Avatar

[brisk]

Cool, thanks for that brisk.

Did you see it in ReadD 3D or IMAX?

imax, back row, center-ish seats.

i'm not sure we have those other 3d cinemas in the uk. i haven't seen them anyway.

[xer0s]

Prepurchased my midnight tickets. If you're going, make sure to pick RealD 3D rather than IMAX 3D. The RealD stuff is what they just created and it supposedly blows the shit out of IMAX.

How exactly does RealD 3D blow away IMAX?

[plained]

its a technique i think

like layering in ur varios highly detailed deapths of fiels over each other

theni'dsurmize thoselayers are movedwithin the frame in a x y z way tosimulate reallness dureing the camera thearactics.

who knows with the glasses shpiel,offetting in someway?

[werldhed]

lol at the ostentatiously skeptical stupidity in this thread.

Yes, it's Dances With Ferngully, but it's also James Cameron, so for every glowing blue bestiality scene there's going to be a vicious fucking gunfight.

I'm as cynical as the rest of you when it comes to movies but seeing as Avatar is solidly in the pluses on RottenTomatoes, I bought my tickets last night.

Perhaps, but it has the same score as Titanic. Which is, of course, a big pile of shit.

[bitWISE]

Prepurchased my midnight tickets. If you're going, make sure to pick RealD 3D rather than IMAX 3D. The RealD stuff is what they just created and it supposedly blows the shit out of IMAX.

How exactly does RealD 3D blow away IMAX?

Someone on the internet supposedly saw Avatar prescreened in both formats and said the RealD was far better.

[bitWISE]

http://hd.engadget.com/2009/12/16/ask-e ... r-the-bes/
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1085037

[GONNAFISTYA]

List of movies - released and upcoming - using RealD 3D tech (from RealD 3D's wikipedia page):

Released:
* Chicken Little (November 3, 2005)
* Monster House (July 21, 2006)
* The Nightmare Before Christmas (October 20, 2006, October 19, 2007, October 24, 2008, October 23, 2009)
* Meet the Robinsons (March 30, 2007)
* Beowulf (November 16, 2007)
* Hannah Montana & Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert (February 1, 2008)
* U2 3D (February 15, 2008)
* Journey to the Center of the Earth 3D (July 11, 2008)
* Fly Me to the Moon (August 15, 2008)
* Bolt (November 21, 2008)
* My Bloody Valentine 3D (January 16, 2009)
* Coraline (February 6, 2009)
* Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience (February 27, 2009)
* Monsters vs. Aliens (March 27, 2009)[15]
* Battle for Terra (May 1, 2009)
* Up (May 29, 2009)
* Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs (July 1, 2009)
* G-Force (July 24, 2009)
* X Games 3D: The Movie (August 21, 2009)
* The Final Destination (August 28, 2009)
* Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (September 18, 2009)
* Toy Story/Toy Story 2 (October 2, 2009)
* Horrorween (October 30, 2009)
* A Christmas Carol (November 6, 2009)
* Larger Than Life in 3D (December 11, 2009)
* Avatar (December 18, 2009)

Upcoming:

* Hoodwinked 2: Hood vs. Evil (January 15, 2010)
* Alice in Wonderland (March 5, 2010)
* How to Train Your Dragon (March 26, 2010)
* Piranha 3-D (April 16, 2010)
* Shrek Forever After (May 21, 2010)
* Toy Story 3 (June 18, 2010)
* Despicable Me (July 9, 2010)
* Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore (July 30, 2010)
* Step Up 3 (August 6, 2010)
* Guardians of Ga'Hoole (September 24, 2010)
* Oobermind (November 5, 2010)
* Rapunzel (December 25, 2010)
* Kung Fu Panda: The Kaboom of Doom (June 3, 2011)
* Beauty and the Beast (2011)
* The Bear and the Bow (2011)
* Cars 2 (June 24, 2011)
* The Smurfs (July 29, 2011)
* The Guardians of Childhood (November 4, 2011)
* The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn (December 23, 2011)
* Puss in Boots: The Story of an Ogre Killer (March 30, 2012)
* Madagascar 3 (May 25, 2012)
* Newt (2012)
* Shrek 5 (2013)
* The Wind in the Willows (TBA)

As you fagg0ts can see, this tech is nothing new. I guess the sheer saturated colour eyecandy of Avatar (and the detail within each shot) is what's blowing people's skirts up.

