Short ass post: I really fricking liked it.
Long ass post with potential spoilers: The imagery is rich and lush and beautiful. The world (moon?) of Pandora was as real as any alien planet has ever been. It feels like a real place, populated with real people and with the 3d, you really do feel like you're there.
I have seen one other movie in 3d, Coraline, and I thought it was used to great effect there, but in Avatar, it's a whole new level of immersion. The bugs that Darth mentioned really do feel like they're buzzing around your head. It feels like the leaves of the jungle should be brushing against your face as the camera moves through the jungle. In fact, it's so impressive that it actually feels like it's breaking immersion when the leaves don't brush your cheeks!
Another effect that just blew me away and was super subtle: looking through windows. There were lots of shots through windows looking out onto Pandora, or through canopies of helicopters or big mechas and the glass would have finger (or whatever) smudges on it. And they just made it feel like the glass was right there in front of you. It felt like you could move your head slightly to see the details slightly obscured by these smudges. Pretty cool.
I saw it on an IMAX screen and it was pretty nuts. The screen takes up almost your entire peripheral vision, so there's nothing between you and the bad guy breathing down your neck! I actually felt the same sense of vertigo that the character on screen does at one point (in the director-intended way, not in the 3d-makes-you-nauseous way) when the character runs out onto a log and sees the beautiful world all around below him. The character gets dizzy for a second and you feel it. I thought for a sec that I was slipping over the edge off the log and moved a foot to catch myself.
And the CG is fantastic. As has been said, the aliens look amazingly life like. You do forget that you're watching a character made up of polygons. The Na'vi become real to you. Especially Uhura, who is gorgeous and finely acted to boot. The other alien animals are similarly believable and life-like.
As for the story, yeah, it's essentially Dances With Wolves/Pocahontas, but it's told in such a way that it feels fresh. (And isn't that how story telling works? Aren't there only really nine stories told again and again?) Moreover, Cameron does a great job at making you deeply care for the characters, and not just the characters, the entire civilization he has built. When you see the bad humans mercilessly crushing the poor innocent Na'vi, you feel gutted. And you really do worry about the characters making it through this.
And more importantly, it's fun. It's fun to watch the coming of age tests as Sully becomes a Na'vi man. It's fun to watch the big battle and action scenes. And it's even fun to learn how the different flora and fauna of Pandora work together. The ending is very cool, and I'm looking forward to the inevitable sequels that Cameron is already planning (and promising won't take so long to make).
On the 3D, though, I was getting a bit of a headache throughout the whole movie. I didn't have a problem with Coraline, so I suspect it was because I watched this in IMAX. Here's my big problem with 3D movies:
When you look around in real life, you focus your eyes on whatever you're looking on without even thinking about it. Anything substantially closer or further away than what you're focused on becomes blurred in your peripheral vision.
When a director makes a movie, he choses what to focus on and what will remain blurred in the foreground/background. Your eyes don't mind because they only have to focus on the screen and don't have to change focus.
But when you watch a movie in 3D, your eyes think they can focus on the different things at different depths (and you can! Changing the focal distance of your eyes brings certain parts of the stereoscopic image into line.) however, even if you do that, the part of the image that you're focusing on may not be in focus because the director may be focused on something else. So if you try to focus on, say, a background piece of jungle (which is hard not to do, since you want to soak up all the details of this world) you wind up just focusing a blurred image, which makes your eyes think that they're still not focused even though they are.
And you couple that with the movie changing between a closeup of a characters face and a wide shot of some action, your eyes no longer have to just move across the screen to look at the portion of the image that the director has focused on like in a regular 2D movie, you have to also find the right focal distance for your eyes to view the new scene. And it could change each time there's a cut between shots. It takes a while to adjust to, and then gets tiring and gave me a bit of a headache. (Though again, it may not have been such a problem on a non-imax screen)
Luckily the film was so enjoyable it distracted me from the slight throbbing beneath my right eye.
All in all, I can't wait to see this movie again, and I'm really sad that it will be very unlikely that I'll find the time to get out to see in in a theater again because it really is a film that should be seen in the theater. So, instead, I need to save my money for a sweet HDTV and bluray player! 'Cause damn!
Fine film. Loved it. Would recommend.
