James Cameron offers what may be the most exotic planet full of aliens ever put on film in his sci-fi epic “Avatar.” Yet if and when humans do meet creatures from other worlds, they'll be unimaginably more far-out than anything Hollywood can dream up, Cameron said. “It'll be much beyond what we can imagine,” said Cameron, whose “Avatar” opened big this weekend with $232 million worldwide. “There are creatures right on Earth that are absolutely amazing, and all the aliens are already here, if you look at a small-enough scale or you look under the ocean.” “Avatar” tells the story of a human, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), who takes on the form of the Na'vi, 10-foot-tall (3-meter-tall) blue creatures that are the dominant species on the distant moon Pandora. Jake goes native, becoming a warrior in a Na'vi clan and falling for Na'vi huntress Neytiri (Zoe Saldana). With pointed ears, huge eyes and tails, the Na'vi are anything but human. Yet like most extraterrestrials created by Hollywood, they still have a general humanoid form, two eyes, ears, arms and legs, a nose and mouth, smiles, grimaces and facial expressions we all can recognize. “We looked at designs for the Na'vi that initially were much more alien,” Cameron said. “When we would draw Neytiri and she had fins on her back and gills and all kinds of weird protuberances and so on in odd places, the question was, well, would you want to do her? No? OK, let's back off from that. ... We just didn't want to take it so far that she had kind of a fish mouth or anything.” Along with blue skin and tails, the alienness of the Na'vi was conveyed largely through differences in scale. “When I write the novel of `Avatar,' which I'm going to do as soon as the dust clears on the film release, I'm going to deal with the issue of why they look so much like us. Because there needs to be an overarching explanation of that, which I have.”
