Avatar

“You are not in Kansas any more. You are on Pandora…”

 Avatar, the box office hit wonder which took on a whole new meaning of success. With both Academy Award winners’ director James Cameron and composer James Horner Avatar was said to be, just ‘a mediocre motion picture.’ How wrong they were...

It became the top-grossing movie of all time at the worldwide box office with almost $1.844 billion in ticket sales.

 Sam Worthington played the lead role of Jake Sully, a former marine who was paralysed in battle, whilst Zoe Saldana was casted to play Neytiri, the Na’vi who subsequently falls in love with Jake Sully. Director James Cameron intended to start the making of the film in 1997, the year Cameron’s Titanic was released. However the technology that Cameron needed to create Avatar was not available, so the script was put on hold.    

         
    To many, the storyline is extremely foreseeable and so once predicted, the film becomes uninteresting and dry. When looking ahead of this fact, I completely lose myself in an entirely different phenomenon. The language, culture and pure ingeniousness of James Cameron’s imagination are all contributing factors of why I put this motion picture so far above any other film that I have watched. The fact that the Na’vi language is an actual dialect and the culture is so similar to that of our own ancestors makes me imagine that such a world out there exists, consequently connecting me ever so more to the film.

The exceptionally believable aspects of everyday life on the planet of Pandora would not be possible or achievable without the incredible use of CGI and stunning imagery. The screenplay for Avatar also adds to the convincing and almost-lifelike qualities which the computer generated imagery has to offer.

When watching the film in IMAX cinema for the first time, the third dimension instantaneously brought me into Pandora itself. Instead of watching the film, I was experiencing it. This particular viewing obviously gave me a biased view of the film from the very start, as the whole experience, including the meal beforehand, premier seats and the whole 3D spectacle to it added to my liking of the film before it even started. Nonetheless, after watching it for the second time on DVD I began to appreciate the entirety of each frame. I noticed how no details in the background were forgotten, and with Avatar being an animated film, I realised at how difficult a job this must have been for the artists involved post production. This simple minuscule fact strengthened my appreciation of the film.

               

  With there being 3 more sequels, I cannot express my gratitude to James Cameron himself for that he has inspired me confirming that ‘the sky is not the limit’ and that for the whole 178 minutes of the film, I can lose myself in an entirely diverse, yet so natural, creation.