Next-Generation 3-D Medium of ‘Avatar’ Underscores Its Message

In the James Cameron blockbuster “Avatar,” 3-D cinematography is the real star. The bugs and crawling creatures seem to slither into the theater seats. The floating mountains of the planet Pandora hover gloriously overhead. And the Na’Vi, Pandora’s 10-foot-tall, blue-skinned natives, come convincingly to life.

“Avatar” has generally won rave reviews, but too many critics have been dividing the movie into the 3-D experience and the plot as if they were unrelated. The remarkable thing about “Avatar” is the degree to which the technology is integral to the story. It is important to show Pandora and its Na’Vi natives in 3-D because “Avatar” is fundamentally about the moral necessity of seeing other beings fully.

Three-D technology has come a long way from the old days of the Three Stooges’ pie-throwing antics. Mr. Cameron created a single camera that can shoot live-action stereoscopic 3-D, to take the technology to a new level, and it is an undeniable crowd pleaser.

At the Imax theater in Manhattan where I watched “Avatar,” people fussed with their plastic 3-D glasses — a big improvement on the old paper and plastic film — for a few minutes. But before long the hushed audience seemed immersed in another world.

“Avatar” centers on a rapacious company that is intent on harvesting valuable ore from Pandora; the Na’Vi live over the largest deposit. The plot is firmly in the anti-imperialist canon, a 22nd-century version of the American colonists vs. the British, India vs. the Raj, or Latin America vs. United Fruit.

Read more . . .

Related articles by Zemanta

• I’ve seen the future of UIs, and it’s stereoscopic 3D (istartedsomething.com)
• The technological secrets of James Cameron’s new film Avatar (guardian.co.uk)
• Esther Iverem: ‘Avatar’–Fight the Power! (huffingtonpost.com)

Random Posts:

• Solar Decathlon solar house competition heats up
• Finance & Economics: Innovation Badly Needed
• Energy Efficiency Technologies Offer Major Savings, Report Finds
• Intel Reader turns street signs into spoken words
• Scrubbing CO2 and sulfur from power plant emissions

Related posts:

1. The Medium Is No Longer The Message, . . . You Are
2. ‘Scary’ climate message from past
3. 3D TV is here
4. Displax ’skin’ turns virtually any surface into multi-touch display
5. Next-generation TMOS displays closer to mass production

Tags: Add new tag, Avatar, James Cameron, movies, Stereoscopy, Theatre

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 26th, 2009 at 11:49 am and is filed under Civilization, Communications, Consider This, Innovation, Innovation Toronto, NY Times, Shape of Things to Come?, Worth Repeating. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.