dr_phil_physics | Entries tagged with avatar

If you aren't reading The World SF News Blog or its LJ feed at

world_sf, then you're missing an interesting window into non-Western, or perhaps even more-so, non-American SF/F. Today there was a nice piece on World Building in a Hot Climate by Anil Menon.

Just a little over a week ago I was reading my PHYS-2070 science literacy papers and was reflecting on the world building of Frank Herbert's Dune. When we write SF, we often want to write about "the other". That might be other technology, other species, other philosophies -- and other worlds. Too often what we see in SF is generic Central Casting planets, with perfectly temperate shirt sleeve weather and homogenous populations. Yes Star Trek, I'm looking at you. (grin) At least Star Wars made an attempt to go from desert to jungle to ice planet. When I reviewed James Cameron's Avatar, I commented on the here-again / gone-again nature of the "hellish" conditions of Pandora:

If I had one complaint, it's that you tend to forget that Pandora is described as sort of a Hell -- and though every once in a while you see a shimmer of air as a human goes through an airlock into the world of Pandora, you don't always remember the oppressive heat. And even that isn't a huge complaint. Why? Because for the Na'vi it's home. They're comfortable in it. It's not like taking an Eskimo and throwing them into the Amazon rainforest for them. Just those puny fragile humans.

So what I end up with is both a complaint on consistency and the realization that for the Na'vi what we're describing is "normal". World building. But whose world?

In Menon's piece on

world_sf, there is this startling admission: "What we often find in Indian SF is world-reusing, not world-building."

How many of us are guilty of that? To me, I think one of the problems of having mega-successful SF like Star Trek and Star Wars means that it is too easy to have a mental image from the movies as your stock footage in your mind. And even when you do come up with your own world building, you can either succumb to the shorthand of describing it to someone as "like Star Trek or Star Wars" or having someone accuse you of doing it that way. But not if you really embrace your world building and come up with something well defined and definitely "the other". (grin)

Anyway, check out the article, because I'm riffing on just one small aspect of the piece, and also

world_sf. You know, you don't have to actually leave this planet or this time to find something which is truly of "the other".

Dr. Phil

Current Mood: intrigued

No Commute

Despite the solemnity of yesterday's holiday, having weekdays without the 2 ½-3 hours of commuting five days a week, means one does have to take the time to do some errands. Knowing that I'd be in Holland MI to see about getting a recalcitrant laptop fixed, I checked the movie times and what do you know -- the Holland 7 was showing Avatar in 3-D at 2:50pm. I could just make it and still be home a little after 6pm.

Things I Never Thought I'd Hear About A Movie Projector

I got to the theatre just in time for the previews, which played on the far left of the screen, maybe one-quarter or less of the real estate. Odd, but I figured that they were going to switch projectors later for the 3D feature. Since the crowd was pretty thin, I scoped out a seat near the center of the first row of the stadium rear part of the theatre, where there's a railing and no seats in front of you so you can stretch out. But after the second trailer, I spied one of the wide body loveseats in the last row of the front section, near center, with a railing on the left side next to the cutouts for wheelchairs. So I switched and found myself with good legroom and hiproom. Yay.

Pretty much missed the third trailer making the switch. And then the Fox movie logo, in 3D, but still on the small piece of screen. Huh? Movie began, still had trouble with the 3D focus in the zero-gee opening. About the time Jake was getting stuff from his locker... the movie stopped. Continued, still wrong, stopped again. Within a minute, someone appeared in the rear of the theatre, apologized, and said there was obviously a size problem and they were working on it. Tried again after a couple of minutes. Still wrong. New announcement -- they were going to have to reboot the projectors "from a difference source." Cue Tim Allen questioning grunt. Mwr-huh? It was going to take fifteen minutes.