[bitWISE]

From the article I linked on page one:

They were looking over footage from a day’s dive when Cameron asked Pace a question: What would it take to build “the holy grail of cameras,” a high-definition rig that could deliver feature-film quality in both 2-D and 3-D? Pace wasn’t sure — he was no expert but knew about the cheap red-and-blue paper glasses of conventional 3-D filmmaking. They were notoriously uncomfortable, and the images could cause headaches if the projectors weren’t calibrated perfectly. Cameron believed there must be a way to do it better. What he really wanted to talk about was his vision for the next generation of cameras: maneuverable, digital, high-resolution, 3-D.

Inventing such a camera wouldn’t be easy, but Cameron said he was ready to break new ground. He mentioned a mysterious, long-gestating film project that would bring viewers to an alien planet. Cameron didn’t want to make the movie unless viewers could experience the planet viscerally, in 3-D. Since no satisfactory 3-D cameras existed, he’d have to build one. He’d brought Pace on the Pacific adventure to ask if the underwater cameraman wanted to help. His goal seemed kind of extreme, but Pace thought it sounded interesting and signed on. “Jim had a clear ambition on the dive trip,” Pace says. “It was fun, but I didn’t really know what I was getting into.”

...

Sony agreed to establish a new line of cameras, and, using the prototype, Pace set to work. After three months, he had fitted the lenses into a rig that allowed an operator to precisely control the 3-D imaging. He figured they’d start with a simple test using an actor or two, but Cameron had other ideas. He asked Pace to install the gear in a rented World War II-era P-51 fighter and then sent him up in a B-17 Flying Fortress. Cameron jumped in behind the pilot of the P-51 and once airborne started filming while the pilot fired .50-caliber machine gun blanks at Pace’s B-17. “It was my first taste of what Jim considers ‘testing,’” Pace says.

The camera performed well, delivering accurate 3-D images that wouldn’t cause headaches over the course of a long movie. Pace thought Cameron would launch right into Avatar. Instead, the director took his new camera 2.3 miles under the sea to film the wreck of the Titanic in 3-D. The way Cameron tells it, he wasn’t done having “manly adventures.”

...

Cameron wasn’t just goofing off. He wanted to make Avatar, and he wanted to do it in digital 3-D. Unfortunately, theater chains were not adopting the technology. It would cost approximately $100,000 per theater, and exhibitors had to be convinced it would pay off. They needed some high-profile 3-D films that could generate enough revenue to justify the conversion.

So Cameron decided to let other directors test his system. The first was Robert Rodriguez, who shot Spy Kids 3-D using the new camera. The picture would still have to be viewed wearing old-fashioned red-and-blue glasses, but Cameron hoped it would demonstrate demand for more 3-D movies and goad theater owners into investing in next-gen projection systems. Released in the summer of 2003, Spy Kids 3-D made $200 million worldwide, but exhibitors remained reluctant to invest in the technology.

Cameron decided to talk to theater owners directly and showed up at their annual convention in March 2005. ShoWest, at the Paris Las Vegas Hotel and Casino, was in full swing, and Cameron was ready to proselytize. He laid it on thick, telling exhibitors that the world was “entering a new age of cinema.” And in case the inspirational approach didn’t work, he tried something more ominous, telling them that those who didn’t switch would regret it. By the end of the year only 79 theaters in the entire country could show digital 3-D movies. But exhibitors had gotten the message: Between 2005 and 2009, they added some 3,000 screens capable of showing digital 3-D.

[bitWISE]

Fucking wow. If you don't go see this in 3D you're a moran.

