibly be delayed until 2008.
Later that February, Cameron revealed that Project 880 was "a retooled version of Avatar", a film that he had tried to make years earlier, citing the technological advances in the creation of the computer-generated characters Gollum, King Kong and Davy Jones. Cameron had chosen Avatar over Battle Angel after completing a five-day camera test in the previous year. Even before the announcement, Cameron's early scriptment for Avatar, which had circulated on the Internet for years, was found no longer to be available.
From January to April 2006, Cameron worked on the script and developed a culture for the film's aliens, the Na'vi. Their language was created by Dr. Paul Frommer, a linguist at USC. The Na'vi language has a vocabulary of about 1000 words, with some 30 added by Cameron. The tongue's phonemes include ejective consonants (such as the "kx" in "skxawng") that are found in the Amharic language of Ethiopia, and the initial "ng" that Cameron may have taken from New Zealand Māori. Actress Sigourney Weaver and the film's set designers met with Jodie S. Holt, professor of plant physiology at UC Riverside, to learn about the methods used by botanists to study and sample plants, and to discuss ways to explain the communication between Pandora's organisms depicted in the film.
In July 2006, Cameron announced that he would film Avatar for a mid 2008 release and planned to begin principal photography with an established cast by February 2007. The following August, the visual effects studio Weta Digital signed on to help Cameron produce Avatar. Stan Winston, who had collaborated with Cameron in the past, joined Avatar to help with the film's designs. Production design for the film took several years. The film had two different production designers, and two separate art departments, one of which focused on the flora and fauna of Pandora, and another that created human machines and human factors.
In September 2006, Cameron was announced to be using his own Reality Camera System to film in 3-D. The system would use two high-definition cameras in a single camera body to create depth perception.
Meanwhile, while all this preparation was going on, Fox was wavering because of its painful experience with cost overruns and delays on Cameron's last picture, Titanic, even though Cameron rewrote Avatar's script to combine several characters together and offered to cut his fee in case the film flopped. Cameron installed a traffic light with the amber signal lit outside of co-producer Jon Landau's office to represent the film's uncertain future. In mid-2006, Fox told Cameron "in no uncertain terms that they were passing on this film," so he began shopping it around to other studios, and showed his proof-of-concept to Dick Cook (then chairman of The Walt Disney Company). However, when Disney attempted to take over, Fox exercised its right of first refusal. In October 2006, Fox finally agreed to commit to making Avatar after Ingenious Media agreed to back the film, which reduced Fox's financial exposure to less than half of the film's official $237 million budget. After Fox accepted Avatar, Cameron and Landau switched the traffic light to green.
In December 2006, Cameron described Avatar as "a futuristic tale set on a planet 200 years hence ... an old-fashioned jungle adventure with an environmental conscience that aspires to a mythic level of storytelling". The January 2007 press release described the film: "Avatar is also an emotional journey of redemption and revolution. It is the story of a wounded former Marine, thrust unwillingly into an effort to settle and exploit an exotic planet rich in biodiversity, who eventually crosses over to lead the indigenous race in a battle for survival," and "We're creating an entire world, a complete ecosystem of phantasmagorical plants and creatures, and a native people with a rich culture and language."
Estimates put the cost of the film at about $280–310 million to produce and an estimated $150 million for marketing, noting that about $30 million in tax credits will lessen the financial impact on the studio and its financiers. However, a studio spokesperson, speaking with film website The Wrap, said that the budget "is $237 million, with $150 million for promotion, end of story".
Avatar is primarily an action-adventure journey of self-discovery, in the context of imperialism and biodiversity.Cameron said his inspiration was "every single science fiction book I read as a kid", and that he was particularly striving to update the style of Edgar Rice Burroughs's John Carter series. The director has acknowledged that Avatar shares themes with the films At Play in the Fields of the Lord and The Emerald Forest, which feature clashes between cultures and civilizations, and that the film shares connections with Dances With Wolves, where a battered soldier finds himself drawn to the culture he was initially fighting against.
In a 2007 interview with Time magazine, Cameron was asked about the meaning of the term avatar, to which he replied, "It's an incarnation of one of the Hindu gods taking a flesh form. In this film what that means is that the human technology in the future is capable of injecting a human's intelligence into a remotely located body, a biological body."