Now I've been to movies where they've forgotten about, or in one case broke, the anamorphic lens which stretched the width to its proper aspect ratio. Very weird way to watch a movie. But this digital dilemma was a new one on me. But I have to say, it was their first 3D show of the day. Don't know if they were getting the movie via hard drives or Internet downloads, but they could have had ended up with the wrong projector source. Or something. And kudos to the Goodrich Theatre people at the Holland 7 for bothering to tell us what was going on. Can not tell you how many times I've been in audiences left in the dark like passengers awaiting an airline flight that's been delayed. Also, they immediately offered full refunds to anyone who didn't want to stay, and that the person who came to us would personally take care of anyone at the concession stand who wanted a free small drink. I didn't -- it's a long movie and I hadn't had a pee break before (grin) -- but it was a nice gesture. Customer service. It's one way of actually getting your customers to come back to your little theatre.

I will say one thing: having seen the 3D logo on the tiny quarter-screen, I think that 3D television will be something to see when quality 3D material, like Avatar's visuals, becomes available for the home market.

3:28pm, tried another restart, failed. 3:38pm, our 2:50pm movie finally restarted, from the opening again, full screen size -- though they did have to re-center the projector as the movie began.

Avatar 3D [PG-13]

Holland 7 Theatre #2, Monday 18 Jan 2010, 2:50pm, $9.25

Can it really be four weeks ago -- Monday 21 December 2009 -- that we saw Avatar in 3-D IMAX? In such a span the movie has churned to near the all-time box office take, though admitted with higher 2D, even higher 3D and ever higher IMAX 3D, ticket pricing that either Titanic or The Dark Knight, and picked off Best Picture and Best Director at the Golden Globes on Sunday night. And then there's the online discussions, from people disappointed with the White Man Saves Blue Smurf Savages From Themselves theme, annoyed at the rip-off of plots from Dances With Wolves to Ferngully, disgusted with James Cameron's attitude toward military/corporations/what-have-you, or even determined Never To See This Movie.

A number of people on the web have suggested that the 30 frame per second digital 3D projection was actually sharper and clearer than the 24 fps IMAX 3D projection. That was one of the reasons for me seeing this again, to make the comparison. But it was hard to make a comparison, because like the IMAX 3D, I was having trouble with the 3D in the floating zero-gee part. And now the scenes with close-ups, like Jake wheeling across the landing field or rolling into the military pep talk, there was an artificialness to the 3D -- again I'm dating myself and mentioning the old Viewmaster 3D disks of the 60s with their 3D "layers".

Just as we get to the part where the "chopper" sets down and Jake, in his big blue avatar, is on his first mission, the movie stops again. They apologize again and said that the focus is off and they have to reboot again. I'd actually been thinking of bailing and taking the refund, because the 3D sucked compared to what we'd seen in IMAX 3D. It's about 3:58pm.

Folks, let me tell you something. This audience of about a dozen souls, was mostly gray and white hairs. I might've been the youngest person there. The elderly couple two rows forward, I knew his hearing wasn't good and he wasn't happy with the 3D glasses. His wife, during this last intermission, sent yet another text message to their daughter saying there were problems and she told him that their daughter said to stick with it, that the 3D was amazing. When they got restarted, the party of avatars is heading into the forest, and immediately they are surrounded by buzzing bugs and all kinds of plants. They'd fixed it. For real. Finally.

The audience gasped. Audibly. More than once. You wouldn't have believed that there were only a dozen people in that big theatre. There was an amazed buzz of excitement as all these older people talked to each other for the next couple of minutes at the wonders of Pandora were unfolded.

It was dramatic as all hell to go from crappy disappointing unhappy 3D indexing/focusing to razor sharp, fully integrated and registered 3D. It practically brought tears to my eyes then, and even thinking about it now while I type this, I'm tearing up. You cannot imagine. It had to have been like that moment in 1939 when MGM pulled off the cheapest trick in the book with The Wizard of Oz when we suddenly go to Technicolor in Oz. You couldn't have planned a more gee-whiz holy cow OMG moment to display how good the technology was by starting to make it work half an hour into the movie, rather than trying to stun us with floating beads of sweat in zero-gee.

This isn't the review of a second viewing of Avatar that I'd planned on making, but for me this was an amazing experience. Despite having seen the movie before, on a giant IMAX screen at that, and having read pages and pages of Internet comments and complaints, old jaded Dr. Phil got sucker punched and bowled over by this amazing contrast and blasted by a renewed Sensawunder.

