Avatar in 3D Review

Saturday, December 19, 2009

I saw Avatar at 12:01 on the night of it's debut. From an innovation standpoint I knew that Avatar was going to be pushing the envelope on several different levels. The birth of Simul-Cam, the revolutionizing of the facial camera rigs, and the performance capture of the actors being grafted onto the bodies of their Avatars are all the first fruits of the new 3D arena. I thought the story might suffer because of the emphasis on the breakthrough technology that movie would be showcasing but this was hardly the case. In fact the story, in my opinion, is only believable because of the fact that the Avatars and Na'vi characters in the film are so life like.

Jake Sully is a paraplegic marine who takes the place of his twin brother as the inhabiter of an Avatar body. He is commissioned by his commanding officer Col. Miles Quaritch to live amongst the Na'vi race (the indigenous inhabitants of the Pandora planet) to live and learn from them. The leading scientist on Avatar technology is Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) who is at first opposed to sending in a replacement for Jake Sully's PHD and accolade decorated brother. She later becomes a Sully proponent when in true Donnie Brasco form Sully joins the Na'vi ranks and becomes one of them in his heart. It might have something to do with him falling in love with Na'vi princess Neytiri or his deeper understanding of the interconnectedness of life and the universe at the crux of the Na'vi ideology.

Avatar the movie, clearly has parallels to imperialism of all kinds. The most obvious theme that runs through the movie is U.S. dependency on petroleum as an energy source. There is also the display of the American mantra of manifest destiny especially apparent in the early history of the U.S. The allegories were apparent and politically charged. These did not overshadow the axioms that none of us can deny including our interconnectedness as inhabitants of this planet, monogamous love, and a reverence for life of all kinds.

Now you ask how can a "Cartoon" accomplish these type of themes and empathy? Well it can't, but Avatar is far from a cartoon. The writer and director of the film James Cameron has been quoted as saying that he has had the idea for Avatar for over a decade but was just waiting for the technology to catch up to his vision. In an interview with Popular Mechanics, Cameron explains that the vitality of the movie lies in what he has coined "Performance Capture". In the past, in movies like King Kong and Lord of The Rings the animated characters weren't "human enough". This lie in the fact that recording the actors playing the animations was done using Motion Capture. The actor is filmed with reference points on the face and body and then expression is added later by an animation shop. The result is something computer generated and no where near the portrayal of human emotion. Cameron explains that the only way to accomplish this is by mapping the true expression of the face. This is daunting task considering the face has about 100 expression muscles. If you neglect anyone of these you lose that realistic look and feel. Cameron's solution was to have the actors wear a camera in front of their face attached to a headband that would record their every expression. The setup is called a Rig and maps to every pour of the human face. The rig reads in the data set unique only to that actor and begins to perform complex algorithms to rationalize the functioning of the actors expressions. This can take almost a year of extracting expression data from the actors performance but once collected is relatively easily to render in film. Once captured the actors facial performance is then grafted to the body of the Avatar. Filming the movement of the actors body for rendering the performance of the Avatar is mainstream technology used in most films these days and is no uncharted territory.

Avatar to me is the first 3d movie to make the imaginative world painted on the screen actually believable. I attribute this to the life likeness of the Avatars in the film. This and much of the other technology in the film didn't exist or was not mature enough before the development of Avatar. For any breakthrough, world changing venture you have to make your own trail and blaze it. This is no where more apparent than James Cameron's transmutation of his imagination to the reality that is Avatar.

Labels: 3D, Avatar, Reviews