Before I start the “review” of Avatar, I would first like to say a few things. The first is that it doesn’t matter if you like Avatar, if I like it, or if anyone else likes it; it has changed the way that movies are created and experienced forever. Regardless of what anyone says about the story, the dialogue, or James Cameron, it is a defining moment in cinema and will forever change the way that I think about and watch movies. The second is, if you have an imax theater near you playing Avatar in 3-D, you have to see it. Because of this movie and James Cameron, over 3000 theaters in the country now have 3-D screens available. Also, Cameron helped invent the technology to create 3D movies and new motion capture that was used during the creation of this movie.

A quick synopsis is; its 2154 and humans need some resource called unobtainium that is on the planet Pandora where the Na’vi (blue people) live. A bunch of scientists have been trying to become a part of the Na’vi community by going into cloned Na’vi bodies mixed with human DNA and trying to interact with them (much like “jacking in” to the matrix). The main character becomes part of their culture, fights ensue ect. ect. It’s sort of a hard movie to explain but when you see it, it makes more sense.

With that being said, I don’t know how much of an actual review this can really be. I did not “love” the movie the way that I “love” other movies. The story was average, the dialogue was not always great, and I can’t believe someone let the planet they are on be called Pandora. But it is not the movie part that is truly important here. Avatar for me, was more of an experience of seeing and becoming part of this world, the same way that the main characters in the movie are learning and experiencing Pandora. For all of the unoriginality that the story had, the care and detail that went into the creation of the world and the Na’vi (blue people) is astounding. Just little things like the language that was invented for the movie, the bugs flying around when we are first introduced into the forest of Pandora, or how every CG character in the movie has the most detailed facial expressions I’ve ever seen. So much so that half the time there did not even need to be dialogue. These are the things that make this movie great which are usually on the sideline for me.

Outside of the movie world, I have one issue with the 3-D-ness of the experience. They give out these crappy plastic 3-D glasses that they have washed 100 times, the lenses have bubbles and warp the screen a bit. In the future I think I will be looking into some high-end 3-D glasses (if they even make them yet) because I feel, much like photography, the better the lenses the better the image. There were many points while watching the movie that I could see ghosting of things on screen because of the glasses poor quality.

I had the privilege of being able to see this movie in a Jordan’s Furniture imax theater, which has tempur-pedic seats and “butt-kickers” (little sub-woofers that attach to the bottom of every seat in the theater) which make the experience that much more immersive. Despite the fact that this movie is more or less a love story with lots of pretty stuff, I came out of the movie theater wishing that I could be part of the world I had just entered into for 3 hours because it really makes you feel like it is a real place. If you have not seen this movie yet, GO SEE IT. It will forever change the way you think about movies and for that reason alone it is worth checking out.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 18th, 2010 at 12:29 pm and is filed under Movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.