Yeah, the bad lines, the obvious story line, the comparisons with half a dozen works by other people -- they're all still there. But you know? I didn't bloody care. It was like the first time I saw Raiders of the Lost Ark and sitting in stunned silence afterwards, watched a whole new crowd come it -- and I sat through it a second time, and dammit it was still entertaining. That's what James Cameron can capture, flawed though he may be. $300 million be damned, the man has put it all up on the screen.

We might not be able to live through a James Cameron movie if he could write a truly magnificent script. Blood vessels would just burst somewhere in the last "reel" before the credits began. And we'd die happy.

Highly Recommended

Trailers: There's a summer action adventure comedy that looks hilarious, despite starring Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz, called Knight and Day. "Drop your weapon or I'll shoot myself and then kill you." Uh, wait a sec... don't you mean...? Might have to see this one.

Dr. Phil

Current Mood: amazed

In An Earlier Time

Back in the summer of 2001, before the world changed, a movie came out which threatened to change everything about moviemaking. Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within was not a hit in the U.S. The plot wasn't American enough -- too Japanese for most people's taste. And though Final Fantasy had been a huge hit video game franchise, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within seemingly had no connection to the characters and plots of all the FF game versions. So you can't even rank it amongst the legions of failed video game tie-in movies.

Watch any of the dreadful Sci Fi Channel (now the sissy SyFy) monster movies and you can see way-too-obvious CGI pasted into the live action. Unnatural movements, obviously faked. CGI sucked in most applications.

But Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within changed the game -- they shot the whole thing in CGI. Used motion capture on the actors, wrote Physics programs to handle the movement of fabric and even modeled 50,000 independent hairs on the head. Brilliantly, they made the "monsters" these luminescent transparent phantoms and featured holographic control and display systems that hung suspended glowing in the air. Seamless between humans, sets, technology and creatures.

I'm one of the few who loved Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. They should've reshot the earliest footage, because the hand and facial movements hadn't been nailed down as well. But it wasn't bad, not bad at all. I especially appreciated the virtual cameras and lenses they used -- they even had lens flare and aperture rings, to say nothing of reflections and depth of field.

And it's been for me the gold standard in realistic computer generated moviemaking. Until now...

Folks, the game has changed. Completely. Forever. Avatar is the most amazing movie. It's blow-you-away where-were-you-when-it-came-out like seeing first-run 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Wars, or Raiders of the Lost Ark, Titanic, The Lord of the Rings or (for me at least) Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within.

Everybody early on wanted to complain that James Cameron stole this or that story for Avatar. It's Ferngully. It's Dances With Wolves... with Smurfs. It's Dragonriders of Pern, it's The Word For World Is Forest. I have to say, Cameron himself acknowledges Dances With Wolves as an inspiration, but much as I said for the movie Moon earlier this year, "But could we just please talk about Avatar as a Science Fiction movie of its own?"

Because anything less at first blush does Avatar a huge disfavor. Sure, it's James Cameron, which means maybe it's heavy handed in parts and the script doesn't feature the most sparkling of dialogue. But we got the same sort of whining before Titanic came out. You know, the way too expensive break the budget $200 million epic where we all know what is going to happen and has a sappy love story. A love story I might add drew a lot of people in to the point where, about halfway through, suddenly this iceberg intruded on the story and it's OMG it's an iceberg what's gonna happen now?!

No, really, Avatar in IMAX 3D is that good. And more.

Avatar IMAX 3D [PG-13]

Celebration North IMAX Theatre, Monday 21 Dec 2009, 3pm

I first saw To Fly in one of the first IMAX theatres at the Air and Space Museum in Washington DC when it was new. The huge screen and sharp picture put you right into a hot air balloon -- and in the cockpit of the Blue Angels. We've seen some feature movies converted to IMAX, including a couple of Harry Potter installments, the last of which had 15 minutes in IMAX 3D. And I've seen a couple of IMAX 3D movies, including the spectacular and REAL Space Station 3D. Nor is this James Cameron's first foray into IMAX 3D, that goes to James Cameron's Ghosts of the Abyss.

