Avatar (2009)Avatar is James Cameron's science fiction epic released in 2009, twelve years in the making after Titanic, and the highest-grossing film in cinema history with a worldwide gross of over $2.92 billion. Sam Worthington plays Jake Sully, a paraplegic former Marine who is sent to the moon Pandora — a lush, bioluminescent world inhabited by the blue-skinned Na'vi — to participate in the Avatar Program, in which humans remotely control Na'vi bodies to interact with the indigenous population. As Jake immerses himself in Na'vi culture and falls for Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), he finds himself torn between his human mission and his growing allegiance to the people he was sent to infiltrate. The film won three Academy Awards — Best Cinematography, Best Visual Effects and Best Art Direction — and revolutionised the use of 3D and performance capture technology. Whatever its narrative debts to earlier films, as a feat of world-building and technical cinema it remains extraordinary.Highlights The world of Pandora — Cameron and his team spent years developing the ecology, language and culture of Pandora with genuine rigour; the bioluminescent forests, the floating Hallelujah Mountains and the Na'vi civilisation are realised with a completeness and visual imagination that no other film has matched. The performance capture technology — Cameron's development of the virtual camera and performance capture pipeline was genuinely revolutionary; Zoe Saldana's Neytiri in particular is a landmark achievement in digital performance, fully expressive and completely convincing as a living being. The aerial battle sequence — The film's climactic battle between the Na'vi and the RDA's military forces is one of the great action set pieces in blockbuster cinema; Cameron stages the chaos of aerial and ground combat with extraordinary clarity and scale. Zoe Saldana as Neytiri — The film's emotional core; Saldana's performance — delivered entirely through performance capture — is warm, fierce and completely real. Her scenes with Worthington give the film its human (and Na'vi) heart. The technical legacy — Avatar changed cinema; its use of 3D, performance capture and virtual production techniques established the template for a decade of blockbuster filmmaking and its influence on the industry — for better and worse — is impossible to overstate. Disc Details Title: Avatar Year: 2009 Director: James Cameron Cast: Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang, Michelle Rodriguez, CCH Pounder Studio: 20th Century Fox / Lightstorm Entertainment Certificate: 12A Region: Region B (UK) Format: Blu-ray Runtime: 162 minutes Genre: Science Fiction / Action / Adventure Barcode: 5039036043908 ConditionCondition: VG/VG — see our Condition Grading Guide.Browse our full range of Blu-ray titles. You might also enjoy our Compact Discs or Vinyl Records.
