Video: The Amazing Avatar Experience

I have never written about anything other than a finished motion picture before and will be upfront about admitting two things right away -- a lifetime of experience has equipped me with a healthy sense of cynicism; and though I dragged myself to Mumbai's only IMAX screen to watch a special presentation of footage from James Cameron's Avatar, I was thoroughly unimpressed by the trailer I had watched online earlier.

The presentation began with a perfunctory introduction by the director -- he looked older (imagine this, when he directed his last fiction feature Leonardo DiCaprio wasn't yet a major movie star), thinner and exhausted from the scale of his latest cinematic undertaking.

You've probably heard hints, allegations and whispers about how Mr Cameron has been developing this movie for over 14 years, how the technology that was required to tell a tale of this kind wasn't even around and that this movie will change the cinema-going experience forever. I don't know how to verify the first two parts of the previous statement but I can tell you this much: You. Have. Never. Experienced. Anything. Like. This. Before.

Ever!

Not with Citizen Kane, not with The Matrix and not with Star Wars. Over one hundred years of advances in cinema technology were conspiring to achieve the experiential effect of this movie. And it is breathtaking.

The clips were all from the first half of the movie as Cameron wanted to keep the presentation free of 'spoilers'. According to Cameron's introduction, these events occur in the 21st century.

We encounter Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) in the first clip. He is a wheelchair-bound Marine present at a briefing where a group of soldiers are being apprised of the situation on the distant moon called Pandora. The press notes tell us that the inhabitants of Pandora are the humanoid race called the Na'vi and it is an environment totally inclement to humans, especially since our kind cannot breath the air.

After that briefing clip, we were shown one where Sully is strapped into a machine that looks sort of like a tanning bed and when he wakes up he is controlling a human-Na'vi hybrid body that is over 10 feet tall, humanoid in appearance and blue-skinned. To visit Pandora, human 'drivers' control human-Na'vi hybrid bodies with their brains.

The rest of the clips are of Sully's Na'vi avatar in a variety of action and adventure scenes that truly demonstrate the extent to which this brave new world has been realized by James Cameron and his team of technicians.

This movie was made for 3D viewing. You know how some of the greatest movies have required you to use a little imagination to feel like you were there/that you lived the story/that you felt for these characters? In this experience, the edge of the screen disappears. It is like being in a really lucid dream and you are weightless.

When that creature attacks Sully on Pandora, your urge to get out of the way will be so strong, theatres may need to install seatbelts before this movie releases. When you see the lab for the first time you don't know whether to focus on him and what Dr Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) is telling him. Or whether you should marvel at all the layers there are in the frame like the way his brain map looks on the translucent screens or the stuff that's just lying on the various surfaces in the room.

When he is attempting to tame the pterodactyl-like creature that will fly him around Pandora I promise you, your vertigo will act up, even if you didn't know you suffered from the condition. This is the first movie where I imagine people will find themselves unable to stand when the end credits roll. I bet most of you have to sit down and watch the names of everyone involved in this enterprise because you will be too unsteady to get up and leave before the people who worked on this massive undertaking are done being credited.

And then I'm sure a lot of us will want to run out and buy tickets to see this thing again. I don't think discussions about storylines, plot points and the validity of the narrative will even enter into conversations until people have exhausted themselves on the sheer power of the visuals. So don't expect to be able to make any coherent opinions about the story Cameron will tell until you've seen this movie at least 10 times.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is going to be the first storytelling 'experience'. This is how people must have felt in 1977 when the opening scenes of Star Wars unspooled. This is a million times bigger than the awe we felt at experiencing 'bullet time' for the first time.

After December 18, the day this movie opens around the world, the definition of cinematic spectacle will be altered forever. And I plan to be there with my 3D glasses on, to experience a sense of wonder so pure my cynicism didn't kick in even once. If this kind of pure spectacle is possible with a movie screen, trick glasses and a few hundred million dollars, perhaps there is hope for us after all.
I can live with that.