A paraplegic ex-marine war veteran is sent to establish a human settlement on the distant planet of Pandora, only to find himself battling humankind alongside the planet’s indigenous Na’vi race in this ambitious digital 3-D sci-fi epic from Academy Award-winning Titanic director James Cameron.

The film, which marks Cameron’s first dramatic feature since 1997’s Titanic, will be shot on the proprietary FUSION digital 3-D cameras developed by Cameron in collaboration with Vince Pace, and will offer a groundbreaking mix of live-action dramatic performances and computer-generated effects. Australian actor Sam Worthington stars as the reluctant human settler, Jake Sully, with actress Zoe Saldana signing on to portray the local woman who enters into a romantic affair with the hero.

The revolutionary motion-capture system created for the film allows the facial expressions of actors to be captured as a virtual camera system enables them to see what their computer-generated counterparts will be seeing in the film, and Peter Jackson’s Oscar-winning Weta Digital visual-effects house has been hired to supervise Avatar’s complex visual effects. Joel Moore, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang, and Michelle Rodriguez round out the cast.

Tags: Joel Moore, Michelle Rodriguez, Sam Worthington, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang, Zoe Saldana