According to a WIRED article I read awhile ago there is a small percentage of people who suffer from headaches after watching movies in 3D. Five seconds after dawning the stereoscopic Ray-Ban’s I could feel a headache germinating behind my right eye. For the next 162 minutes my head incubated a massive head-pounding migraine. When arriving home all I could do was sleep and wait until the pain had passed. 4 hours and 2 Advil’s later I finally recuperated. So with a “clear” head let me briefly transcribe my emotions and thoughts.
Even though we’ve seen the story play out before (think FernGully: The Last Rainforest meets Dances with Wolves) we’ve not seen it told in this way. From the beauty of a realized place like Pandora to the imaginative creation of the animals and plants James Cameron does a fantastic job of bringing his world to life. The technical prowess of a movie like this is worth the admission. The emotional range of the CGI characters (if I can call them that) was so convincing that the line between the Na’vi and the humans was blurred when you saw them both on-screen. The human characters like Parker (Giovanni Ribisi) and Colonel Myles (Stephen Lang) seemed very cliché and two-dimensional when compared to Neytiri (Zoe Saldana). Which is one beef I had with this film in treating the agressors with a simple brush. There is a vain attempt to prove the tension that Parker felt about the operation but it is never developed to the point where you sense the complexity of it. Instead you’re led to cheer for the Na’vi without realizing that it is our consumption that drives Corporations to do what they do. Even that in itself is not that straight-forward either. Before I stray though let me close by saying that despite the growing “tuma” in my head I left feeling like I had been a part of a historical turning point of cinematography,while at the same time vowing to never watch another movie in 3D again!