The look of the Na'vi—the humanoids indigenous to Pandora—was inspired by a dream that Cameron's mother had, long before he started work on Avatar. In her dream, she saw a twelve-foot-tall blue-skinned woman, which he thought was "kind of a cool image". He included similar creatures in his first screenplay (written in 1976 or 1977), which featured a planet with a native population of "gorgeous" tall blue aliens. These later became the basis for the Na'vi. On the specific reason for the choice of blue as their skin color, Cameron said "I just like blue. It's a good color ... plus, there's a connection to the Hindu deities, which I like conceptually."
For the film's floating "Hallelujah Mountains", the designers drew inspiration from "many different types of mountains, but mainly the karst limestone formations in China." When Cameron was asked if he got the idea for the floating mountains from an album cover of the rock band Yes, he replied with a laugh, "It might have been ... Back in my pot-smoking days."
To create the interiors of the human mining colony on Pandora, production designers visited the Noble Clyde Boudreauxdrilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico during June 2007. They photographed, measured and filmed every aspect of the rig, which was later replicated on-screen with photorealistic CGI during post-production.
For the love story between characters Jake and Neytiri, Cameron applied a star-crossed love theme, and acknowledged its similarity to the pairing of Jack and Rose from his film Titanic. Both couples come from radically different cultures that are contemptuous of their relationship and are forced to choose sides between the competing communities. "They both fall in love with each other, but they need to fight side-by-side, and so there's that kind of requirement to let the other person go in order to do what you need to do, which is kind of interesting," said Cameron. He felt that whether or not the Jake and Neytiri love story would be perceived as believable partially hinged on Neytiri's attractiveness. "So the physiological differences—the more alien we make them in the design phase, we just kept asking ourselves—basically, the crude version is: 'Well, would you wanna do it?'" stated Cameron. The all-male crew of artists were used to perfect the Na'vi attractiveness. Though Cameron felt Jake and Neytiri do not fall in love right away, Worthington and Saldana, the characters' portrayers, disagreed. Cameron said Worthington and Saldana "had a great chemistry" during filming.
At Comic Con 2009, Cameron told attendees that he wanted to make "something that has this spoonful of sugar of all the action and the adventure and all that". He wanted this to thrill him "as a fan" but also have a conscience "that maybe in the enjoying of it makes you think a little bit about the way you interact with nature and your fellow man". He added that "the Na'vi represent something that is our higher selves, or our aspirational selves, what we would like to think we are" and that even though there are good humans within the film, the humans "represent what we know to be the parts of ourselves that are trashing our world and maybe condemning ourselves to a grim future".
Cameron acknowledges that Avatar implicitly criticizes America's role in the War in Iraq and the impersonal nature of mechanized warfare in general. In reference to the use of the term shock and awe in the film, Cameron said, "We know what it feels like to launch the missiles. We don't know what it feels like for them to land on our home soil, not in America." He said in a later interview, "The film is definitely not anti-American." A scene in the film portrays the violent destruction of the towering Na'vi Hometree, which collapses in flames after a missile attack, coating the landscape with ash and floating embers. Asked about the scene's resemblance to the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, Cameron said he had been "surprised at how much it did look like September 11".
Principal photography for Avatar began in April 2007, and was done around parts of Los Angeles as well as New Zealand. Cameron described the film as a hybrid with a full live-action shoot in combination with computer-generated characters and live environments. "Ideally at the end of the day the audience has no idea which they're looking at," Cameron said. The director indicated that he had already worked four months on nonprincipal scenes for the film. The live action was shot with a modified version of the proprietary digital 3-D Fusion Camera System, developed by Cameron and Vince Pace. In January 2007, Fox had announced that 3-D filming for Avatar would be done at 24 frames per second despite Cameron's strong opinion that a 3-D film requires higher frame rate to make strobing less noticeable. According to Cameron, the film is composed of 60% computer-generated elements and 40% live action, as well as traditional miniatures. Motion-capture photography would last 31 days at the Hughes Aircraft stage in Playa Vista, Los Angeles, California. In October, Cameron was scheduled to shoot live-action in New Zealand for another 31 days. More than a thousand people worked on the production. In preparation of the filming sequences, all of the actors underwent professional training specific to their characters such as archery, horseback riding, firearms, and hand to hand combat. They also received language and dialect training in the Na'vi language created for the film. Prior to shooting the film, Cameron also sent the cast to the jungle in Hawaii to get a feel for a rainforest setting before shooting on the soundstage.
