You know, this movie was sold out in our little local theater, for every showing, and that never happens. It’s got blue people, mixes live action with CGI, and it’s in 3-D. In general, I find 3-D unnecessary. I avoided Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, one of my dream children’s books (the story of a world where food rains from the sky. The book has illustrations where people hold out plates and receive spaghetti and meatballs, pancakes, ice cream. How can you not love that?) I didn’t like the use of 3-D in Harry Potter and could have lived without it in Up. In general, I have found it an incredibly distracting and vertigo-inducing technology. Keep your 3-D away from my movie entertainment, thank you.
However, if Avatar keeps selling well, along with other 3-D flicks, there will just be more and more movies with this technology. I loved Avatar. I thought it was an awesome movie (in a very different way Up in the Air was awesome), with its 3-D technology an intrinsic part of what made it annoying. It helps that the story is not Titantic-shallow (did you see Kate Winslet deliver dialogue in a musical theater-style American accent? “I won’t leave you, Jack!” Big ewww.) This story won’t grab everyone, but I dug its pro-nature, pro-spirituality message with corporate/military America as the big bad wolf. It was kind of like Braveheart with blue people.
The 3-D in this picture didn’t make the room spin, looked cool, and was an essential, not incidental, part of the storytelling where you enter this alternate, magical reality. The world of the Ne’vi, or the Giant, Fit, Fat-Free Blue People, features entirely made up flora, fauna, nature, insects, and wild animals.
P.S. I ended up dreaming I was one of the blue people with giant frog legs and Husband was like my tiny human companion. The blue people are big in the movie and make human adults look like babies in their arms.