Review of Avatar at the Dome IMAX Theater

My first experience watching Avatar was at the Dome IMAX Theater.  The movie was fascinating to watch with all the special effects.  It had quite a mesmerizing quality to it.  The colorful world of Pandora with all the wild jungles and the creatures that inhabited it was very imaginative.  Although some of the creatures, well actually most of the creatures weren’t really endearing.  Meaning, they weren’t cute and fuzzy.  They were rather disturbing and scary.

The story was fairly simply and had some elements of trying to send a message to us the audience.  One could definitely draw a parallel from the movie to today’s world environment especially since we were traveling to Pandora because things on Earth weren’t so good.  But apparently we hadn’t learned our lesson because we tried to destroy Pandora also.  It had the corporate greed along with the guns for hire aspect to which we could certainly recognize as current events.

The mixing of animation and real people is certainly not a new concept. Disney is good at doing this.  There was a movie made back in 1964 where the main character was turned into the creature he wanted to be.  The movie was The Incredible Mr. Limpet. You can’t draw too many comparisons to this movie though because this movie can be summed up as cute.  It was a lighthearted comedy not Sci-Fi.  It of course did not have the intensity this movie had and you can’t compare the special effects but it is fun to see movies that were made a long time ago and see how far we’ve come.  The animation in this movie was so good that it was hard to tell who was real and who wasn’t.

With all this being said, the movie was good but it wasn’t great.   Part of the problem was the Dome IMAX.  The movie was shown in 2D not 3D.  It wasn’t really a good way to see this movie.  The movie had too much motion to it and after awhile you had to close your eyes otherwise it could have made you nauseas.  It also was too gory and now we have to have intimacy between animated characters even though it was brief.  The movie was fun to watch so it’s a definite thumb’s up for entertainment.  The story wasn’t exceptional but the special effects make up for it and that’s probably what is most important because it’s not really about the story any more.  The special effects come first and then maybe a story.