When I was seven years old, my family went to Disney World, where I watched Honey, I Shrunk the Audience!.
Backed by the dulcet tones of Rick Moranis’s whiny voice, I was treated to all manner of dorky 3D trickery. A dog, bigger than god, poked out of the screen and licked me. This event caused a jet of water, ersatz saliva, to shoot into my face from the back of the chair in front of me. Lab rats escaped their cages, rushing into the auditorium, causing spinning pieces of plastic under the seat to thwack the backs of my calves repeatedly. Because of this, I instinctively lifted my legs onto the seat.
This was hardly the infancy of 3D, but it was new to me. The gimmickry of the visual and practical effects was lost on me, since I was too young to be cynical about that kind of thing.
Contrast this with my skepticism regarding James Cameron’s Avatar. Of course, I read about the movie on all manner of websites. I saw Twitter explode when the trailer was released. I read about the bloated budget, the extended production time, and heard Cameron talk about how he was revolutionizing film.
None of these claims found any purchase with me. It looked like Fern Gully, except with blue people and without a rapping bat voiced by Robin Williams.
I threw my $10.25 onto the pile, along with the other $1 billion or so, solely out of technical curiosity. Just how revolutionary could this be? How would this new technology change the way the shots were composed? How could Cameron reconcile the 3D with an actual narrative?
Early on in the movie, Siguorney Weaver’s character says “You’re not in Kansas anymore” to the film’s bewildered main character, Jake Sully. It’s a heavy-handed reference, but Avatar is light on tact. The message is clear: The Wizard of Oz was a spectacle, an easy-to-understand story that made Technicolor a mainstream success. The audience was brought along for the ride, transitioning from Earth to Oz, from sepia tones to a world where the brick road was yellow, goddammit!
Avatar is to 3D what The Wizard of Oz was to color film. What remains to be seen is if the 3D films that follow it will implement the tech as subtly and masterfully as Avatar.
When the 3D trailers started, I was immediately disoriented.
Those kids whose eyes were ruined by Nintendo’s Virtual Boy? I was one of them. A lifetime of inner ear problems have left me incredibly susceptible to motion sickness. I watched in horror as previews for Alice in Wonderland and a new Shrek movie threw candy-colored visual hell at my face. It felt like each eye was moving on its own accord, and I couldn’t tell where to focus. I had to look down at my lap more than once to keep my bearings.
Put simply, it sucked.
The feature itself had much more grace. James Cameron wasn’t Jo-Jo the Indian Circus boy with his pretty new pet. He didn’t throw things directly through the screen, just to show that he could. Instead, shots are composed in such a way that stray leaves obscure the edges of the frame, just barely out of focus, placing the audience in the bush with with the “cameraman.” Floating motes of nature dust glow around the characters. CGI drop ships stand out in front of ridiculously picturesque vistas.
Since this review is already full of digressions, let me tell you about the first time I played Splinter Cell on my brand new Xbox. One level features an industrial freezer, separated by a doorway of hanging, transparent rubber flaps. When Sam Fisher walks through them, they flop around realistically, as you’d expect they would. This blew my mind. I spent probably ten minutes just walking back and forth through these flaps, seeing how they’d react.
It’s the little things that draw me in to a world. I felt the same way about the use of 3D to lend depth to shots including windshields or mirrors. The illusion was complete, I saw glass windshields, and then a few feet behind them, I saw faces. The rear-view mirror of a mech featured a realistic reflection, with the proper depth and everything.
There’s only one “OH MY GOD IT’S FLYING RIGHT AT ME” moment, and its really satisfying.
I’m not fooled for a second, though. I know that Hollywood is rushing to embrace 3D as a way to bolster its distribution model. Why would I pay $10 to see a movie when I can wait 3 months and enjoy it on my own time, with high definition and surround sound? Movie theaters need a hook, and Avatar is a successful pilot run of what’s likely to be a real shot in the arm for brick and mortar theaters. That, and beaming Glenn Beck live into the heartland.
My cynicism was marginally justified in that I found it difficult to watch large portions of the movie. The eye naturally searches a frame for the area of focus. Size and movement dictate the magnetism or weight of the imagery, telling is where to direct our gaze. Shots are composed with foregrounds, mid-grounds, and backgrounds. This is the paradigm of cinematography, that you manipulate images in order to create the illusion of three-dimensionality on a 2D plane. This new 3D technology takes the way we naturally watch movies, and forces perspective on us by keeping our eyeballs on a tight leash.
I’d find my eyes straying from what was “in focus,” only to receive a headache as reward for my curiosity. Foreground and background elements are put (literally) right in front of you, and blurred out, causing your eyes to fight to bring those things into focus. This also creates a nasty effect where live-action elements look like cardboard cutouts compared to objects that are rendered to be “naturally” 3D. It’s difficult to explain, and not everyone notices it, but it bothered me.
You’ll notice that I’ve said very little about the narrative of the film. It’s a pressing issue, and it’s what would keep the movie from being a 3 hour tech demo.
The story is a thinly veiled allegory for 1). the Iraq War (specifically) and 2). Imperialism/Exploitation (generally). Cameron doesn’t give the audience much credit, and refuses to treat us as adults who can draw our own conclusions. That said, I agree with Avatar’s politics, personally, I just would have enjoyed a less heavy-handed approach to the subject matter.
Cameron’s an effective storyteller, though, and the majority of the film is incredibly exhilarating. My chest was thumping during the battle sequences, and I was along for the ride on most of the movie’s emotional ups-and-downs. It was emotionally manipulative without pissing me off, which is more than I can say for many films which hamfistedly attempt to elicit some kind of human response from me. Avatar is like Star Wars in that is adheres strictly to the Monomyth, but that’s a set of cliches I can’t argue against. It’s stood the test of time pretty well.
The characters were solid. I empathized with the right ones, and felt that the wrong ones were sufficiently villainous. The performances were very good, especially in regards to the digital actors. I was sold on the facial expressions and fluid animations of the Na’vi. The illusion was complete, and at very few points did I feel like I was watching a video game cinematic.
Avatar is deserving of your attention, if only because it’s a spectacle that must be seen before it leaves theaters forever. 3D television sets are too far away, and this is an experience which, regrettably, can’t be duplicated in the home.
I want to leave you with a small anecdote, which I feel sums this over-long article up quite well.
The theater was packed, and I had to sit right next to a little kid, around 7 or 8 years old. Right around the age that I was when I saw Honey, I Shrunk the Audience!. At several points during the movie, I noticed that he was waving his hands in front of his eyes, as if to scatter the leaves/dust/debris obscuring his vision. Even though I knew it was all 3D trickery, I caught myself doing the same. Just like Honey, I Shrunk the Audience! was my first experience with 3D, Avatar was this kid’s first experience with 3D. I can quantitatively say that Avatar is the better of the two, and we’ve come a long way since 1994.
Progress is an amazing thing, and if the leap forward is big enough, we’re all little kids again, and everything is a wonder.
The best advice I can give to anyone going to see this movie is to pay a visit to RunPee.com. You will have to piss by the time the credits roll, and I guarantee there will be a line at the bathrooms.
. When I did so I was playing 
, thinking to myself that the two went pretty well together.