The reald setup didn't cause me any trouble and even with a shit seat the picture was perfect. After the first few minutes I couldn't tell there were any glasses or special projectors.

[GONNAFISTYA]

Some co-workers of mine saw it today and said that - while it's not the next level of cinema - it is indeed the next level of visual effects.

BTW...for me at least, after a while I don't even notice when I'm wearing the crappy red/green glasses. And when I saw the Terminator 3D thingy in LA (with the polarized glasses) I completely forgot I was wearing them 10 seconds into it.

It's quite apparent that audiences would have been ready for 3D movies long ago if movie theatres weren't so skittish about the cost (and if 3D movie directors didn't beat you over the head with the 3D effect in trying to get the audience to duck every few minutes).

[bitWISE]

Some co-workers of mine saw it today and said that - while it's not the next level of cinema - it is indeed the next level of visual effects.

BTW...for me at least, after a while I don't even notice when I'm wearing the crappy red/green glasses. And when I saw the Terminator 3D thingy in LA (with the polarized glasses) I completely forgot I was wearing them 10 seconds into it.

It's quite apparent that audiences would have been ready for 3D movies long ago if movie theatres weren't so skittish about the cost (and if 3D movie directors didn't beat you over the head with the 3D effect in trying to get the audience to duck every few minutes).

Yea, they ran a 3d preview of Alice in Wonderland that didn't take long to become annoying. That was actually the first movie I've ever seen in 3d because I never felt the need. But if more legitimate movies were shot that way I would definitely make an effort to go see them. And I think that may be the way in which it could be the next level of cinema, if it causes more quality movies to shoot in 3d simply to provide an experience worth going out to see. I actually enjoyed the whole thing overall and not just for the effects. The interaction and relationship between Jake and Neytiri really pulled me in and had me smiling, laughing, and even feeling the urge to cry at a couple points.

I'm tempted to go watch it again this weekend in IMAX to see if I can tell any difference. Our IMAX isn't one of the gigantic ones but it is a big bigger than the standard screens.

[bitWISE]

http://gizmodo.com/5429424/avatar-revie ... -after-all

I wonder if his complaints are typical of IMAX or if he's just some kinda of pussy.

[andyman]

saw it in 3d... BEST MOVIE EVER FOR A THEATER.

/THREAD.

[xer0s]

Just saw it in Real D. Amazing...

[sliver]

Short version: I saw it tonight and it was almost exactly what I had expected -- eye-popping action balanced against an embarrassingly cliché and overwrought storyline.

Long version [mild spoilers] :

Avatar: 8/10

James Cameron’s long-awaited Avatar, sold for months as a cinematic “game-changer,” is finally here, and both the best and the worst thing that can be said for the visionary director’s decade-long pet project is that it is exactly what it looks like.

On the one hand, it is a leap forward in action film-making from one of today’s foremost auteurs, marrying real-life acting with breathtaking computer-generated imagery on a scale never achieved before. On the other hand, Avatar is a disagreeably by-the-numbers morality tale about capitalism and colonialism which predictably pits bloodthirsty, profit-hungry marines against a native population of noble earth worshipers.

We are introduced to the world of Pandora through Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a disabled former marine given the opportunity to earn himself a new, working pair of legs by infiltrating the society of the indigenous Na’vi culture.

Pandora’s most valuable mineral resource—named “unobtainium” in a vexingly cutesy moment that must have seemed to Cameron as though it would get lost in the minutiae of his world-building—is concentrated right beneath the temple-like Hometree of the local Na’vi tribe, and human business-types want it.

Running the corporate operation is administrator Parker Selfridge (Giovanni Ribisi), a brash entrepreneur with no belief in the existence of setbacks. And heading security—perhaps contributing to Selfridge’s myopia—is the bigoted and abrasive Colonel Quaritch (Stephen Lang), essentially Cruella de Vil in army fatigues.

With bulldozers en route to the Na’vi Hometree through the dense Pandoran jungle, Jake and his research team have a matter of weeks to gain the trust of the Na’vi and convince them to relocate from their traditional territories to avoid all-out war.

