fter we build expectations due frenzied hype campaign in recent months and beautiful trailers , last night we had the chance to watch the “grand-daddy” of all event movies on the big screen in IMAX 3D. In Italy Avatar was distributed later than other countries who know why (?). We were unprepared for the enormity of the technical and artistic achievement this film represents. Director James Cameron, who was one of the pioneers in the age of hyper-realistic CGI with Terminator 2 and The Abyss – and who was also responsible for Titanic, has spent the last ten years working on his latest film, Avatar. Filmed using a raft of new 3D technologies and a 70-30 mix of CGI with live action, Avatar is the story of Jake Scully, a paraplegic marine posted to a base on a faraway planet full of dragons, floating mountains, bizarre creatures and sexy, blue, 9-foot-tall aliens.
By linking up with an ‘Avatar,’ his consciousness is transported into the body of one of these Na’vi aliens and he’s able to experience the magical planet through and interact with the natives. In order to bring planet Pandora to life, Cameron had to overcome a series of technical and logistic challenges – for starters, he had to evangelize the very concept of 3D to a cinema world that had dismissed 3D as a cheesy relic of the 1950s.
He had to develop a portable and mobile camera system that could film stereoscopically without interfering too much in the filmmaking process. Then, he had to work out how to bring the gigantic scope of his vision to life using cutting-edge CGI. But most importantly, he had to work out how to integrate his human actors’ performances with the CGI elements in a way the felt real and avoided the clunky CG character flaws of, say, a Jar Jar Binks – and do it all in 3D. The solution was pure technical genius. Cameron and his team designed a “virtual camera” system that processed the motion capture actors and backgrounds in real time, so that Cameron could watch and direct the CGI action more or less the way the audience would see it, even as a scene was being filmed.
Facial motion capture technology was also developed to record every nuance of the live actors’ performances, with additional cameras fitted to the mo-cap actors’ skull caps in order to perfectly grab the eye, mouth and facial wrinkle motions that carry so much weight when it comes to building realistic CG characters. With facial capture recorded separately to the rest of the motion capture, it was also possible to re-do bits of dialogue or facial acting after the main scene had been filmed. The results are absolutely staggering.
The strength of Cameron’s vision for this film, his intense attention to the tiny details and the brilliance of his artistic team make Pandora a hugely believable world. The visuals are far and away the most staggering thing I’ve ever witnessed, and the use of 3D adds immeasurably, transporting you into each scene in a way that simply redefines immersion. The big stuff – the phenomenal sky battles, the floating mountains, the gundam suits, dragons and massive Pandoran beasts, blew my mind.
The tiny details, like the spinning insects, the floating ash and flying dirt, were almost as stunning. But the indoor shots in the human world were some of the most immersive, placing you right there in the command room with its awesome holographic displays. The characters and some of the dialogue have a fairly strong whiff of cheese and ham about them, the plot gets a little obvious and the environmental/harmony with nature message could be seen as preachy, but the overall experience of this movie had me gasping in pure awe.
The gigantic IMAX screen can be just too big for some 2D movies – for Avatar, it’s absolutely perfect .We don’t think you could have the same experience watching it on your lounge room plasma… Congratulations, Mr. Cameron. You said you’d deliver a movie that would revolutionize the cinema, and you have.
ith its North American box office receipts at $750 million and an additional $2 billion in overseas ticket sales, James Cameron’s Avatar is the highest grossing film of all time.The eco-friendly sci-fi blockbuster had its share of fans and detractors, but even its biggest naysayers can’t argue that the movie’s ground-breaking visuals and remarkable 3D effects are likely to influence film-making for years to come. Even the standard DVD version of the film is saturated with color and looks marvelous on an HD screen. It is sure to be watched and re-watched by fans analyzing every scene and attempting to learn the Na’avi language. Unfortunately other than a 30-second anti-smoking commercial, the newly released Avatar DVD is devoid of even a single bonus feature other than subtitles and audio tracks in English and Spanish, and an additional French audio track. For a movie that was years in the making, the lack of even a single special feature is unforgiveable. While numerous special edition Avatar DVDs jam-packed with extras are likely to hit the shelves at Best Buy for years to come, refusing to include any extras at all on the film’s initial DVD release shows a complete lack of respect for the film’s tens of millions of fans. While the Oscar-nominated Avatar is a spectacular visual effects extravaganza, the complete lack of bonus features drops this DVD’s ranking from a B+ to a D rating. You’re better off borrowing or renting this DVD and saving your hard-earned money for a future version that’ll undoubtedly give you a wealth of commentary tracks, deleted scenes, making cast interviews.
