2022 – Avatar: The Way of Water
I have to say, I was thoroughly impressed with the visual effects for this movie. There were images on display, the likes of which, I have never seen in my life. In fact, nobody in the world had ever seen anything like it. True, I’d guess around two thirds of the film was CGI, which many people have a problem with, but when it is done this well, I don’t mind one bit. The motion capture and facial recognition technologies that were developed and employed were beyond amazing, and made even more so, considering that much of the film took place under water.
Speaking about underwater motion capture, Director James Cameron was quoted as saying, “”It’s never been done before and it’s very tricky because our motion capture system, like most motion capture systems, is what they call optical base, meaning that it uses markers that are photographed with hundreds of cameras. The problem with water is not the underwater part, but the interface between the air and the water, which forms a moving mirror. That moving mirror reflects all the dots and markers, and … it creates thousands of false targets, so we’ve had to figure out how to get around that problem, which we did. … It’s taken us about a year and a half now to work out how we’re going to do it.”
But something else that impressed me was the live action elements, and how they were seamlessly blended with the CGI. For example, Spider was a fully live-action character. And yet you’d never know he was acting with computer generated images, even though there were the size differences between the Na’Vi and the human child. But actor Jack Champion, who played Spider, handled it all perfectly.
And then there were the new alien environments and all the extremely detailed design elements. The aesthetics of the film were just incredible. This includes the physical differences between the forest Na’Vi and the water Na’vi; the forest plants and creatures as compared to those of the sea. The giant whale-like Tulkun looked just as incredible out of the water as in, even when they were interacting with the large, futuristic water-vessels of the humans. There was one awesome shot that comes to mind, in which a Tulkun leaps out of the water and lands on the deck of a ship. It looked every bit as real as the live-action boat it was attacking.
And speaking of the futuristic designs of the human ships, weapons, and technologies, they were perfection. Cameron actually made them look just as cool as the CGI alien elements of the film. I especially liked the U-boats with their harpoon guns. They were a terrible part of the film’s narrative, but they looked pretty awesome. The hyper-detailed design of every single part of the visuals was just stunning, and I can’t wait to see what Cameron comes up with in the next installments of the franchise, slated to come out in 2025, 2029, and 2031.