Avatar: Some Thoughts

Updated 2009-12-29: I think I may have been a little too hard on the film, even here.  To be absolutely clear, I loved the movie and recommend that you go see it.  There were just a few things which seemed a little implausible for me.  For more info on the science of Avatar (they got a lot right!), read this super-interesting article.

I just saw Avatar last night, and I wanted to share some thoughts with the world.

The short version: If you haven’t seen it yet, you should.  Just be ready for a little willing suspension of disbelief.

Note: there are some spoilers in this post. Watch the movie first.

Visually, it was stunning.  I don’t know exactly how the 3D tech worked, but it worked very well.  It was very convincing and stunning, but it wasn’t overused or overemphasized, either.  The world the artists created seemed entirely realistic, the lighting and coloring was beautiful, and all the effects were very well done.  While you’re watching, you won’t even notice what’s CGI and what isn’t; the colors, textures, and especially the lighting and other environmental factors are perfectly blended together into an entirely convincing picture.

(While I’m on the subject, I’d like to point out that the movie must have taken an extraordinary amount of computational power to render, even by today’s movie-rendering standards.  The sheer amount of power they had to have used for that is, in itself, amazing.)

I’m glad the movie ended happily for (most of) our protagonists.  I was worried about that right up until the conclusion.  I wish Trudy (the pilot who helps Jake & crew escape) had fared better, though.

I do, however, have some minor issues with the movie.  I’m entirely in favor of willing suspension of disbelief during a movie, but I still notice glaring logical/physical errors which would be problems even in the movie’s fictional setting.

You’ll note that the laws of physics changed between 2009 and 2154 (the year the movie takes place).  I’ll note just two of the physical problems that I remember (there were many, many more which I can’t remember offhand):

• Birds flying a few feet above a giant, spinning, helicopter-blade type thing will get sucked in, no question about it.  This was not the case in one of the first scenes in the movie.
• For an atmosphere where there’s supposedly very little oxygen, there were some pretty big fires and fireballs.  Fireballs need a pretty decent amount of oxygen to happen.

There were a few other issues which took away from the believability of the plot.

• At the end of the movie, when Jake is fighting the Colonel at the end of the battle, the Colonel made a major tactical error by chasing Jake around rather than just heading straight for the trailer.  Had he ignored Jake for just a little bit and begun attacking the trailer, he would have forced Jake into a defensive position rather than letting him take an offensive position and effectively control the battle.  A colonel with his experience would not have made that decision (he makes an intelligent choice in a similar situation earlier), and he could have won by choosing “correctly.”  Obviously, he had to lose the fight to move the story in the right direction, but perhaps Jake could have won it differently.
• According to the speech at the beginning of the movie, you’d lose consciousness after being exposed to the atmosphere for 20 seconds.  I didn’t time exactly, but there were several instances where I think people managed to be outside for significantly longer than 20 seconds.

Though the visuals were for the most part great, I did have a few problems, particularly with the first few scenes.  The shots in a white/gray spaceship, where everything was very evenly lit and there was plenty of depth of field (that is, everything was in focus), were very confusing pictures.  Your eye looks for visual cues when it’s deciding what to pay attention to.  These cues are things like brightness/darkness (contrast), color (or lack thereof), and selective focus (your eyes go to whatever’s in sharp focus).  Some shots at the beginning of the movie removed all these visual cues, and as a result viewers’ eyes and brains get very confused, especially when they’re exploring a 3D space instead of a 2D picture.  I spent the first 5 or 10 minutes of the movie just being confused simply because all my brain was devoted to looking at everything in a big, 3D space in detail and processing it to try and find out what was important.

All in all, these small issues don’t detract much from the film; it’s a good story, and the visuals are stunning. Go watch it.

Oh, and one more thing: Papyrus? Really?