Monday, December 21, 2009

Avatar - the movie

Firstly WOW!

Avatar is an amazing movie, the attention to detail is immense. I mean they production team created not just a world, a language and a culture from scratch but they immerse you into this place called Pandora from the start. There is a short no intro to the story form the main character but the rest you learn as the movie unfolds.

I have tried to leave any big story line bits out of this, but if you haven't seen the film, trust me it is good and stop reading now until you have seen it.

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Some small things I think made the movie;
- Real pandorians have 3 fingers, human avatar clones have 4 (guessing its because of the genetic mix)
- Every breathing animals breathes through openings on their body, not through their mouths
The Hallelujah mountians.... cool (glad to see earth physics doesn't have to follow humans around the universe)
- The big tree - it is BIG, I mean BIG
- The scene where 'Jack' walks for the first time.
- Sigourney Weavers Avatar was 6 yrs younger than anyone elses as hers was the first to be created

A couple of things that got missed during the edit;
- One of the human avatars gets killed then appears in the closing sequence?
- Where humans can and cant breathe the 'air' on Pandora needed to be explained a little as sometimes they could other times they needed breathing masks.


My thoughts;
Okay I did think having an 'Aussie' with a blue face getting the crowds riled up to go to war was a little too braveheart, but who cares really at that point of the film you are so immersed in the story that it does not matter. But maybe as a kiwi I am biased.

The story behind Avatar is not a brilliant one, however if any more time was spent on explaining this and that it would never have got finished and would have ended up a bit like The Lord of the Rings films - a lot of film for a single story - keeping everything in one film was a big project on its own, I wonder how much footage we will get in the directors cut?

So many times during the film I found myself going 'cool' or 'wow' or 'awesome'. I realise it is being pencilled in as the most expensive film of all time and I dont care if it is because you get to see all of the money being spent. In every scene there is something hapening on the edge of the shot, moving, changing colour.
I am a geek but even the computer termail workstations in the human complex with their curved translucent touch/hologram screen were cool - and unlike other SciFi films you can see these being built soon with the current technology we have now.

Okay Avatar is set in 50-60 years in the future, but all of the cool military kit would fit in now to our world now, it was all 'petrol' powered, it looked real and sounded real, it fired bullets, not laser beams etc.

Avatar had some amazing scenes, but everything was so (and I say it again) immersive that you had no problems believing that what was happening on the screen wasn't impossible.
The film has something for everyone, even the girls get a hidden chick flick romance in the background. For the guys there is a bit of "murder, death, kill" and the kids get cool plants animals and ofcourse loads of blue people.

All in all an amazing film that I will happily see again, probably in 3D.

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