However, Jake’s time spent with the Na’vi causes an inexorable acculturation, for which Avatar was lampooned on a South Park episode as “Dances with Smurfs.” Ultimately, “Dances with Pocahontas in FernGully” would be more apropos, but the underlying issue is that, having been marketed as a wildly original story, Avatar is in fact anything but.

Even overlooking the question of originality, Avatar’s slavish adherence to convention nearly eclipses the natural beauty of Pandora’s landscapes and wildlife.

The Na’vi are a gentle, spiritual and communal people with profound respect for nature—bien sûr. Set against them are the tyrannical military caricature and the icon of heartless corporate greed, two broad-stroke clichés neither relatable nor understandable as human characters, despite traces of plausibility. When Jake is lost in the woods, of course he meets a beautiful Na’vi—the daughter of her tribe’s chieftain, no less—who ultimately falls deeply in love with him. Of course he will love her back, change his allegiance, and help to lead the Na’vi against human colonization. Of course it will climax with awesomely violent warfare.

Aggravating this numbing predictability is the disappointing familiarity of Pandora. The inhabitants are bipedal humanoids, with the generic African tribe as their terrestrial analogue. Sure, the forest is sprinkled liberally with bio-luminescence, but the flowers are just deep-sea tube worms and the fauna—including hammerhead-rhinoceroses and parrot-pterodactyls—are symmetrical reconfigurations of earth animals.

However—and this is a big however—Avatar’s saving grace is the sheer audacity of its vision and execution. Even when we know exactly where he’s going, which is most of the time in Avatar, Cameron makes the journey enjoyable.

For example, there is a classic stock scene—as recycled in King Kong, Star Wars, and this year’s Star Trek—in which the hero is attacked by a monster which is then devoured by an even more fearsome monster, and so on. Cameron gives it to us once more in Avatar, but with such breathless energy that it almost feels new again.

The film is full of moments of sheer awe, from Jake’s discovering the wildlife of Pandora to his first experience of flight, from the ceremonies of the Na’vi to the beautifully shot chaos of total war. And make no mistake, there is enough action here to satisfy the fans Cameron earned with Terminator, Aliens, and True Lies.

If anything, Avatar’s real weakness is that it does the representation of native peoples a disservice (as did The Last Samurai, among others) by depicting indigenous populations as reliant on external salvation when they conflict with “civilization.” And by assigning worth to the Na’vi partly on the basis of their functioning biological Wi-Fi network, Avatar begs uncomfortable questions about the status of their real-world analogues, whose spirituality does not manifest in breathtakingly visible ways.

But most importantly, despite impossible hype, Avatar succeeds on the fundamental level of transporting us to a different world. The message is an imporant one: might does not make right. The medium is an effective one: lush 3-D as you have never seen it before. Like Jurassic Park on steroids, Avatar is a rollicking good time.

[andyman]

ok if you look at it that way, its a high budget Ferngully..... but we all know we liked ferngully.... and while you're at it, the airships looked like Halo relics, the mechwarriors main gun was a chainsaw gun from gears of war, and .... man were those arrows huge

[Nightshade]

From what I've read in this thread I'm really wishing that my friends didn't hate 3D, forcing me to see the regular version. But, they had a free ticket, so...

For those of you that don't want to read sliver's usual pretentious, wordy parp, here's the lowdown: Dances with Wolves meets The Smurfs in the most beautiful version of The Land Before Time that you can possibly imagine. This movie is stupid. Really, really stupid. The mercenaries and corporate types are so "bad" it's comical. The Indians, sorry the Smurfs, fuck, sorry, the Navi are so wonderful and spirited, so in touch with the energy of their Matrix, sorry, reservation, shit, sorry, planet that it's sickening. This is a terrible, TERRIBLE movie and I fucking LOVED IT. The visuals are THAT good. I'm so glad James Cameron decided to give us this excellent insight into the evils of Gargamel and his misdeeds against Neo and the Lakota Sioux.

