Earlier today I went to see Avatar 3D over at the Vue Cinema in Eastleigh. James Cameron has a pretty good track record, but I won’t deny being a little worried that the film might concentrate too much on special effects at the expense of the story, but I was very pleasantly surprised.

It would be very easy for the 3-D effect to become the centrepiece of a 3-D movie, but it seemed as if it was carefully thought out. Nice touches included the fact that some of the humans’ display devices were themselves displaying images with depth and the various things floating in the atmosphere (including the Atokirina’ and the dust after the destruction of the Na’vi Hometree).

The only thing really wrong with this type of 3-D right now is that you can’t focus anywhere other than where the camera is focused. Of course, fixing that is incredibly difficult, since you’d need to be able to adjust the focal length for specific areas of the image in the projector, not to mention adding the requirement of being able to film everything in every shot in perfect sharp focus in the first place.

Pandora itself is amazingly beautiful, particularly at night with all of the bioluminescence, and it really is difficult not to marvel at the amount of work that went into designing the lush and importantly believable landscape of the Pandoran forest and its native wildlife.

Anyway, it’s a wonderful film; let’s hope James Cameron gets to make a sequel. Let’s also hope that unlike the Alien series (which has been fatally marred by the awful Alien Resurrection, not to mention a certain amount of stupidity in the AvP films), the studio knows when to call it quits.