Scale and Fluidity

It seems churlish to criticize James Cameron's Avatar, but to get it out of the way, yes, the story becomes increasingly predictable as it goes along and, yes, the characters are skin -- or maybe texture map -- deep. The two standout performances are the vets. The level of gratitude felt when Sigourney Weaver first shows up is palpable, back for her second run with Cameron after he upped her Ridley character in Aliens. She not only provides pleasure in human form, but she also takes to her Na'vi avatar with complete commitment and is the most recognizable transformation of all the characters, kitten-like as native. And Stephen Lang, now in a late-career movie renaissance, is the best possible fit as military villain for this particular movie, a 3D Sgt. Rock-type figure bursting out from the screen more than any of the others, gorgeous claw-mark scars on the side of is head and one of the most memorable moments when he steps out in to the poisonous Pandora atmosphere to try to shoot down a heli-gizmo himself -- only once an aide comes out with an oxygen mask do we realize he's been holding his breath.

While I wouldn't be surprised if Cameron is once again passed over for a Best Screenplay nomination, the story does succeed in all it's pastiche in being moving at points and rousing at others, an obvious adaptation of the tragic genocide of the Native American peoples and culture, crossed with a little Iraq War resource grab. The politics are pleasing, and one can see potential sequels that could take the paradigms even further.

It's this emotional bigness that will secure Avatar the Best Picture/Most Picture award, and why not. The movie has something of a textbook quality, in the sense that future filmmakers will take lessons from it's use of both 3D and performance capture, and I'm betting some of them may think they're making further advances, only to go back to the source and find Cameron's already explored the particular possibility they have in mind.

Due to some past work in videogame production, I've been through the motion capture process, but the advances over the past decade have been huge, to the point where Cameron has solved two of the biggest problems. One is immediate feedback -- evidently he was able to do real-time compositing into rough versions of the 3D environments, effectively allowing him to edit in production and when the actors went home each night. No need to shoot coverage or even shoot shots in the traditional sense, just very advanced data capture and manipulation, a new form of shooting and editing, or at least on a scale never attempted before. (The Lord of the Rings series, particularly Gollum, is the most obvious and closest antecedent.) The other is facial capture, which Robert Zemeckis has tried perfecting on his recent 3D movies, always falling short on the eyes in particular, which is to say the most critical aspect of a film actor's performance. And this is where Cameron hits it out of the park.

Evidently the performance capture suits used by Cameron have a novel device, a camera on a headpiece pointing right back at the actor's face, no doubt with a wide angle lens married to some sort of software that maps with high accuracy to the character model faces. There's not a glimmer of disbelief that we're watching Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, CCH Pounder, Wes Studi, Sigourney et al giving the performance, and if there's an animator's hand further shaping or honing the facial tics and eye darts, it's not evident.

Then there's the 3D, which is used more to pull the viewer in than project out as has been overdone in the past. There's a brilliant early shot inside a huge space transport as Worthington and other cybernauts come out of cryogenic sleep that took my breath away, deep focus and deep 3D that would have made cinematographer Gregg Toland Citizen Kane jealous, a solid sci-fi image that made me want to delve deeper into that world, a fine way to get us started.

I saw it in IMAX which is the most Most Movie available, quite a treat, and essential to get the full impact of the more vertiginous scenes on the planet, high in the trees, above waterfalls, climbing floating mountains for which Yes album artist Roger Dean should earn a royalty. I pretty easily forgot that the entire planet -- as far as I know -- was an artificial construct, probably helped along by the life and death, avatar vs. lethal Pandoran nature early scenes. I certainly wasn't thinking about it during the big huge climactic battle, a new benchmark in mass destruction, impressive even by previous Cameron standards.

So is this The Jazz Singer of 2009, the movie game-changer? In terms of 3D, it's a big advance, but a lot of it was on the way -- Up stands out from this past year as a movie that used 3D successfully for scale and expansiveness, Coraline in a different way for atmosphere. In terms of performance capture, y-e-s.

It's all about scale and fluidity. Congrats to Cameron for making the ten-foot tall Na'vis convincing, and their size in some of their scenes with humans pries open the imagination as well. And for an art form that has historical striven for seamlessness, as the development of sound with pictures led to a more mimetic and immersive experience, the seamless integration of performance captures is a major achievement.

One has to wonder...what's next, Jim?