Avatar

Went to the pictures yesterday, to see the big Christmas release, Avatar. Definitely one for the big screen - such rich scenery and detail. I'm not sure about the 3D, though - I think it gave me a headache - that or the dehydration caused by overheating in Movies @ Dundrum.

It's been said already, but I'll say it again: Avatar is really "Dances With Aliens" - a traditional tale of soldier falls for native princess and is not so sure any more about the war he was fighting. This time, the story is set on Pandora, a planet far far away, where humans are mining some crazily-expensive rock. The goodies and the baddies are easily recognisable, and the main baddy is very cliché'd. And there is a moral to the story - about man's bond to the earth and all this warm Gaia stuff, but it's still a darn good story and it's well told, and the special effects are out of this world.

Actually, it's mostly special effects. The strange thing is that I couldn't find anything on the official website about the special effects, but I did find a "Pandorapedia" site with all sorts of factoids about Pandora, its inhabitants, the na'vi, and also about the spaceship technology to get there (one for the geeks - and it's editable like Wikipedia, but this morning, all I found was this: "БУБЛИК, ОТСОСИ <3…I hope the owner of this site made a backup. I figured this would happen, some nob-gobbler cleared this whole site. Next time don't make it so that every average joe/jackass can edit your site. RIP PandoraPedia.")! 

And I did find a site that says that 60% of the movie is 100% CG. I had to dig a bit further to find information about the technology and the special effects, for instance how they avoided the "Valley Effect" on the CG faces (read these  2 interesting articles )