Final Theatrical Poster for James Cameron's Avatar

The movie ‘Avatar’ is about an ex-Marine on the planet Pandora who, as an Avatar - a human mind in an alien body - finds himself in a desperate fight for his survival and that of the indigenous beings called Na'vi.

The magnum opus ‘Avatar’ is all set to release on worldwide on 18^th December 09. The flick is both written and directed by Oscar winning visionary filmmaker James Cameron, of Piranha II, The Terminator, Aliens, The Abyss, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, True Lies, and Titanic previously. He has been developing the technology to make this movie for the last 10 years. 20th Century Fox is distributing this film both in IMAX and regular theaters in 3D around the world.

Avatar’s main Highlights:

The Thanator

Thanator is the king predator of the ground in Pandora. He is a big, black, shiny, armored six-legged panther. Of course, you can’t depict that literally, so you think: “How can I make that alien?” And you come up with these flexible bone shields around it and sensor quills.

Neytiri

This is a photograph of a bust, cast from the actress Zoe Saldana, who plays Neytiri. Around the mouth, the jaw, and even up into the cheekbones, this character is essentially Zoe

The Tree of Souls

This is a very important spot in the film. It’s called the Tree of Souls, and it’s a big input-output station, if you like, where the Na’vi are able to communicate with the big global biological network of their world. It was inspired by some of the bioluminescence.

Samson gunship attack

A Samson gunship is being attacked by a Banshee. This is from the movie’s climax, which has so many layers of performance, or animation, and of live action all thrown into the blender that it’s practically a mini-movie in itself. It takes place in the floating mountains, where intense magnetic fields throw the ship’s instrumentation, forcing them back into a Second World War-style combat mode. Which is simply a way of creating a situation where you’ve got pterodactyls fighting helicopters and who wouldn’t want to see that?

The Hallelujah Mountains

These floating mountains are a surreal Magritte-type image that the eye accepts quite willingly. The rocks look real, the clouds look real, and all the subsets of the image look real, even though it’s a nonsense image.