I do love 3D...

and Avatar is worth seeing in 3D. The surprise for me was Sigourney Weaver was in this film. Had I known that before seeing it I would have been slightly dubious about seeing it. But as it turned out she didn't detract from the film for me.

When I go and see a big special effects film I often sit and try and work out what composite layers and filters are being used to produce the effects and often I can roughly figure it out. However, this film has me stumped. I'd love to know more about it.

The film is colour rich. I'd love to know the file size of some of the scenes in raw format. Digitally producing faux neon colour is not easy. I have heard that one of the animators had to go back to the director over 150 times with edits trying to achieve the correct look on just one of the illuminated plants.

Then thinking more about that while watching the film the 3D aspect puzzled me. Ok, lets say you're an animator working on a scene and want to see how it looks in 3D. Can they render and then view the polorised 3D on their monitors? Can they edit in 3D? Getting a natural depth of field would be tricky. Yeah, I know the computers work it out, but too composite on top of that would be challenging.

So all that aside, the movie did actually take me along with it and sometimes I just forgot all the technical questions in my head and enjoyed what I was watching. I thought it was long. Maybe a little too long, but you get that from 'epics'.

This movie does signal a change and a step forward in entertainment. I would imagine this film is the modern day equivalent of going from silent movies to talkies and then b&w to colour. It is the benchmark. And judging from the lines of people waiting to see this I'm glad I'm one of them who had the chance to see it on the big screen.