Long ass post with potential spoilers: The imagery is rich and lush and beautiful. The world (moon?) of Pandora was as real as any alien planet has ever been. It feels like a real place, populated with real people and with the 3d, you really do feel like you're there.
I have seen one other movie in 3d, Coraline, and I thought it was used to great effect there, but in Avatar, it's a whole new level of immersion. The bugs that Darth mentioned really do feel like they're buzzing around your head. It feels like the leaves of the jungle should be brushing against your face as the camera moves through the jungle. In fact, it's so impressive that it actually feels like it's breaking immersion when the leaves don't brush your cheeks!
Another effect that just blew me away and was super subtle: looking through windows. There were lots of shots through windows looking out onto Pandora, or through canopies of helicopters or big mechas and the glass would have finger (or whatever) smudges on it. And they just made it feel like the glass was right there in front of you. It felt like you could move your head slightly to see the details slightly obscured by these smudges. Pretty cool.
I saw it on an IMAX screen and it was pretty nuts. The screen takes up almost your entire peripheral vision, so there's nothing between you and the bad guy breathing down your neck! I actually felt the same sense of vertigo that the character on screen does at one point (in the director-intended way, not in the 3d-makes-you-nauseous way) when the character runs out onto a log and sees the beautiful world all around below him. The character gets dizzy for a second and you feel it. I thought for a sec that I was slipping over the edge off the log and moved a foot to catch myself.
And the CG is fantastic. As has been said, the aliens look amazingly life like. You do forget that you're watching a character made up of polygons. The Na'vi become real to you. Especially Uhura, who is gorgeous and finely acted to boot. The other alien animals are similarly believable and life-like.
As for the story, yeah, it's essentially Dances With Wolves/Pocahontas, but it's told in such a way that it feels fresh. (And isn't that how story telling works? Aren't there only really nine stories told again and again?) Moreover, Cameron does a great job at making you deeply care for the characters, and not just the characters, the entire civilization he has built. When you see the bad humans mercilessly crushing the poor innocent Na'vi, you feel gutted. And you really do worry about the characters making it through this.
And more importantly, it's fun. It's fun to watch the coming of age tests as Sully becomes a Na'vi man. It's fun to watch the big battle and action scenes. And it's even fun to learn how the different flora and fauna of Pandora work together. The ending is very cool, and I'm looking forward to the inevitable sequels that Cameron is already planning (and promising won't take so long to make).
On the 3D, though, I was getting a bit of a headache throughout the whole movie. I didn't have a problem with Coraline, so I suspect it was because I watched this in IMAX. Here's my big problem with 3D movies:
When you look around in real life, you focus your eyes on whatever you're looking on without even thinking about it. Anything substantially closer or further away than what you're focused on becomes blurred in your peripheral vision.
When a director makes a movie, he choses what to focus on and what will remain blurred in the foreground/background. Your eyes don't mind because they only have to focus on the screen and don't have to change focus.
But when you watch a movie in 3D, your eyes think they can focus on the different things at different depths (and you can! Changing the focal distance of your eyes brings certain parts of the stereoscopic image into line.) however, even if you do that, the part of the image that you're focusing on may not be in focus because the director may be focused on something else. So if you try to focus on, say, a background piece of jungle (which is hard not to do, since you want to soak up all the details of this world) you wind up just focusing a blurred image, which makes your eyes think that they're still not focused even though they are.
And you couple that with the movie changing between a closeup of a characters face and a wide shot of some action, your eyes no longer have to just move across the screen to look at the portion of the image that the director has focused on like in a regular 2D movie, you have to also find the right focal distance for your eyes to view the new scene. And it could change each time there's a cut between shots. It takes a while to adjust to, and then gets tiring and gave me a bit of a headache. (Though again, it may not have been such a problem on a non-imax screen)
Luckily the film was so enjoyable it distracted me from the slight throbbing beneath my right eye.
All in all, I can't wait to see this movie again, and I'm really sad that it will be very unlikely that I'll find the time to get out to see in in a theater again because it really is a film that should be seen in the theater. So, instead, I need to save my money for a sweet HDTV and bluray player! 'Cause damn!
Fine film. Loved it. Would recommend.
but he's not alone in liking the interface! Hopefully you'll like it too Crimson!
