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shermaramaAvatar: I can understand the point of those who criticise it. It probably is a bit short on character development, if you like that sort of thing, but I don't care; I sat there happily occupied with the story for the whole nearly three hours, it kept a lot of things spare where we didn't need to know the details, and thus managed to never once set off my pseudo-science-bullshit detector as a result. And, of course, no-one can argue that it doesn't look spectacular. However, it kept on reminding me of things I've seen elsewhere.
No really. Those giant red fan things that zip back into their tubes when someone touches them? Tube worms. The ones we get here are smaller, although some of them are that colour; I see Cameron's made a documentary about the life around hydrothermal vents where there are tube worms that are really that big, but you know, he didn't make those things up. And the glowing floaty seed things? Pretty much comb jellies / sea gooseberies only LESS colourful. Little translucent animals with stripes of cilia down their sides to move them around; the cilia are small enough to act like a diffraction grating and thus appear like little flashing rainbow stripes when they move. You can't tell that from the photos, so here's some video. All the business with everything glowing at night? What, you mean like bioluminescence? I just tried to search for some good video footage of real-world underwater bioluminescence, actually, and two of the top searches that pop up when you stick that in youtube are 'bioluminescence ocean' and 'bioluminescence avatar', and all the footage from the the ocean is a bit rubbish, because it's hard to film underwater and even harder to film low-light stuff underwater. But if you want to look at this in person, because your eyes and your brain's image processing is so good that it can easily see these things where film looks atrocious, then none of this is remote, distant, impossible stuff to see. Comb jellies are frequently hanging around while doing a safety stop at six metres, once you've got the hang of looking for tiny rainbows attached to something translucent. I've seen phosphoresecence in the water off Brighton on a night dive; we kept waving our hands around in the water, watching the little green sparks and giggling like idiots. Even those flying mountains reminded me of diving around big rocks in the Scillies - you see the normal arrangement of a big rock sticking up out of a surface and then you go and have a look what it looks like when you get below the surface, where it turns out you can fly and there's all sorts of peculiar life forms around. If the photo wasn't in an album you probably can't see I'd link to a photo of Chris floating mid-water next to a giant wall of plumose anenomes, or of the seals playing with another diver next to a vast wall of jewel anenomes.
In short, if you want to be able to move around in three dimensions with amazing wild creatures who might consent to come and play with you in a multi-coloured, glow-in-the-dark world that's technically challenging to make a film out of, take up diving. Incidentally, I am going to Egypt for a week's diving holiday tomorrow, including three days on a live-aboard where the pattern of the day basically goes get up, dive, eat, dive, eat, dive, eat, dive, hang around possibly involving drinking, sleep, repeat. This is going to be good.
No really. Those giant red fan things that zip back into their tubes when someone touches them? Tube worms. The ones we get here are smaller, although some of them are that colour; I see Cameron's made a documentary about the life around hydrothermal vents where there are tube worms that are really that big, but you know, he didn't make those things up. And the glowing floaty seed things? Pretty much comb jellies / sea gooseberies only LESS colourful. Little translucent animals with stripes of cilia down their sides to move them around; the cilia are small enough to act like a diffraction grating and thus appear like little flashing rainbow stripes when they move. You can't tell that from the photos, so here's some video. All the business with everything glowing at night? What, you mean like bioluminescence? I just tried to search for some good video footage of real-world underwater bioluminescence, actually, and two of the top searches that pop up when you stick that in youtube are 'bioluminescence ocean' and 'bioluminescence avatar', and all the footage from the the ocean is a bit rubbish, because it's hard to film underwater and even harder to film low-light stuff underwater. But if you want to look at this in person, because your eyes and your brain's image processing is so good that it can easily see these things where film looks atrocious, then none of this is remote, distant, impossible stuff to see. Comb jellies are frequently hanging around while doing a safety stop at six metres, once you've got the hang of looking for tiny rainbows attached to something translucent. I've seen phosphoresecence in the water off Brighton on a night dive; we kept waving our hands around in the water, watching the little green sparks and giggling like idiots. Even those flying mountains reminded me of diving around big rocks in the Scillies - you see the normal arrangement of a big rock sticking up out of a surface and then you go and have a look what it looks like when you get below the surface, where it turns out you can fly and there's all sorts of peculiar life forms around. If the photo wasn't in an album you probably can't see I'd link to a photo of Chris floating mid-water next to a giant wall of plumose anenomes, or of the seals playing with another diver next to a vast wall of jewel anenomes.
In short, if you want to be able to move around in three dimensions with amazing wild creatures who might consent to come and play with you in a multi-coloured, glow-in-the-dark world that's technically challenging to make a film out of, take up diving. Incidentally, I am going to Egypt for a week's diving holiday tomorrow, including three days on a live-aboard where the pattern of the day basically goes get up, dive, eat, dive, eat, dive, eat, dive, hang around possibly involving drinking, sleep, repeat. This is going to be good.
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no subject
Date: 2010-01-22 01:40 pm (UTC)(I dunno, not seen the film yet, but having lived with a keen diver for years, IKWYM.)
no subject
Date: 2010-01-22 01:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-22 03:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-22 07:22 pm (UTC)...the whole film seemed to have pinched a fair few motifs from C J Cherryh's Foreigner series.
Liked the film though, mostly because it was pretty.
no subject
Date: 2010-01-31 02:41 pm (UTC)