Avatar,One Of A Kind Movie

Written By: mike on September 23, 2010 No Comment

Avatar is one of those films that comes along once every blue moon and changes the future of Cinema. Sure, the story is nothing new. Dances With Smurfs. Pocahontas in Space. Insert your favorite pop-culture comparison here. The reluctant hero must abandon his attachment to evil civilization and protect the natives that he falls in love with. It’s a cookie cutter tale. A formula to get people in the seats: and boy-oh-boy do we get in the seats. Avatar made $2.7 billion worldwide. That’s a whole lot of butts in chairs.

How much money it made, however, is not what makes this film so important. Musical Score? Not really. Phenomenal dialogue?? Can’t say it was phenomenal. Then what’s the big deal? Oh, it must be the talent: brilliant performances from ever-so-brilliant actors? Ehhhhh, the performances were fine. Nothing spectacular unless you consider actress Zoe Saldana, who spends the whole film as a motion capture animated giant blue alien. The fact that she made me actually care about her gives her props as an actor in my book! Sigourney Weaver is a little forced, and Sam Worthington plays the hardened hero well enough although the word “lackluster” definitely comes to mind. Unfortunately, the performances just really aren’t something to go crazy about.

Hmmm…it must be the direction then! James Cameron, veteran filmmaker, rockin’ it out with the most ambitious project he’s undertaken. I’m there with you on that for the most part. This film took him 4 years to make from start to production end. To be able to keep his vision going full force that entire time takes skills. Mad skills. The impressive part about James Cameron, however, has to do with the main reason that I feel like this movie is so darn important, which I will get to shortly.

James Cameron created new technology for this film. He created new ways of motion capture, new cameras, new 3D technology. He made it possible for himself to bring his vision to actualization. He obviously had teams upon teams working for him but it was his vision ultimately. He wrote it. He developed it. He directed it. When I went and saw this film I did not see it as just a movie, but a full, immersive experience. The technology he created made it possible for him to do that. Which brings me to why I think Avatar will change the future of filmmaking. It comes down to two words:

Uncanny Valley. “What the hell does that mean?” you might ask. Well, allow me enlighten you. The basic concept of the Uncanny Valley is that there is a time when visual fx bring something to a point where it is “too realistic” and when that happens human beings reject it. Technology has made things very true to real life and when it gets past a certain point of being too true, the human mind can’t take it. Its just too weird.

What Cameron did is he crossed this Valley and took Visual FX to a place past the point of being creepy and weird. Everything looks completely real in his world: the Na’vi people, Pandora’s creatures, plant life, everything. With Avatar the viewer is never creeped out, nothing ever looks half real. It all works within James Cameron’s world. This is the first time that a film has ever done this. It is a GIANT step. Now I’m just interested to see where it goes from here and how other films use it! Just hope the porn industry doesn’t get a hold of this. That could start to get a little…freaky….