SDCC 2009: 'Avatar' Impressions Roundup

[Photo from the 'Avatar' video game]

-- "25 minutes of Avatar in 3D played, and it surpassed all expectations and anything the guy who gave us Terminator 2 has ever done. What Cameron has done with CGI and performance capture, and making it look photo-real in 3D, is akin to what Miyazaki has done with animation." -- Phil Pirrello, IGN

-- "Basically, today James Cameron walked into a room with 6,000 people and pulled out his dick and slapped it on the table. With an HD camera pointing right at it ... Avatar is really, really, really, really cool. It is not photoreal." -- Drew McWeeney, HitFix

-- "Sorry, folks, but while the most fully realized and wholly immersive CGI achievement in cinematic history probably won't cure peptic ulcers or reverse male-pattern-baldness, it will definitely make you go "whoa" more times than Keanu Reeves on his first visit to the Long Beach Aquarium." -- Seth Abramovitch, Movieline

-- "Cameron proves again that he can combine high-octane thrills with human drama, creating palpable emotional depth both for and between the characters even as he subjects them to physical derring-do that otherwise seems impossible." -- Todd Gilchrist, Cinematical

-- "This is an evolutionary jump, not a revolutionary leap. I didn't experience movies in a whole new way, and nothing I saw on screen left me feeling more than impressed. What the movie represents is someone putting real money into the current CGI and mocap tech and shoving it an extra step forward." -- Devin Faraci, CHUD.com

-- "What I saw were glimpses at a fantastic bit of storytelling, a rich fantasy tale, by a master of the artform, but the CGI creatures and characters are just that. They're amazingly executed, no doubt, but it's not like when you saw your first CG dinosaur and you said, "This is a game changer" to yourself." -- Quint, AICN