Quite a lot’s been said about Avatar this week – but I had an opportunity to go check it out for myself last night and it greatly surpassed my expectations. Go see it!

Plotwise, it felt like James Cameron lifted pages directly from “Dances with Wolves” and “The Last Samurai”, and then threw a bunch of giant smurfs and robots in for good measure. There’s not a lot of new ground tread here, in terms of clever story twists, but it was simple, clear and paced well, and made sense, which I can’t say about a lot of other CG spectacle films. (*cough* Phantom Menace, Final Fantasy, etc *cough*)

Visually, it was stunning – really incredible production design went into every inch of the film, in particular the lush environments. The native species of plants and animals on planet Pandora look and feel like they could be real. The 3D effect from the glasses was subtle and downplayed through most of the film, but I think it plays a huge role in making the battle scenes readable – I’m curious to see the “flat” version at some point to see how it differs.

I think ‘regular’ members of the audience probably took most of it for granted, but this film was a monumental technical effort. I often forgot I was watching a nearly-entirely-CG film, the textures and lighting and character animation (mostly motion capture?) were amazingly well executed. This will be a very exciting year at Siggraph, when they explain how everything was done. I bet 80% of the talks will at least cite Avatar as an influence. I have so many questions!

I wonder how many person-years went into putting all of this together? Kudos to all of the artists I know who worked on shots for this movie – I saw a bunch of ex-Frantic credits in there mixed among a bunch of different companies. Great job, everyone! One for the history books!