Avatar a Huge Hit

James Cameron delivers another hit at the box up, in an attempt to find a successor to Titanic. Avatar delivers the goods, says the Boston Herald:

After 12 years of waiting to see what the “King-of-the-World” and director of “Aliens” (1986) and “The Terminator” (1984) was going to do next, Cameron’s given us an eye-popping, if obviously derivative 3-D geek-spectacular for the “World of Warcraft” crowd. Shot using state-of-the-art motion-capture technology, the film tells the story of Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a Marine whose legs have been paralyzed.

Special effects in this movie are paramount and they deliver, probably enduring over time:

Cameron seamlessly melds live action, computer-generated animation and 3-D technology. The motion-capture technique that dazzled in Lord of the Rings reaches a new level of proficiency, enabling more nuance in facial expressions.

But why diminish all this with clunky dialogue?

Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) is a former Marine, now in a wheelchair, recruited to Pandora. Humans are there at the behest of a powerful corporation mining a mineral that could solve the energy crisis on ravaged Earth.

Pandoran air is toxic to Earthlings. So scientists create a program in which human “drivers” are connected to avatars, bodies created in the lab that look like the natives of Pandora, called Na’vi, and can survive in the environment. Human DNA is mixed with Pandoran DNA, and these hybrid beings are sent on reconnaissance.

The 161 minute movie is a leap forward technologically, says Andy Klein in Brand X:

I’ve never seen a 3-D feature that made me especially hungry for more . . . until now. “Avatar” truly is spectacular. It’s hard to assess how much of this leap forward has to do with technology or with Cameron’s central aesthetic choice — i.e., he resists the temptation to have images fly out into the auditorium. With a few discreet exceptions, he simply expands the depth behind the plane of the screen. You feel as though you’re looking through a window or a visor into a real space. Add to that the extraordinarily detailed computer-generated environments and the result is an unprecedented sense of immersion.