Tuesday, 22 December 2009 16:16 | and posted in Features
You can be easily forgiven for thinking that claims about Avatar changing the face of cinema are merely media-hype, but wow, wow, wow is this not an overstatement. Avatar truly is the herald of a new era of cinema! An era where three dimensional movies will become the norm and where, comically, everyone in cinemas will be wearing really uncool black glasses!!
Avatar is the new movie by James Cameron (director of Titanic, Terminator 2 and Aliens). It is rumoured to be the most expensive movie ever made ($300 million) and the majority of this budget went on creating its special effects. It has been filmed using technology so ambitious that Cameron had to build it himself to create his three dimensional vision.
3D movies have been around for ages, but what makes Avatar special is that it moves 3D beyond the gimmicky approach of say Journey to the Centre of the Earth 3D (where things jump out at you at intervals) to a setup where you are immersed in the environment itself. Avatar is not about overwhelming the audience with visual spectacles, but about giving the movie heightened believability - and boy does Cameron achieve this.
It's hard to describe in words the astouding difference 3D makes to your cinematic experience! It seems a wee bit cliche to say it but you feel like you are actually there - an observer on Avatar's fictional planet, Pandora. After much thought, I've eventually put the difference down to perspective. In a normal movie you are aware of the flatness of the image you are watching - the image is undeniably different to what you see through your eyeballs in the real world.
The three dimensional effect on display throughout Avatar makes you constantly aware of perspective - it looks real! Images have height, width and depth - so much so that I experienced something akin to vertigo in several of the scenes because of the tremendous depth to the on-screen images. The whole experience is as close to a duplication of human vision as currently exists and this is why it will transform cinema.
Avatar is highly likely to become the first commercial film where the 3D version financially out-performs the 2D version and it is already paving the way for new live-action (i.e. non Disney Pixar or Dreamworks Animation) 3D movies in 2010, from Alice in Wonderland to Tron Legacy.
