Okay, I know it’ s been metformin hcl 1000 mg less than a week since I professed my undying love for giant blue aliens in the form of a college length essay, but I’ve got more to say. In my Avatar review I stated that it’s one of the most important films in the history of cinema. A statement like that needs to be explained.
Anyone who’s been to film school knows that Film History 101 always contains a screening of at least one film like Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) or Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925). Why? I can assure you it’s not because your Professor will think that you’ll like it and I’m pretty sure I fell asleep when I had to watch Metropolis, but for it’s time, it was mind-blowing. Lang used miniatures to create the grand scope of a world and set the standard for how anyone who followed him would make a Science Fiction film. Unfortunately, there’s no way for any of us to really understand that impact unless we were there, just like I can’t imagine what it was like for young and old alike to walk into a theatre in 1977 and see Star Wars.
For decades we’ve had these benchmarks that have risen above their mediums and transcended what we thought was possible. It was more than just listening to an album or going to the movies; it was an experience. I wish I understood what it was like to hear “Thriller” for the first time or see Star Wars on the big screen in 1977. Even though I’m irrationally petrified of sharks because of Jaws, I still can’t imagine how frightening that must have been nearly 35 years ago. All our lives we’ve heard of things like this and how emotionally compelling they were in ways that cannot be explained with words but only through experience. They don’t come around often, and when they do, you have to cherish them because otherwise you’re missing out on something that you may never be able to replicate.
When The Dark Knight (TDK) came out last summer I was intent on seeing it in IMAX. TDK was the first narrative feature film to be shot using the IMAX format. It wasn’t fully shot in IMAX (due to the simple cost of film and enormously cumbersome camera) but select scenes were with the intention of bringing to life a film in a way we’ve never seen before. Honestly, I’ll never forget what it felt like to see that IMAX image for the first time in TDK. My mouth nearly dropped to the floor at the astounding quality of the image. I saw it twice more in IMAX and refused to see it in a regular theatre simply because I knew that there was no way that image would be given justice on your standard screen. If it was re-released in IMAX again I would be the first in line to get a ticket.
But really, this wasn’t a monumental achievement in cinema history. Anyone could have done it, and with the success of TDK‘s IMAX sales, Michael Bay quickly decided to do the same with Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen. Unfortunately, he’s about 1/86th the filmmaker that Christopher Nolan is and did not utilize the format well. Nolan understood the format and knew how it had to be filmed before he even turned on the camera. He knew that cutting from IMAX to standard footage would be jarring and would need a touch of finesse, and mostly shot entire sequences in IMAX, but also used establishing cityscapes to transition scenes. Bay, on the other hand, just decided to do certain shots in particular, and would cut rapidly back and forth between the two formats, which ultimately made the image irrelevant.
So why is Avatar so important? When I left the theatre I finally understood what I’d heard all my life. I firmly believe that the impact and revolutionary influence of Avatar supersedes nearly anything that has come before it. You wanna throw the Star Wars argument at me? Well, if you wish to get into details, how about the small fact that Stanley Kubrick was already flying into space with miniatures 9 years before Lucas with 2001: A Space Odyssey, now regarded as a masterpiece and cornerstone of the genre? Jaws created the wheel. Jaws is the “Thriller” in cinema history and rewrote the book on how movies were released and spawned the familiar term “Summer Blockbuster.” What year was that? 1975, still two years earlier than Star Wars.
More recently the new big technology has become motion capture. Motion capture (MoCap) is simply where an actor performs on a stage and his “performance” is captured by hundreds of cameras. MoCap exploded on the scene in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers with the computer generated character of Gollum, played by then unknown Andy Serkis. Knowing full well what went into this technology, I believe Andy Serkis should not only have been nominated for an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor, but he also should have won. To see him perform, crawl around, and speak with the now infamous voice of Gollum is remarkable. He created that character and that performance — not a computer — and there are few who could pull off what he did. Yet he remains under-appreciated.
Sitting on an idea he’d had since the 90′s and waiting for technology to catch up, when James Cameron saw Gollum he knew the time had come. He saw the future more clearly than any of us could have possibly imagined, and given Cameron’s track record this should come as no surprise. He had a dream of bringing back the experience of going to the movies in a way that probably hadn’t been achieved since Star Wars. In a digital world where portability is paramount in society the theatre experience was dying. In the past 10 years 3D has been the logical jumping off point and this was the third go round with the technology after it’s failure in the 50′s and 80′s. 3D was a way to bring in more money and force the public to get back into going to the movies instead of downloading them on their computers or buying bootlegs in the streets to watch in the comfort of their own home.
3D became one thing and one thing only: a gimmick. No one had really understood the potential yet. It wasn’t about how much fun you could make it by having a sword come inches from your face in a theatre. It was about bringing the audience into a fully immersive experience at the movie theatre. James Cameron understood this and knew what had to be done. Basically, in one fell swoop, Cameron made the most important film in the history of cinema standing in a mostly empty warehouse. Gone are the times of location scouting and waiting for good weather or seven days for the perfect sunset (as Cameron did for the infamous kissing scene in Titanic). Gone are the costs of film processing or waiting months to see a fully completed digital effect added to the original shot of a scene. Cameron erased everything. He ushered in a technology where he could stand on an empty stage with a handheld monitor, hold it up in the room, and not see that same stage on the screen, but the vast world of Pandora, or really, anything he could imagine. Cameron could make dreams a reality and for the first time bring a world to life that is so real you feel as if he must have discovered another planet and isn’t telling anyone.
Has any film so vastly changed the future of the medium before? Maybe. But we might have to travel back to 1894 when Thomas Edison invented the Kinetoscope and the first commercial exhibition of moving images on a screen was held in New York City. 115 YEARS AGO. Could this be the last time a single event had so great an impact? It very well may be. So you see, Avatar is more than a movie. It’s an experience like no other. It’s a reason to get off your couch and go to a theatre. And if that’s not enough convincing, how about this: During the production of Avatar, Steven Spielberg, who has always been set in his ways of film and unwilling to adopt the digital medium more so than any other filmmaker working today, stopped by to see what Cameron was doing. He was so impressed that he immediately went and made a film using the same technology that will be released Christmas 2011.
Don’t ignore the future. It’s here. Please, I beg you, don’t miss out on the experience of seeing Avatar in 3D. 20 years from now Avatar will be remembered by those who saw it for the first time and could say with absolutely certainty it was a glimpse into the future and they knew they were witnessing a milestone in the history of cinema.
For more information, WIRED magazine wrote a great little piece on the basics of how filming a scene works. Here it is.
