Events | 2009.08.22
Avatar's 3D takes film to a new level (but you still need glasses)
New dimension, same old story for James Cameron\'s first movie since Titanic
The lights go down at the BFI Imax in London and James Cameron appears on screen in bulky three dimensions. The director is "here" (his words) to introduce Avatar Day, the grand unveiling of 15 minutes of footage from his latest opus (which isn\'t actually out until December). "Have you got your glasses on?" he barks, and of course we have; why wouldn\'t we? Without those polarised goggles, Avatar Day would surely be an irrelevance and Avatar just another cornball sci-fi fantasy about alien monsters on a faraway planet.
Instead, Cameron\'s first full-length dramatic feature since Titanic comes billed as the shape of films to come – and that shape has height and width and depth. Cameron shot Avatar on his own patented Fusion Camera System, blending live action with the sort of performance capture technology previously road-tested on the likes of Beowulf. Insiders claim the results go far beyond anything achieved by other recent 3D offerings, leading the industry towards a brave new world of stereoscopic film production. Twenty years from now, we are assured, all movies will look like Avatar.
So we peer through our specs as jungle foliage is dragged across the screen and blue-skinned extraterrestrials loom up in the foreground. At one stage the lead protagonist strolls into an Edenic glade of illuminated plant-life while the camera tracks 360-degrees around him. His movement disturbs the fluorescent flower petals, which appear to detach themselves from the frame, wafting gently out across the darkened auditorium.
The audience chuckles and coos and applauds at the end. By and large, they seem impressed. "I\'ve always been agnostic about 3D technology," admits Dan Williams, who has travelled from Brighton to view the footage. "But I may be converted now. I think it probably is the way forward."
Avatar charts the adventures of Jake Sully, a US marine who finds himself conjured into a human-alien hybrid dispatched to the planet of Pandora. Once there, he proceeds to tame a giant bird and romance a giant Amazonian.
Early evidence suggests that its revolutionary nature may well be confined to the technology. Cameron cut his teeth as an assistant to B-movie producer Roger Corman and, even now, seems content to rely on stock genre narratives. He is the living embodiment of John Sayles\'s argument that the B-movie died out only in the sense that it became an A-movie, and that there is no point making a cheesy outer-space monster movie for $100,000 when a Hollywood studio is making the exact same picture for $100m. Avatar\'s budget, incidentally, is a reported $237m.
For all that, we are here to wallow in the spectacle, not scoff at the story — and in this respect Cameron\'s film is undeniably beguiling. It boasts a startling depth of field, conjuring a fetid virtual terrain on a pancake-flat screen and inviting the viewer to step inside. No doubt it is the fate of all cutting-edge technology to eventually turn blunt, dull and outmoded, but that is a concern for another day, another era.
With Avatar – and its dedicated 24 hours of previews – James Cameron has refined the template for big budget Hollywood film production. The future of cinema just became a gaudy, gift-wrapped present.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/aug/21/avatar-3d-film-james-cameron
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