Avatar is first and foremost a story of love and liberation, in which it can be seen as a handful of natives fully integrated into their natural environment who set out to fight to rid themselves of the boundless ambition of a human mining corporation, willing to the most brutal predation of nature. The story in this sense is not unfortunately new. The indigenous peoples of planet Earth are daily plundered with extreme violence because they are located in territories full of oil, strategic minerals, or simply forests that must be reduced to cubic meters of wood first and then converted in grass to grow feed and fatten the burgers we so gladly eat. Avatar, is also the epic struggle of the natives of the indigenous planet of Pandora subjected to a corporation that to defend its expoliation does not hesitate to use an advanced biotechnological technology.

Avatar (2009), will become a film that will surely mark a before and after for the film industry, thanks to the technological display in the filming of all the scenes and their 3D staging. But at the height of the 21st century environmental crisis, this film is also a good example of the recasting of fantasy cinema in favor of just causes. And this in itself already has a certain value, given the scarcity of vital commitment that characterizes our materialistic society. Pandora’s natives fight unequally against bad and ruthless humans as there are across continents to capture strategic mineral and energy resources. With 237$ million budget, the movie would become the highest grossing movie ever with more than 2$ billion

Science fiction is a literary genre that almost never hits. 2001, ‘Odyssey in Space’ (1968) predicted three decades later that we would be on our way to Jupiter and with orbital stations when we can barely maintain a space station, the sense of which is more than debatable. But it is also true that science fiction has been able to stimulate our imagination and sometimes put us on alert. ‘Matrix’ (1999) is a severe warning about the manipulation of our mind. Avatar is a movie made to surprise, with the signature of a James Cameron always committed to the seventh art, and probably as happened with Star Wars (1977), set a trend.

Avatar, does not even have the ideological content of ‘Where Green Ants Dream’ (1984) by Werner Herzog, although it is probably a good metaphor to warn us about the importance of respecting harmony that does not belong to us. And less to destroy it and that resources continue to flow to swell the economic growth of a few. Avatar is not a film of moral complexity, much less, since it is essentially a film subjected to the strictest canon of adventure cinema, with very bad bad and good of noble heart. And it is this contrast, however so flat, that allows us a reading not exempt from a certain moral elevation who is seduced by these half-digitized indigenous people of 2.5 m of blue color and whose planet is a display of biological imagination.

This movie was planned to be released much earlier than it was. When Cameron brought the project back to life in 2005, it seemed that the required technique was already at hand. At the time, there was still concern that the characters did not appear real enough, and suffered the worrying “dead eyes” effect already seen in some of the early acting capture films. Cameron’s team wanted to go far beyond previous efforts, to ensure the complete realism of the characters. To achieve this, they developed a new system of “image-based facial interpretation capture”, using a camera held in the head that accurately recorded the smallest details of the actors’ facial performances. Instead of using the motion capture technique by placing reflective markers on the actors’ faces to capture their expressions, the actors wore a helmet similar to that of football players, to which a tiny camera was applied. The device pointed to the actors’ faces and the camera recorded facial expressions and muscle movements to an impossible degree until then. More importantly, the camera recorded eye movement, which had not been the case with previous systems. The head adjustment system allowed the actors’ facial performances to be captured with unprecedented clarity and precision. And, since the head clamping system did not depend on past motion capture cameras, those cameras could now be used only to capture body movement, so they could move much further away from actors. This allowed the AVATAR team to use a much larger capture environment, or “Volume” (virtual plate), than had ever been used before. With six times the size of previous capture volumes, AVATAR Volume was used to capture galloping horses, scenes of specialists that required elaborate use of wiring, and even aerial fights between ships and flying creatures. In this way, the revolutionary head clamping system was the key, not only of the subtlest details in the emotions of the characters, but also in the film’s biggest show. Another innovation created especially for AVATAR was the Virtual Camera, which allowed Cameron to shoot scenes within his computer-generated world, just as if he were shooting on a Hollywood stage. Through this virtual camera. The director could see not only Zoo Zaldana, but his blue-skinned character of three meters high, Neytiri. Instead of seeing Sam Worthington and Sigourney Weaver, he would see their giant blue avatars, complete with their tails and huge golden eyes. In addition to all this complexity, AVATAR was made in stereoscopic 3D. So WETA not only needed to work in 3D on creating its computer-generated scenes (as other visual effects companies, such as ILM did), but live action scenes also had to be shot in 3D. To do this, Cameron used the Camera Fusion System, which he had half-developed with Vince Pace. It took them seven years of development to create the Fusion system, which is the most advanced stereoscopic camera system in the world. The cameras worked flawlessly on the AVATAR set, allowing live action scenes to be smoothly combined with computer-created scenes to form a unified whole.

With a lot less technology and real costumes being used by the actors is the movie ‘Aliens’ (1986).The film explores aspects that are set aside in the first, such as the reproduction of aliens, thus obtaining a magnificent “supervillain” embodied in the impressive alien queen, a colossal creature of more than four meters, magnificently gedenby the talented visual effects team, deserving without palliative of all possible awards for such work, because let us not forget that we are talking about 1986 and, today, this creature remains terrifyingly believable and creepy, serving as inspiration, like the first, of countless graphic novels, video games and films of the genre and placing Aliens among the greats of the genre and magnificent sequel to the masterful work created by Scott.

Roger Ebert describes the movie as very intense and scary. “The ads for “Aliens” claim that this movie will frighten you as few movies have, and, for once, the ads don’t lie. The movie is so intense that it creates a problem for me as a reviewer.” Meanwhile James Berardinelli is mainly focused on the style the movie was shot and the atmosphere it creates, the mood movie bring and its tones. He describes it as very unique and special for the time it was created. “In addition to being a master of the precisely executed action sequence, Cameron develops a powerful, claustrophobic sense of atmosphere. Whether it’s during the chaotic action sequences within the aliens’ hive, on the inhospitable surface of LV-426, or behind the steel barricades within the colony, Cameron never fails to establish a mood and tone.”

The unrest final en touring that begins with the hordes of aliens attacking headquarters with the frantic escape through the ventilation tunnels—a sequence capable of putting the nerves of the most painted on the nerves; continues in the crisp incursion of an armed Ripley into the teeth into the alien queen’s nest, a whole paragon of virtues from the narrative point of view with which Cameron manages to tease the public in his armchair, and culminates in the confrontation.

With a superb montage that Ray Lovejoy – Kubrick’s collaborator in ‘2001’ and ‘The Shining’ (1980)—delivered after two days locked in the editing studio, the struggle that Cameron puts on track, and which begins with one of the most mythical phrases in the history of cinema , is the ideal conclusion to an exemplary film: in a corner, the refined exoskeleton of the one we already saw in its ‘Xenogenesis’; on the other, the queen’s spectacular design; in the center, a filmmaker who needs nothing else to cover the confrontation of a spectacular epic tone derived from the significance that the scene has both for Ripley, and for the audience.

These both movies fit the same genre, sci-fi and they both are directed by the same director, James Cameron. The main differences are the budget and the technology that was used. With only 18$ million budget, the movie definitely made its money back by grossing more than 180$ million on the box office.