The Avatar Effect

If you haven't heard of James Cameron's latest mega blockbuster movie Avatar by now then you must have been living under a rock somewhere for the last few months.

I am not going to try to review it here as many people have already done that and pretty much all of them will have done a better job of it than I could. But what I want to think about is the impact this film will have on cinema in the future. Is it really the beginning of a new era in film making, or is it just another - albeit extremely successful - film?

Avatar, as you no doubt know, is largely CGI (that's computer graphics, if you were wondering) and presented both in traditional 2D and revolutionary 3D formats. It is the largest budget film ever made, and is up there in the top two highest grossing films of all time (it may be there by now as the highest, but I haven't checked recently). This gives James Cameron the two highest grossing films ever (yes, Titanic was one of his as well). But apart from being very expensive and pretty successful by any standards, what is it about Avatar that will really change things in film?

Personally I don't think it is the 3D. There is a lot of talk about it and the effect was definitely better , but if anything I felt it was a bit of a distraction from what would have been a better film if I hadn't been watching it through a pair of polarized sunglasses. I will be going along to see it in 2D later this week hopefully if my diary allows and see for myself. I'm expecting to enjoy the film lots more in 2D than 3D, but I'll let you know.

No, where I think the real influence will come from is the quality of the CGI. Quite simply it is photoreal. There are scenes where the only possible way that you can tell the difference between it and reality is that you intellectually know that blue aliens don't exist. Or, at least, if they do it was unlikely that Mr Cameron could have filmed them in that detail, as just getting to the location would have headlined in everything from the tabloids to the science journals.

In 1977 when George Lucas released Star Wars everyone knew that it was somehow revolutionary. The camera techniques, image processing, and sound systems that he created to make the film possible had never even been imagined before let alone designed and used. It was the start of a new era in film making. Everyone adopted aspects of the techniques he developed, and Industrial Light and Magic and Skywalker Sound became household names. Films changed forever.

And now comes along Avatar. Everyone thought they knew what CGI looked like, knew its limitations, and knew that they would certainly know the difference between a rendered alian and a real human in an alien suit. But Avatar has redefined all that.

Films will never be the same again. And personally I'm really excited to see what's coming next. Star Wars was just the beginning of a generation and so much more followed, raising the game every time.

And Avatar is the beginning of the next.