Avatar Becomes James Cameron’s Technological Breakthrough

James Cameron spent the past 15 years of his life trying to bring "Avatar" to the screen.

Photo: Avatar Becomes James Cameron’s Technological Breakthrough

Calling it a movie isn’t quite accurate. “Avatar” is a massive, overwhelming audio/visual spectacle. It is truly an immersive experience that takes moviegoing into uncharted territory. One that manages to awe you with its technical achievement, while at the same time make you shake your head at the simplistic failings of the script. An environmental message wrapped inside the pulpy stylings of Edgar Rice Burroughs, the story has many of the same elements – corporate greed, colonization, forbidden love - Cameron has been playing with throughout his career.

Game-changer? On a technical level, absolutely it is. The use of 3D in “Avatar” is phenomenal, so good in fact, that you stop noticing it a few minutes in once you get used to all the detail flooding your eyes. Cameron had so much faith in the technological breakthrough he delivers here, there isn’t a single 3D parlor trick. No arrows are flung at the audience; no creatures jump at the screen. The big difference with seeing the film in 3D is the sheer depth. The clarity of the mountains off in the distance, or the trees in the background, is incredible.

The laboratory scenes, surprisingly, show off Cameron’s groundbreaking technology even better than the large-scale action sequences. As characters come in and out of the camera’s view, computer screens flicker in the corner, and it’s all crystal-clear, Newsarama reports.

It was also reported, you might have cringed when you saw the first trailer. But when you see these big blue creatures walking around on the big screen in all their 3D glory, you very quickly forget that these creatures are not real. The animation is flawless in their movement and their interaction with the scenery. It is like nothing you have seen before, and Cameron must be applauded for waiting all these years (upwards of 10 if you’re counting) until the technology could keep up with his imagination. The marines’ weaponry and machinery is just as amazing to watch and looks so damn realistic and plausible that I expect to see them hit the battlefield sometime in the future. Cameron enjoys taking us to places that we have never been before. Just watch the doc “Return to Titanic” to see his perseverance, and in Pandora, he has once again showed us a place that is so wondrous and intriguing that you want to spend more time there, MovieViral reports.

Access Atlanta quoted Zoe Saldana as saying, “It was hard at first, but once we understood the technology and got used to the physicality of it, it was the most liberating thing. I almost feel like this technology is going to challenge the way we view films and the way we view actors.”

Indeed, director James Cameron first conceived of “Avatar” 15 years ago but waited until filmmaking technology could catch up with his imagination. The final product cost more than $250 million and involved creating a new system of cameras and motion-capture systems.

In the film, Cameron remixes several ideas from his own canon: lifelike extraterrestrials (“Aliens”), heavy artillery (“Terminator”) and a pair of star-crossed lovers (“Titanic”), all set in an environment that’s exotic and deadly. The action takes place in 2154 on Pandora, a jungle-covered moon in the Alpha Centauri system, where human negotiations with the aboriginal aliens have turned violent. In a stroke of public relations genius, the Earthlings interact with the locals using genetically engineered “avatars,” bodies identical to the alien Na’vi but controlled by the consciousness of a human.

Saldana’s Neytiri plays a sort of Pocahontas for Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a former Marine new to the avatar program. It falls on Neytiri to teach Jake the Na’vi customs and language, which Cameron created with the help of a linguistics professor, Access Atlanta reports.