[Foo]

They don't fucking sparkle, do they?

[LawL]

Short version: I saw it tonight and it was almost exactly what I had expected -- eye-popping action balanced against an embarrassingly cliché and overwrought storyline.

Long version [mild spoilers] :

Avatar: 8/10

James Cameron’s long-awaited Avatar, sold for months as a cinematic “game-changer,” is finally here, and both the best and the worst thing that can be said for the visionary director’s decade-long pet project is that it is exactly what it looks like.

On the one hand, it is a leap forward in action film-making from one of today’s foremost auteurs, marrying real-life acting with breathtaking computer-generated imagery on a scale never achieved before. On the other hand, Avatar is a disagreeably by-the-numbers morality tale about capitalism and colonialism which predictably pits bloodthirsty, profit-hungry marines against a native population of noble earth worshipers.

We are introduced to the world of Pandora through Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a disabled former marine given the opportunity to earn himself a new, working pair of legs by infiltrating the society of the indigenous Na’vi culture.

Pandora’s most valuable mineral resource—named “unobtainium” in a vexingly cutesy moment that must have seemed to Cameron as though it would get lost in the minutiae of his world-building—is concentrated right beneath the temple-like Hometree of the local Na’vi tribe, and human business-types want it.

Running the corporate operation is administrator Parker Selfridge (Giovanni Ribisi), a brash entrepreneur with no belief in the existence of setbacks. And heading security—perhaps contributing to Selfridge’s myopia—is the bigoted and abrasive Colonel Quaritch (Stephen Lang), essentially Cruella de Vil in army fatigues.

With bulldozers en route to the Na’vi Hometree through the dense Pandoran jungle, Jake and his research team have a matter of weeks to gain the trust of the Na’vi and convince them to relocate from their traditional territories to avoid all-out war.

However, Jake’s time spent with the Na’vi causes an inexorable acculturation, for which Avatar was lampooned on a South Park episode as “Dances with Smurfs.” Ultimately, “Dances with Pocahontas in FernGully” would be more apropos, but the underlying issue is that, having been marketed as a wildly original story, Avatar is in fact anything but.

Even overlooking the question of originality, Avatar’s slavish adherence to convention nearly eclipses the natural beauty of Pandora’s landscapes and wildlife.

The Na’vi are a gentle, spiritual and communal people with profound respect for nature—bien sûr. Set against them are the tyrannical military caricature and the icon of heartless corporate greed, two broad-stroke clichés neither relatable nor understandable as human characters, despite traces of plausibility. When Jake is lost in the woods, of course he meets a beautiful Na’vi—the daughter of her tribe’s chieftain, no less—who ultimately falls deeply in love with him. Of course he will love her back, change his allegiance, and help to lead the Na’vi against human colonization. Of course it will climax with awesomely violent warfare.

Aggravating this numbing predictability is the disappointing familiarity of Pandora. The inhabitants are bipedal humanoids, with the generic African tribe as their terrestrial analogue. Sure, the forest is sprinkled liberally with bio-luminescence, but the flowers are just deep-sea tube worms and the fauna—including hammerhead-rhinoceroses and parrot-pterodactyls—are symmetrical reconfigurations of earth animals.

However—and this is a big however—Avatar’s saving grace is the sheer audacity of its vision and execution. Even when we know exactly where he’s going, which is most of the time in Avatar, Cameron makes the journey enjoyable.

For example, there is a classic stock scene—as recycled in King Kong, Star Wars, and this year’s Star Trek—in which the hero is attacked by a monster which is then devoured by an even more fearsome monster, and so on. Cameron gives it to us once more in Avatar, but with such breathless energy that it almost feels new again.

The film is full of moments of sheer awe, from Jake’s discovering the wildlife of Pandora to his first experience of flight, from the ceremonies of the Na’vi to the beautifully shot chaos of total war. And make no mistake, there is enough action here to satisfy the fans Cameron earned with Terminator, Aliens, and True Lies.

