When the lights in the hall go out, they are worn the 3D glasses and it finally begins Avatar: The Way of Water, it’s like stepping back in time 13 years. Here you are Pandora. here are the Na’vi. Let’s see what the director came up with James Cameron, this time. Let’s see if the special effects – in the era of virtual reality and the metaverse – will still be able to amaze us.
Expectations are high. So high that after an hour of film – out of a total of 180 minutes – one wonders if that’s all. If indeed the most astonishing moment can be considered Princess Neytiri’s huge arrow that shoots out of the screen, to threaten the entire room.
Mind you, the whole first part of Avatar: The Way of WaterFrom a technical point of view, it is flawless. There is all the know how accumulated by James Cameron with the first film of 2009.
We also see the extraordinary hand of Weta FXthe company founded by Peter Jackson in Wellington, New Zealand, which in the 2000s he won five Oscars for best special effects (three for The Lord of the Ringsone for King Kong and one just for Avatar).
Pandora’s fauna and flora touch the armchairs, the family of Jake Sully and Neytiri – who now have four children – has an extraordinary consistency, in the action scenes one senses that 3D is designed and studied down to the smallest detail.
It should not be forgotten that they worked on the new film 1400 artists on Weather FX. Cameron arrived to view up to 450 versions of a single take.
During production, in Wellington, the special effects managers set up screens in the corridors that the director walked through, on which the scenes to be approved were broadcast. They were called “decoys”, they were supposed to get his attention. When Cameron wasn’t satisfied, he didn’t hide it.
“This looks like a dinosaur movie explosion from the 1960s,” the director once said, commenting a scene where a helicopter is shot down. And there is no one in the world who is stricter than Cameron on this issue: the director is a helicopter pilot and has used them often in his films, since Terminator 2 a True Lies (he was there to film, on board, the epic scene where Jamie Lee Curtis hangs frighteningly from the aircraft).
But it’s been too long from the wonders of the first Avatar. And in the drawers of memory an ancient amazement resists which, at least initially, stands comparison with the sequel.
We are immersed in again a beautiful fairy talein what Spielberg called “an emotional show”ma where is the innovation compared to the 2009 blockbuster?
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Everything changes, suddenly and surprisingly, when the story moves underwater. The next two hours set in the blue paradise of Pandora, the sea where the Metkayina tribe communicates with huge, intelligent and sensitive mammals, they are amazing.
“I see you” is the signature phrase of Avatar. And here, finally, even those sitting in the room are able to ‘see’ the magic of Cameron’s new masterpiece.
Telling the jungle ei in 3D Pandora’s Hallelujah Mountains could appear, in 2009, an extremely complex operation. But that’s nothing compared to what it entails, today, reconstruct in three dimensions the nuances of the water and the waves, the bodies that fluctuate in the depths and the movement of thousands of elements that make up the fragile marine ecosystem.
After the first Avatar, which cashed $2.7 billion, James Cameron plunged into the deepest ocean depression in the world. In March 2012, aboard a small National Geographic submarine, the director became the first man in history to descend alone 11 km into the The Mariannes Trenchfound in waters east of Taiwan and the Philippine Islands.
This experience deeply marked Cameron, who had already put the production of his film to the test in 1989 The Abyssset in the depths of the Caribbean Sea and actually filmed in a giant vat carved out of the abandoned Cherokee Nuclear Power Plantin South Carolina. That film cost two years of troubled work and an expensive investment: there was talk of about 70 million dollars.
For the underwater scenes of the new Avatar, Cameron used a large 3.5 million gallon pool. Importantly everything in the film that happens in the water was filmed in the water. The director initially tried to film some movements outside the pool, with the actors moving independently and being dragged or made to leap into the air thanks to cables. But the results didn’t convince him.
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Per The water wayCameron and his team they almost started from scratch. The 3D cameras used for the first film were no longer sufficient. Others developed by Australian inventor Pawel Achtel and his company DeepX were needed.
But the most important novelty concerns the use of a unique motion capture system, capable of collecting shots taken in and out of the water and merging them into a single virtual image. Weta FX used new algorithms and a new artificial intelligence model to get as close as possible to the ‘reality’ Cameron had imagined in his head.
This effort does not affect every scene of the new Avatar. By removing the 3D glasses, from time to time during the projection, it is more clearly noticeable – from the slightly blurred images – the exact moment the technology is applied. There are moments, in the final part of the film, in which the well thought-out plot, combined with the 3D with attention to the smallest details, it literally makes you hold your breath.
Waiting for the (true) metaverse, Avatar: The Way of Water – view strictly in an IMAX theater – it’s the most immersive experience we’ve had in recent years, without the need to wear a heavy and annoying visor. The ticket price – around 15 euros – cannot be considered high if we take into account the technological research and techniques involved in each scene.
Without getting to walk on it, it can be said that Cameron with water has done a real miracle.