Finally the 3D release of James Cameron’s Avatar brings the blockbuster experience into your home
Avatar Blu-Ray 3D
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Avatar Blu-Ray 3D is by-far the best 3D movie I have seen at home.
The Avatar Blu-Ray 3D experience is immersive, emotionally engaging and a visual feast.
The 3D effect is natural and powerful when the room is darkened, like a movie theatre.
Director James Cameron’s primary use of 3D is creating the visual world of Pandora, an idyllic world of light, plants and creatures with depth and texture.
3D also creates immense fields of action that take your breath away.
The 3D improvement over 2D is demonstrated throughout the movie. In one 3D scene, the hero Jake Sully flies down beside a sheer rock face and I felt intense vertigo. That didn’t happen in 2D.
Avatar seeds of eywa
In the 2D scene where the seeds of Eywa electroluminescent creatures float down upon Sully, it looks special.
The 3D version has an emotional impact missing from the flat 2D scene. In the 3D version of the same scene, the seeds surround Jake and cover him with their magical presence.
Of course the movie was conceptualized and filmed as 3D and was meant to be viewed in 3D.
In the scene where Jake emerges from his cyro chamber, the 3D creates a realistic illusion of depth that there are hundreds of chambers. If you saw the movie in 3D you know the 2D effect misses that.
Avatar 2D cyro chamber
An exclusive marketing agreement with Panasonic robbed the rest of the world from the 3D version until October 2012.
Now the Blu-Ray 3D disc of Avatar is widely available, anyone with a 3D television can enjoy the movie as it was intended. The Avatar (Blu-ray 3D + Blu-ray/ DVD Combo Pack)
I do not have a DTS-HD receiver but I can report the DTS sound was excellent.
I bought the 3D disc two months ago but saved it for the holidays. At 2.5 hours, it deserved a first viewing at the right moment, when there was time to enjoy the visual and aural feast.
The Blu-Ray 2D is a very good disc to watch with sharp images and excellent sound, as you expect with a 1080p high-definition Blu-Ray disc.
The Blu-Ray 3D disc is exceptional and without a doubt the best 3D movie we’ve seen for home viewing.
In 3D, the fictional world of Pandora comes alive in a way that we saw in the theatre but was lost on the DVD. Scenes have an amazing depth of field. I never worried about what I was looking at in the scenes.
James Cameron and Vince Pace, his director of cinematography, invented the 3D cameras used in filming the movie, the Sony Fusion 3D. Cameron Pace 3D technology is the state-of-the-art for 3D cinema. They now license it to other producers at low fees to encourage more 3D movies and television.
Watching 3D
We watched the 3D Blu-Ray of Avatar on a Sony BDP-S580 Blu-ray Disc Player
We used both the rechargeable Sony TDG-BR250/B 3D Glasses
The 3D Blu-Ray player and Sony Bravia LED combination has worked very well for a year. The glasses are slightly irritating on your nose so we take a break in the middle of 3D movies to rest our eyes.
During daytime, light bleeding from other rooms makes the 3D experience more pronounced and less realistic.
Plot
The plot of “Avatar” is a science fiction mixture of Walt Disney when-you-wish-upon-a-star and a super-violent version of “Apocalypse Now.” A marine in a wheelchair bucks the system of human exploitation for profit when he gets a chance to walk and run again and finds true love. There is a big war fight scene at the end.
Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) is a paraplegic marine vet in a wheelchair, with deep angst since he lost his ability to walk. To the other private soldiers-of-fortune, Jake is a pitiable freak. That’s an accurate characterization of people with disabilities who are tolerated but still considered sub-normal, much it is today. Even President George H. Bush, who is a champion for disability rights, hid his use of a wheelchair until recently to protect his public image.
Humans are exploiting the Na’Vi, the indigenous blue and tall people of Pandora, light years away in 2154. The 3D view of Avatar really shines at showing how agile the Na’Vi move in their natural world. It’s ballet without the music.
Jake becomes a whole person again as a Na’Vi Avatar, leaving his crippled body in a lab machine. It’s not hard to guess which body he likes.
OK so I identified with the cure for his disability. It’s a wondrous dream to become non-disabled that I share with a billion other people in this world. It’s never going to happen but what a dream for 161 minutes.
Avatar is so emotionally gripping that psychologists reported people expressed suicidal thoughts after watching it, when they could not accept Pandora as fiction.
“Stacy Kaiser, a psychotherapist, said obsession with the film was masking more serious problems in the fans’ lives. “They’re seeing Avatar, they’re lonely people, a lot of them don’t have a lot going on in their lives right now,” she said. “The movie opened up a portal for them to express their depression.” Telegraph.co.uk
The rest of the plot you either know already or will learn when you see the film.
For more on the fictional world of Pandora, Wikipedia is a good place to start.
High Definition Disc News has a good scene-by-scene discussion of the movie which I would not recommend until after you have watched the 3D version several times. It spoils the magic.
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