Well, I have a LOT to say about this movie, but I'll keep it short....
- Excellent overall, but the story was lacking - and too predictable. I kept saying that it seemed almost smarmy, like a Disney flick, and my son later realized that it was Pocahontas.... lol
- Frankly, seeing it any way other than IMAX 3D won't do it justice.... (Sorry for/to the folks who cannot see it that way....)
- It's already made US$1B, but the entire family is going to see it again... in IMAX 3D....
- True visual eye-candy, indeed, but it's WAY more impressive to a Computer Graphics nerd that was one of the first doing "3D" wire frame graphics on green oscilloscope screens...
- You don't even KNOW how technologically advanced this project was! The resultant movie bears NONE of the true advances resulting from Cameron's tenacity! Oh sure, you see the END result on the screen, but the advances he FORCED INTO BEING to make this film are going to change the entire movie industry! (I'd really like to post links to some of the technology articles, but they're all rife with reader commentary....
Hint: Nov 2009 WIRED magazine)
- The previous point bears repeating: The Making Of This Movie Was Unlike Any Movie Ever Made Before:
* Created a 350-page
Pandorpedia [
example ] describing every aspect of the fictional planet Pandora, complete with environmental and zoological details of all life, as well as similar detail for all the human weapons, shps, vehicles, etc.
* REAL-TIME, REAL-WORLD FULL-MOTION CAPTURE of all the real-world actors in 3D motion-capture suits on 140 synchronized digital cameras on full-sized sets built inside the hangar in which Howard Hughes built the
Spruce Goose.
* Invented a new type of 3D camera system (which Sony built esp. for him) to greatly improve upon current 3D capture and delivery methods. (His idea: Trash the current "screen plane" (
related PDF technical paper) concept completely and go with a more natural, human-perception-based method.)
* Avoided "
Uncanny Valley" problems - notably those that made other CGI movies (e.g. Polar Express) - feel "creepy" to watch by filming closeup (1" away from actor's face), wide-angle, high-def moving images of all the actors' visible facial expressions - right down to their facial pores - and used them to map onto their CGI counterparts.
* Built a computer farm that put all this together IN REAL TIME, so he could watch the "post-production" footage as it was being "filmed!"
Avatar is truly a technological masterpiece that will open the door for a totally new era of visual entertainment, with production "ease" and creative flexibility heretofore only imagined.