What makes Avatar so immersive? It is all affect.
Jake, as we are introduced to him, and thus what we experience with him as the protagonist, is that he is crippled, slower than the rest, barely keeping up, and at peace with it -- but with an obvious handicap.
Something about the movements of the avatars, was intoxicating -- I could swear that the 'normal' human sequences were filmed with a lower grade camera or something .. certainly the lighting was frequently different, the sets were always interior, cold, metallic ...
... and then the transformation into the avatar was not just about the avatar body (although that was significant, those initial moments of the experiencing the body), but about breaking through to outside, the exhilaration of suddenly being able to walk, run, be free .. but other affectative elements, like biting into a fruit .. the (irrational) implication is that tasting the fruit, like running and feeling the ground beneath your feet, is that somehow more visceral than experienced even as a fully-functioning human. The implication is that avatar-experience is somehow more alive and awake than what it is to experience it as *any* human.
That coupled with the miracle of the actor-expression motion capture elevated the affectative experience to a whole other level.
Some other nitpicks:
The avatar body is seen in the fluid container as dreaming. To dream means to have a brain, to have consciousness. Does this mean Jake's avatar is actually its own fully sentient person? If so then the avatar sequence means they are taking over a sentient being -- they never address this.
What is the range of the avatar connection? Miles? Tens of miles? Hundreds of miles? How do they do that? Seems implausible. But of course there would be no movie if they couldn't move freely in another totally different reality without constraints .. to point out, "oh, we can only go <x> miles" would jar the audience out of the experience.
The things about this movie that work the best are things that are not rational -- they are affectative, they are purely emotional. They elicit an emotional response.
--
"Unconscious in 20 seconds, xxxx in 4-minutes":
a plot device. A little information delivered to set up for later.
Unconscious in 20 seconds, dead in four minutes is really not *that* great
of a threat. Military training and countermeasures can easily deal with
that or even prevent that from ever becoming an issue.
There are far greater, more immediate threats facing soldiers. This was
set up for the final battle at the end of the movie. Four minutes, so the
final battle
could be dramatic, and the set up early on justifies the event happening.
But if you think about it (and you're not meant to), it's kind of silly.
It's purely there, for dramatic means. From a logical standpoint, 20-seconds to
four-minutes is not that big of a deal. But something *real*, like say,
unconscious in 2-seconds, dead in 24 seconds would probably be too visceral,
too realism-based, and wouldn't make that suspense-filled climax work .. not
enough time to create that drawn out "suspense" element
that Cameron likes so much (and that works ... after all, his
movies, are, in part, a well-tested formula ... layered with lots of different
bells and whistles, plot devices, setting and story to be just different enough,
but still with that structure in there, if you look hard enough for it, or
know his movies well enough ..
these things work, they have been tried and true, again and again
See, all the *talk* about Pandora being so ruthless, creates an imagery in the
viewer's mind .. yet the facts, the hard numbers .. 20-seconds / 4-minutes is not
that threatening. This is a a disconnect between reality and the emotive.
The unobtanium piece:
Don't hold on cool fx shots. This is insulting, and also detracts from the
narrative. Cameron understands this.
Something else I noticed that may have been a flaw, but was probably done intentionally for that emotive effect:
The Major testing his fist-punches in the mech.
Conservation of movement. Why not have the operator do extremely little punches,
that get interpreted/augmented as bigger ones in the actual machine? This way energy
transferred is far more effective - you do a little punch and it translates to a big punch. Why have the human do these big punches, expend his actual energy,
when you can do little ones that are translated as big ones? This way the energy used is delivered far more effectively (the operator doesn't actually have
to wear himself out delivering action). Any
augmented reality should be done this way. They made the same mistake with
Tom Cruise in Minority Report. He does these sweeping hand gestures and finger
movements when he could be doing far less and achieving the same thing .. less
energy for the operator, energy saved, energy transferred into something far
more effective without taxing the actual human operator. It doesn't make sense
that the energy used between man and machine is 1 to 1. It should be small
movements, transferred into larger, greater ones.
Sigourney Weaver saying "picked up english faster than I could teach it"
That's kind of impossible.
-
I'm kind of ambivalent, I don't quite know how to feel, about the fact
they didn't use Zoe Saldana's likeness for Netyiri.. why they created a
new, from the ground-up face for Netyiri. This the only character where
they did this. Not only does it not stand up the test of time - all the
other chraracters' faces look more real, where Netyiri looks more watered
down, more fake - (and I know why he did this: he wanted to create the
perfect woman, one that males would be undeniably attracted to) -
- but did not putting Zoe Saldana's face on her character somehow deprive her
of being a bigger star?
There's no way to know this, really. On the one hand not using her real face
might make people want to seek out her real face, which is cool, but on the
other hand, the simple lack of media saturation means her face doesn't get out
there as much.
EDIT: I'm sorry, Netyiri's face does not stand the test of time. It was
a bold effort, but with all pioneering efforts, mistakes and discrepancies
abound. Some shots she looks good, but others, it looks like an incomplete
face - kind of flat. They should have made her features a little fuller,
a little rounder. Bridge of the nose is too flat, space just under the nose
and above the upper lip is too flat. The whole front of the face is too
flat. If they had made her upper lip just a little fuller it would've been
a big improvement.
