Movie Review: James Cameron’s AVATAR in IMAX 3D
Thank you Lord for blessing humans with creativity, the technology to make it happen, and my eyesight to see it.
I don’t know how the movie would look in a regular screening, but getting one of the best seats in the IMAX theater and enjoying the movie like it was envisioned in Cameron’s mind is something truly extraordinary. I feared that I may have been too over-hyped about the movie given the buzz surrounding it, but believe you me I have read nothing on the movie and have had it, for a long while, mixed up with Avatar The Last Airbender movie, coming out later.
So yes, you could say that I was entering the movie knowing that it was in 3D and that it featured blue people.
And I was SHOCKED!
I need to get this out of the way: though the IMAX gigantic screen really did help in the immersion into the movie, like all other movies shown in 3D (IMAX or not) there is this general fuzziness and softness to textures that degrade the quality (if you’ve seen it and seen the trailer below, you’d know what I am talking about).
Still, a loss in quality was a small price to pay, for it is a beautiful world of the Navi-inhabited Pandora that Cameron created, too beautiful to not allow yourself to be sucked in. To thoroughly enjoy the movie you either need to be a tree hugger or truly let go of rationality. And unlike many sci fi flicks out there, the characters that are out of place are the humans. Avatar’s world is rich in history, nature, lore, culture, and even language. It is blatantly apparent that a lot of effort has been put into the realization of the world, yet at the same time you do get the gut feeling that some stuff had to be cut out to fit the movie, like the Lord of the Rings flicks.
What’s beautiful about the movie is that it takes everything ordinary and turns it into extraordinary. Lots of rituals, beliefs, animals, plants and landscape exist in reality and are recognizable in the movie, but they’ve been made into truly magical elements.
The overarching story could become preachy at times, and there are many subtexts you can indulge in (terrorism, invasion of other countries, colonialism, the whole mother Earth narrative), however, the face-value story isn’t something that has not been done before, even the tribal wars and the inter-species love stories. What accentuates the typical, however, is the immersive magical world that makes everything endearing and breathtaking. As for the acting – thankfully most of the movie focuses on the animated Navi, which animated beautifully, and the human counterparts do a pretty good job, with Sigourney Weaver throwing in dry humor here and there typical of her Alien experience. Worthington’s Terminator experience helped with the grunt work too.
If there’s anything to say to people who are to see it, the movie is about the experience, much like the Matrix and Lord of the Rings when they came out. You can read into the story as deep as you want, but like the previously mentioned movies, it’s the experience that will keep you talking for a long time to come.
Now enjoy the HD trailer!
