Avatar

On Boxing Day i’ve used the opportunity to visit a cinema with a really good friend of mine in Oldenburg. Obviously the choice felt to Avatar. And i have to admit, that i’m really impressed. The following text may contain some spoilers, thus don’t read the rest of this text if you plan to view this movie unspoilered.
The movie contained all the ingredients of a Cameron movie: Tough women (Sigourney Weaver as a scientist and the helicopter pilot, similar to Lindsey Brigman in Abyss or Sarah Connor in Terminator 1 and 2), a sleazy corporate executive (like Carter Burke in Aliens or Kirkhill in Abyss), a badass military (like Lt. Coffee in Abyss). The aircrafts look a little bit similar to the crafts in Aliens and even the walking machine are there, too. But at this point all the common parts ended. Where Camerons other movies impressed me at their respective time, Avatar just blew me away. Do you remember the T1000 walking through the bars of in the mental asylum or the water tentacle in Abyss?). Extrapolate this to the n-th and you won’t get even near of Avatar. Of course it’s a simple story. I thought a while of a “Pocahontas on steroids”. But Avatar is much more. It’s the first time CGI enabled me to immerse into this world. It’s the first time where story had no loopholes that threw my out of immersion (and normally Hollywood is able to provide loopholes in even the simplest plot). It isn’t spoiled by a new-age concept like “Gaia” in Final Fantasy, the concept of the interconnected somewhat thinking trees sounds reasonable as far as science fiction can be reasonable (they explain it with an analogy to the brain by viewing the trees as neurons and their rootings as dendrites and axons). There are so many small things in this video, making the immersion plausible: When Jake Sully is hold back by the straps in his bed in the zero gravity of the space craft, when he digs into the soil with his toes when he can use the legs of his avatar. Just the small movements that made the romance between Neytiri and Jake plausible. Yes … a plausible and believable “falling in love” between two CGI characters (a point where even real actors and stories did fail often utterly) And then there was the 3D: It was just wow. As my left eye has priority by a vast amount over my right one looking in 3D was really hard for me but (i have to force my vision on the right eye and then trying to refocus the left eye without losing focus on my right eye) all this effects was worth the headache afterwards. It’s great to see the flies dancing, to have the impression of the depth of vision. I’ve published a list of things about the Zeros yesterday. Avatar didn’t made it to this list, not because it’s not en par with “Eternal Sunshine” but because i consider it as a film of the Tens of this century. Avatar showed us how cinema will look in the future.