During filming, Cameron made use of his virtual camera system, a new way of directing motion-capture filmmaking. The system displays an augmented reality on a monitor, placing the actor's virtual counterparts into their digital surroundings in real time, allowing the director to adjust and direct scenes just as if shooting live action. According to Cameron, "It's like a big, powerful game engine. If I want to fly through space, or change my perspective, I can. I can turn the whole scene into a living miniature and go through it on a 50 to 1 scale." Using conventional techniques, the complete virtual world cannot be seen until the motion-capture of the actors is complete. Cameron described the system as a "form of pure creation where if you want to move a tree or a mountain or the sky or change the time of day, you have complete control over the elements". Cameron gave fellow directors Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson a chance to test the new technology. Spielberg and George Lucas were also able to visit the set to watch Cameron direct with the equipment.
To film the shots where CGI interacts with live action, a unique camera referred to as a "simulcam" was used, a merger of the 3-D fusion camera and the virtual camera systems. While filming live action in real time with the simulcam, the CGI images captured with the virtual camera or designed from scratch, are superimposed over the live action images and shown on a small monitor, making it possible for the director to instruct the actors how to relate to the virtual material in the scene.
A number of revolutionary visual effects techniques were used in the production of Avatar. According to Cameron, work on the film had been delayed since the 1990s to allow the techniques to reach the necessary degree of advancement to adequately portray his vision of the film. The director planned to make use of photorealistic computer-generated characters, created using new motion-capture animation technologies he had been developing in the 14 months leading up to December 2006.
Innovations include "The Volume", a motion-capture stage six times larger than any previously used, and an improved method of capturing facial expressions, enabling full performance capture. To achieve the face capturing, actors wore individually made skull caps fitted with a tiny camera positioned in front of the actors' faces; the information collected about their facial expressions and eyes is then transmitted to computers. According to Cameron, the method allows the filmmakers to transfer 100% of the actors' physical performances to their digital counterparts. Besides the performance capture data which were transferred directly to the computers, numerous reference cameras gave the digital artists multiple angles of each performance. Richard Baneham, an animation supervisor for the film, noted one scene in particular that presented a unique challenge for his crew and said, “There’s a moment at the end of the movie when Jake is picked up by Neytiri, and we finally see Jake as a human and Neytiri as a Na’vi, and they interact. That you have a live action character and a CG character actually touching is a huge deal. We were invested to the point where the right amount of shadow was cast, including the right amount of bounce light from the human character reacting on the Na’vi’s skin.”
Digital effects rendering was performed at Weta Digital's data centre in Wellington, New Zealand. The 10,000-square foot server farm makes use of 4,000 Hewlett-Packard servers, and occupies the 193 spot in the TOP500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers. Creating the virtual world of Pandora required over a petabyte of digital storage. Each minute of the final footage for Avatar occupied 17.28 gigabytes of storage. To help finish preparing the special effects sequences on time, Industrial Light & Magic was brought on board, working alongside Weta Digital to create the battle sequences. Joe Letteri was the visual effect general supervisor.
Composer James Horner scored the film, his third collaboration with Cameron after Aliens and Titanic. Horner recorded parts of the score with a small chorus singing in the alien language Na'vi in March 2008. He also worked with Wanda Bryant, an ethnomusicologist, to create a music culture for the alien race. The first scoring sessions were planned to take place in Spring 2009. Horner composed the score as two different scores merged into one. He first created a score that reflected the Na'vi way of sound and then combined it with a separate "traditional" score to drive the film.British singer Leona Lewis was chosen to sing the theme song for the film, called "I See You". An accompanying music video, directed by Jake Nava, premiered December 15, 2009, on MySpace.