This time the war has been won. With the successive release of the three Blu-ray editions of Avatar, the HD format has finally received massive recognition from the public, relegating DVD to ancient history. Status report.
The lights go down in your Home-Cinema room. You slip your blue (!) disc into the drive, slip into the sofa, and the film starts.
A soothing synthetic whir fills the air. The first images of Avatar in Blu-ray 3D move across the screen. It is a historic moment. If you were from another time, you would be watching M or The Wizard of Oz. Two seminal films in the history of cinema through their reinvention of the language of film, sound and colour. A new place in the hall of fame must now be created for Avatar. Because the plasma 3D screen in front of you is no longer a flat screen with moving images but a window into another world. A world in which everything appears real, even though everything is unreal. Ladies and gentlemen, you're not in the 20th century anymore…
To say that the Blu-ray 3D version of Avatar is a shock, an ultimate experience, is a euphemism. The disc represents a watershed moment. A disc of such perfection, that it touches the very essence of film, reinventing it. The most beautiful Blu-ray in the world effortlessly reproduces the bicephality of the film, one foot in the future, and one in the past, its visual perfection, sublimed by the 3D 1080p definition, and its classicism. Avatar is a film in a league of its own. Summarising 100 years of American and international film, a fusion of classic western, science-fiction, Japanese animation; Ford, Hawks, Delmer Daves, Miyazaki, Oshii and Terence Malick, in a totally new visual envelope, Cameron has reinvented his film and FILM itself into the bargain, in a profoundly stunning work, which makes his old works looks like what they truly are: films from another century. Furthermore, Avatar in Blu-ray 3D is an historic event. An event which enables us to rediscover the feeling that our great grandparents must have had when they discovered the first talking film in the silent era, or the first film in cinemascope, or in colour, or even the first colour televisions sets. This is the same emotion that was felt, in the days of black and white televisions, when Dorothy passed from sepia to colour in The Wizard of Oz.
Sure, the only way to get your hands on this Blu-ray is to buy a Panasonic plasma screen (See Technovision). Much virtual ink has been spilled on the «flat» Blu-ray releases, arguing that 2D could never claim to reproduce the hypnotic effect of the 3D version in the cinemas. That deprived of this artifice the film would collapse. «They» got it wrong (once again). Whatever the version, theatrical or special edition, 2D or 3D, with or without bonuses, Avatar is THE HD best seller, the must have purchase for all equipped homes. A film that is the future of Cinema. And Home-Cinema.
David Fakrikian
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