In our IMAX theatre, the sweet spot for me is dead center, rows 3 or 4. We were able to get dead center, row 2, which meant bending the neck a little more craning around to see everything. But this was not a problem.

Avatar is everything that IMAX 3D has ever promised. Yes, it's being shown in regular 3D and 2D, and if you don't have a local IMAX, go see the Real 3D version, I'm sure. 3D has been a gimmick in far too many films. And I know people who've complained of vertigo in both IMAX theatres and 3D in any format. But 3D is being used here to create a world, not shock you. The opening, inside the cylinder of a massive starship, seemed a little ViewMaster 3D to me -- not sure if it was the setting or just getting the eyes adjusted to the 3D or whether they screwed up. But after a minute, you forget that it's a gimmick. Because you are THERE.

And CGI creatures, worlds and motion capture "people"? Look, I used to tell people that if Titanic cost $200 million to make, then at least for once every penny ended up on the screen. Well, if Avatar cost $300 million to make, then you really have to understand that every penny has ended up on the screen. I'd say "unbelievable", but that's wrong. It's totally BELIEVABLE.

I suspect there are fighter pilots who will weep at never being able to truly "plug in and fly". And the virtual camerawork that goes along with flying is unprecedented. I have never seen anyone take the Gundum/giant fighting suit concept and make it workable. Until now. Totally ramped up beyond the wonderful loaders he had in Aliens. I've never seen anyone create a complete ecosystem to the point that entire vistas had to have been created totally on the computer.

The CGI and live action filming is seamlessly interwoven. There are no breaks, no lines, no errors in lighting. Once, in a long shot of Na'vi scampering up a "vine", I thought the movements looked a little too Gollum for my taste, but though they forget about it most of the time, Pandora is supposed to be a lower gravity world than Earth. With that opening 3D scene mentioned earlier, that makes TWO shots where I questioned the filmmaking. Two. In a 162 minute epic. Compare that to the lovingly detailed list of glitches we all saw in the original Star Wars. (grin)

After the initial introduction, you soon tend to forget that the Na'vi are ten feet tall -- until you see them next to those puny, pitiful humans in the air masks.

What does this computer and 3D immersion get you? It gets you pulsating floating seeds which are so lovely and soft you can feel them. It gets an undercover of flowering plants which you can almost smell the sickeningly overpowering scent. It gets you creatures full of teeth and too many legs and eyes, which though alien, you can connect with. Hell, it even gets you 3D snapshots on the wall, which pan as you walk past them. This is the future.

Pandora is a real place. I have seen it.

For those of you who don't want a tree-hugging eco movie or some dewy eyed love story, fear not. Like Titanic, Cameron knows how to mix types and show you an action flick. As far as military hardware goes, besides walking fighting suits, he's got these wonderful future-gen helicopters. Sure, the body is not that much beyond a Blackhawk, but the twin ducted fan (or at least guarded) contra-rotating blades screams high tech functionality.

And Cameron knows how to do big. Whether its starships, bases, strip mines, earthmoving equipment, trees, creatures. Explosions. Remember Cameron put real wood beams and columns in his Titanic interiors just so they'd break and splinter properly. The man knows how to turn solid wood into chunks and splinters.

This isn't some campy Ewoks versus Imperial Stormtroopers fight. This is deadly serious.

If I had one complaint, it's that you tend to forget that Pandora is described as sort of a Hell -- and though every once in a while you see a shimmer of air as a human goes through an airlock into the world of Pandora, you don't always remember the oppressive heat. And even that isn't a huge complaint. Why? Because for the Na'vi it's home. They're comfortable in it. It's not like taking an Eskimo and throwing them into the Amazon rainforest for them. Just those puny fragile humans.

You become one with the Na'vi. They are real. I've seen them.

And I want to see them again. Soon. Just to look around this world.

And you know what? It'll still be worth every penny of the extra fare IMAX 3D ticket price.

Highest Recommendation

Dr. Phil

PS - I urge you to read Jim Wright's excellent essay Avatar: Simple Astounding (Spoiler Free) on Stonekettle Station.

PPS - Wikipedia's article mentions that James Cameron has a trio of scripts for an Avatar trilogy. Just saying.