This movie was one I anticipated for some time. I’m a Sci-Fi geek, a movie freak, and a Cameron disciple (ever since Terminator 2). Most important to me today however: seeing whether the world of cinema was about to change forever… or not. My review will *not* be about the story, but about a number of themes it addresses, namely the 3D experience, motion capture, and (some spoilers) it’s environmental message.

First, the 3D experience. I’m afraid I didn’t like it very much from where I was sitting. And that I learned is one of the keys to watching a 3D flick, you have to experience it just right.

A couple of thoughts on the human experience: You have to wear glasses, you have to sit in the right place, and no one can pass the screen to go to the bathroom or else all is destroyed.

• The glasses: there are generally 2 types of glasses used in 3D cinema, active ones with shutter technology, and passive ones, which are just like regular, slightly over-sized sunglasses. I used the latter. Having biked for 30 min. at full speed just to get to the cinema on time (that’s how geeky I am about this), I found that sweat really didn’t agree with these glasses. The cinema provided me with one of those alcohol drenched tissues, but that definitely didn’t last me through the two+ hour movie. For the rest, I found them a little dark and the image without them was a lot clearer, though of course not meant for regular 2D viewing.
• Sitting just right: so I arrived to a packed cinema, meaning that I had to sit bottom-center-right and also that I have to try to see the movie again in a more empty cinema. To me the viewing experience definitely seemed sub-par and I will have to research optimal placement prior to seeing my next 3D movie.
• Other people’s bladders: so a couple of things disrupted the experience: my seating position, the subtitles, and people passing the 3D screen to go to the bathroom. The latter seemed to disrupt the image physically with the light of the entire image actually changing, and my thought is that they must have disrupted the beamer in some way. And while the subtitles seemed to float as much as the rest of the objects (see next paragraphs), they took away from the illusion of staring into a wonderful 3D world at times.

Generally, I think that Avatar should actually be viewed in an IMAX theater, which has a far larger screen and is designed for 3D, and not a regular cinema converted to 3D, which seems to be all the rage these days. And while dubbed movies kind of suck, I think it may be a better choice for people like me residing in a non-English country.

THE BIG QUESTION: So how was the actual 3D? Apart from the qualms I mentioned, actually pretty interesting! A few years ago, I watched Superman Returns at an IMAX, which required me to put and take my 3D glasses on and off as a green or red symbol appeared on screen and that sucked. But for Avatar, I could keep the glasses on all the time.

The 3D itself wasn’t the pop-out kind either, rather it was like you were looking into a window at 3D objects. In one scene, Sam Worthington’s character was exploring the alien jungle and looking at some exquisite flowers and it felt to me like I was standing opposite him looking at the same objects, which was nothing short of amazing!

I liked 3D a lot in slow scenes like this, but fast scenes such as battles were a little harder to follow. Cameron tells one hell of a story though, which drew you into the picture regardless.

Topic 2: Motion capture
The actual revolution that this movie is supposed to herald is the new kind of motion capture used, called performance capture. As far as I understand it, it allows for a few innovations in film making: accurately capturing face movement, having real characters interact realistically with virtual ones, and, for the camera person, seeing in realtime the result of the performance capture through the camera’s viewfinder.

THE BIG QUESTION: did it work? Hell yes!!! You notice it first with the female antagonist, Neytiri played by Zoe Saldaña (I had no idea!), who is completely “performance captured,” and whom you fall in love with within a few minutes. Her face shows an amazing range of emotions, from anger to joy, that demands an emotional response from the viewer. The last time I found myself infatuated with a virtual character was in King Kong, where I felt real sympathy with this fantastical character that Peter Jackson brought to screen.

Topic 3: the environmental message (limited spoilers ahead!)
Yes, one of the strongest themes of this movie was preserving a planet, respecting it’s inhabitants, both plant and creature. It was very powerful, I thought, but some people may consider it as preachy.

The problem with this message is that following it would require us to abandon 99% of our technology and return to a lifestyle more connected with nature and I’m very sceptical that this could ever happen, certainly not in time for this century’s crisis.

What Avatar manages to show is that the human race, through it’s relentless need for progress and profit, will always end up destroying that which exists in order to create something new. Avatar condemns our race to a “dying planet” and it can’t send a sadder message than that.

In Conclusion:
Above all, Avatar is an Action and Sci-Fi flick, and a good one at that, but it also makes you think, which many of Cameron’s movie seem to do. Definitely a re-watch for me, both on the silver and the small screen.

Rating: 7/10

Vincent
(p.s. minus the added formatting and picture just now, this post was written on an iPod Touch, forever dispelling my notion that typing on a touch screen is impossible. It did lead to some typos & grammar errors, mostly caused by it’s 95% useful predictive spelling engine.)

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I’m starting to think that I’m wayy too interested in maps and geographical coordinates. Things like Google Maps and GPS just make me want to make something great out of all the information we have lying around and put in a map context. I think this is also the reason behind all the location based services, everyone is trying to see what would work. Most of them are fun experiments, but let’s see what sticks.

Finnish boxy architecture, now on Google Earth.

The one thing that reminds me that we do live in a future foretold by all the great 80′s sci-fi movies is Google Earth on iPhone and especially it’s useless feature where you can change the view by tilting the phone. It serves no purpose whatsoever, but it’s cool and feels like “future”. I think Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash really showed the vision what Google Maps/Earth ultimately could become (think real-time satellite feeds).

A while back magical elves -generated buildings started appear in selected cities in Google Earth, which was also pretty cool. Unfortunately these magical elves were somewhat sloppy about the finer architectural points of our human buildings so most of them look like boxes – and, well, some of the 60-70′s era concrete buildings are in fact (ugly) boxes.

So, when Google revealed their new Building Maker, I was pretty much hooked. It allows you to easily model buildings out of aerial photography. And if you’re good enough, those models might just end up on Google Earth.

This tool reminded me of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, which was also interesting in how it allowed to harness the human processing capability to tasks unsuited to computers (or magical elves, who don’t grasp our architectural styles). Some might remember how it was used (unsuccessfully) to search for the remains of Steve Fosset’s plane. Google does have some experience in this fields as well, they did something similar with their Google Image Labeler, which paired random people in a game of labeling images. Unlike Mechanical Turk, Image Labeler was mostly harmless fun and a game to kill time for participants. It is this fun part that I find really important in these things. I think Google accidentally or on purpose have also some fun elements in Building Maker, in addition to it’s crack-like addictiveness level.

The best thing about the Building Maker is that it runs in your browser and is dead simple to use. It’s fun. It’s like a small flash game, but instead of just wasting time you waste time in benefit of a commercial, listed company.

So, now I have 25 models worthy of Google’s acceptance criteria. It’s these accomplishments that keep me coming back to model things. Unfortunately, many models were rejected by Google and that of course isn’t fun. The main reasons for rejections so far have been “Incomplete texturing” and “Floating”. The frustrating thing about this is there’s very little I can do about these two problems. It’s a bit frustrating to notice that Google doesn’t have imagery for all sides of the building after you have started to model a building and short of renting a plane and taking pictures yourself there’s not much you can do. Floating is even more frustrating, because there’s very little hinting you can do to tell the modeling software that the box you’re trying to make should, in fact, be on ground level instead of floating couple of meters in the air.

Yes, if you want, you can import the model from Google’s servers into SketchUp and refine the model there, but that’s both extremely difficult and requires a lot of effort. Not fun, but maybe, just maybe, that refining could get your model listed…

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