Avatar

From sinking boats to agile blue creatures, James Cameron, the director of Titanic and Avatar, seems to be unstoppable. After Titanic, Cameron disappeared from the movie scene for almost a decade. For his grand reentrance back into Hollywood, he decided to try his hand at 3-D sci-fi.

3-D movies are not a new concept. The first 3-D movie shown to a commercial audience was The Power of Love in 1922. 3-D has been used at amusement parks and science centers but didn’t make it into the mainstream theaters until recently. In the past few years, there has been a new wave of 3-D movies including Coraline, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Bolt, and Up.

Cameron decided to take 3-D to a whole new level. Technology has advanced so that going to the movies feels like being on a different planet. In Avatar, Cameron made the audience feel like they were on Pandora, flying around on giant dinosaur birds, and shooting giant arrows at the American military.

Cameron went to all lengths to make the planet of Pandora seem as real as possible. He hired a linguist from University of Southern California, professor Paul Frommer, to create the language of Na’Vi. Frommer created a 1,000-word vocabulary using a lot of clicks and glottal strokes. It’s not quite up to par with klingon yet, but it’s getting there.

The film had an opening gross of $77 million in the United States and $165.5 million in its foreign debut. The movie was estimated to have cost about $280 million, and that doesn’t even include the equipment made specifically to make Avatar possible. Cameron invented new instruments to create the movie he envisioned, like a new and improved 3-D camera.

Avatar’s plot is the age-old tale of natives trying to resist infiltrators and the destruction of nature. Whether you call it a remake of Pocahontas, FernGully, or Dances with Wolves, the storyline is almost irrelevant. The main draw is the technology and special effects. Unlike previous 3-D movies, where the effects were meant to make the audience jump, the 3-D elements in Avatar enhanced the viewer’s experience. It brought the viewer’s focus to certain areas of the screen and created a depth-of-field that would have been impossible to imitate on flat screen.

One last note: the world of Pandora was so beautiful that CNN reported that some viewers were going through post-Avatar depression. For some, the real world couldn’t hold a candle to what Cameron created.

-Renee Orenstein