If anything, Avatar’s real weakness is that it does the representation of native peoples a disservice (as did The Last Samurai, among others) by depicting indigenous populations as reliant on external salvation when they conflict with “civilization.” And by assigning worth to the Na’vi partly on the basis of their functioning biological Wi-Fi network, Avatar begs uncomfortable questions about the status of their real-world analogues, whose spirituality does not manifest in breathtakingly visible ways.

But most importantly, despite impossible hype, Avatar succeeds on the fundamental level of transporting us to a different world. The message is an imporant one: might does not make right. The medium is an effective one: lush 3-D as you have never seen it before. Like Jurassic Park on steroids, Avatar is a rollicking good time.

You're such a fucking wanker.

[sliver]

ok if you look at it that way, its a high budget Ferngully..... but we all know we liked ferngully.... and while you're at it, the airships looked like Halo relics, the mechwarriors main gun was a chainsaw gun from gears of war, and .... man were those arrows huge

agreed, agreed, agreed.

From what I've read in this thread I'm really wishing that my friends didn't hate 3D, forcing me to see the regular version. But, they had a free ticket, so...

For those of you that don't want to read sliver's usual pretentious, wordy parp, here's the lowdown: Dances with Wolves meets The Smurfs in the most beautiful version of The Land Before Time that you can possibly imagine. This movie is stupid. Really, really stupid. The mercenaries and corporate types are so "bad" it's comical. The Indians, sorry the Smurfs, fuck, sorry, the Navi are so wonderful and spirited, so in touch with the energy of their Matrix, sorry, reservation, shit, sorry, planet that it's sickening. This is a terrible, TERRIBLE movie and I fucking LOVED IT. The visuals are THAT good. I'm so glad James Cameron decided to give us this excellent insight into the evils of Gargamel and his misdeeds against Neo and the Lakota Sioux.

I owe you one.

And I hate 3D but this was worth it. If I were you I'd see it again, on IMAX if possible.

They don't fucking sparkle, do they?

Not by Twilight standards, but almost.

[HM-PuFFNSTuFF]

Saw it in IMAX 3D which made it worth it for sure. Don't see this movie in 2d. There is no point.

[Tsakali]

fucking nearly 3 hours long though, that's not sitting well with me
but I have borth read D and IMAX options near by so I prolly watch it in realD

[bitWISE]

Didn't even feel like 3 hours to me. I could have kept going.

The Na’vi are a gentle, spiritual and communal people with profound respect for nature—bien sûr. Set against them are the tyrannical military caricature and the icon of heartless corporate greed, two broad-stroke clichés neither relatable nor understandable as human characters, despite traces of plausibility.

If anything, Avatar’s real weakness is that it does the representation of native peoples a disservice (as did The Last Samurai, among others) by depicting indigenous populations as reliant on external salvation when they conflict with “civilization.” And by assigning worth to the Na’vi partly on the basis of their functioning biological Wi-Fi network, Avatar begs uncomfortable questions about the status of their real-world analogues, whose spirituality does not manifest in breathtakingly visible ways.

How can you call the Na'vi cliches that are neither relatable nor understandable and then turn around and damn the movie for how you see the Na'vi representing native cultures in a negative light? Aside from the obvious hypocrisy, the two separate points don't really sit well with me either. First, being very similar to Native Americans, I found the Na'vi not only understandable but totally relatable. On a lush planet that beautiful on such an epic scale, how could you not have any desire in your heart to live within their culture and follow their ways? I mean it's not even faith based spiritual bullshit, the planet really was a single interconnected life essence.

On the second point. Why is it disservice to accept help from an outsider when you are impossibly outmatched militarily? We're talking about expertly trained military personal with fucking laser guided missiles against a tribe of hunters armed with sticks.

[xer0s]

"a rollicking good time." Damn silver, you're a tool and a half.

And that's not a review, it's a synopsis. No one wants to read that shit...

[Tsakali]

lol, people better than us at anything makes us feel uncomfortable... sad little planet we live in.