“I’m kind of just living on Pandora right now,” said James Cameron recently, as he tinkered with a remaster of his 2009 blockbuster Avatar, for rerelease in preparation for its sequel, Avatar: The Way of Water, in December. It’s the second instalment of a four-part franchise that includes the already-written Avatar three and four, due for release in the next decade, by which time the audience will have had ample opportunity to join Cameron on his fictional world.
That was always the dream behind the Avatar films: immersion in the world of Pandora, a habitable, extrasolar moon somewhere in the Alpha Centauri system whose every tree, plant, bush flower and blade of grass is rendered in every weather condition – rain, sun, mist – with the help of facial rigs, motion capture and key-frame CG animation. You “enter a world”, said Cameron. “You become fully immersed in it. You feel like it surrounds you and you become an inhabitant there … You go on that journey.”
