Movies You Must See – Avatar

This is the first motion picture in which Avatars are ‘the stars’.

To make the digital creations ‘real’ the actors wore specially made skull caps which were fit with a tiny cameras positioned in front of the actors’ faces  so that  the information collected could be transmitted to computers.

This meant 100% of the actors’ physical performances was overlaid on their digital counterparts.

This is really special, and because of this innovation, allowed a sense of realism;  one was not watching cartoon characters or computer generated characters, but a ‘real’  face of a real ‘alien’.

The movie did draw on just about every science fiction story;  so there is a sense of ‘been there’ but this is always cut by a different and unexpected twist.

At the most basic level, there is a planet which has an atmosphere humans can not survive in. However, by creating ‘clones’ of the local population with insertion of human genes, the ‘Avatar’ could be created so that the human can, with a kind of brain connection, ‘transfer’, (for a time) into the body of that humanoid local.

On one hand it is not unlike people who use VR and play games and ‘become’ that character on the screen, so there is no discomfort with that technology at this time in human history.

The special effects, the attention to detail, the sense of reality makes this, obviously, the most watched movie in history.   It became the first film to gather over Two Billion Dollars.

The basic story is this:

About 150 years from now, the Earth’s resources have been depleted and there is a severe energy crisis.  A very valuable mineral, (rather unimaginatively) named unobtanium,  exists on a planet called Pandora.  This planet is inhabited by humanoids called ‘Na’vi’, who are very tall and blue skinned.

The human/Na’vi  avatars allow humans to function on the planet.    One of these avatars gets lost and is taken in by the Na’vi.

The culture of the Na’vi is quite interesting, so along with the visual impact there is something worth viewing.