Absolute visual bliss

There's an instant in Avatar, James Cameron's $1 billion-and-counting global box office phenom, when a six-legged saber-toothed Thanator goes chasing the blue-skinned Jake Sully through the jungles of Pandora. Our hero escapes by jumping off a cliff and diving hundreds of feet into the raging whirlpools of a waterfall.

It's pretty exhilarating in plain ol' 2-D.

A little more exhilarating in RealD 3D.

And mind-bendingly exhilarating in Imax 3D.

I know, because I saw all three formats back-to-back-to-back, in a single-day Avatar marathon that left me feeling a little like Timothy Leary after a week's worth of 'shrooms. (Note to Loews Cherry Hill: Is that blotter acid on your ticket stubs?)

Cameron spent something like 15 years and $230 million to develop his story of a paraplegic 21st-century Marine whose dead twin's matching DNA is souped up to make a human/alien hybrid - creating an avatar he can mentally control, and letting him go tearing barefoot with the Na'vi tribe around an intergalactic Eden.

The Oscar-winning Titanic director (he needs to make room on his shelf for a few more golden dudes) labored mightily, developing newfangled 3-D cameras and an elaborate motion-capture system that digitally transferred not only his actors' movements to their CGI counterparts, but their facial expressions as well.

The results are transformative.

I sat there in the theater the other day imagining what it must have been like for audiences in 1933, witnessing the marvel of a giant ape clambering frantically up the Empire State Building in King Kong. And I flashed back to 1977, when millions of us went slack-jawed in awe as the Imperial Star Destroyer rumbled across the screen in the opening minutes of Star Wars.

Avatar is right up there. It's the same sort of seismic cinema experience: The movie pulls you full force into a whole new world. And it changes the paradigm of the movie biz while it's at it.

I'm happy to report that it's none-too-shabby if you opt to see it without those funny, clunky glasses. The 2-D version, which had far fewer people in the theater - 3-D and Imax ticket sales make up about 75 percent of Avatar's daunting $372 million domestic gross to date - shimmers with the brilliance of its psychedelic color palette.

Cameron's Pandora is a trippy rain forest of a planet, teeming with multihued creatures, iridescent flora and fauna, its skies scudded with clouds and moons aglow. The drawback of 3-D (at least in the RealD 3D version I saw) is that the tinted lenses of the polarized glasses darken the picture for the viewer, and even when the projector lamps are amped up, the color isn't as vibrant. (Dolby's 3D system, which utilizes "color filter coating" technology, and requires more expensive 3-D glasses, claims to eliminate this problem, but the nearest theater using the less-common Dolby system is 80 miles from Philadelphia, at the Penn Cinema 14 in Lititz.)

But without the dimensional dazzle of 3-D and Imax 3D, clumsy and cliched aspects of the narrative start to draw attention to themselves. Michelle Rodriguez's gum-smackin', gung-ho copter pilot Trudy mutters the same gripe about her "instruments" being out of whack over and over again. And the first time that Sully, in his towering, blue-skinned avatar incarnation, climbs off the lab table and scrambles into the Pandoran outdoors, he looks a little too much like a CGI-rendered being.

That's not the case in RealD 3D, or Imax 3D: Scully pushes through the exit door and starts his wobbly run across the base camp, kicking up the dirt with his bare feet - dirt that practically hits you in the face and those black-framed glasses lodged on the bridge of your nose.

Even the subtitles - the Na'vi dialect that the lithe, 10-foot-tall Neytiri speaks with her tribefolk - appear to float off the screen.

What's more, an array of two- and three-dimensional images - the hologram displays in the operations center of the obnoxious baddie Parker Selfridge; the data tablets with photos of key Na'vi leaders examined in the lab, and even the pictures affixed to the fridge at the mountain base camp - all bounce to life in 3-D.

What's really more: the mesmerizing sequence that culminates with Sully and Neytiri's epic flight on their respective mountain banshees, those fierce beaked winged dragons (Na'vi name: ikrans) that one bonds with for life, or dies trying to. Set midway through Cameron's 2-hour-40-minute epic, it begins with a crazy vine-climb up floating chunks of earth and rock. Then Sully picks out and tames his personal banshee, and then he and Neytiri climb aboard and swoop and bank, dive and soar o'er waterfalls and forests, their faces elated, their bodies poised like jockeys bringing their steeds victoriously around the final turn. . . . This is moviemaking at the summit of its game.

To behold this spectacle in the giant-screen, surround-sound room of an Imax 3D-equipped theater is the closest thing to being there riding the banshee yourself. The experience is breathtaking, as close to bliss as you can get without Zen training, or the use of illegal substances.

There's been a boom in 3-D production over the last few years, and the outsize success of Avatar, which opened in theaters all of three weeks ago - and which continues to sell out its Imax runs like mad - is certain to spur even more 3-D titles. DreamWorks' animated division, which has Shrek Forever After opening in May, is devoting itself exclusively to 3-D animation now. Other 3-D titles comin' at ya this year include Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, Tron Legacy, Toy Story 3, Despicable Me, Dimension's Piranha 3-D, and (yes, can it really be true?!) Kenny Chesney: Summer in 3D.

News of 3-D TVs and an ESPN 3-D sports channel hogged the headlines last week at the annual Consumer Electronics confab in Las Vegas. Not to mention that Sony will begin releasing 3-D Blu-ray DVDs for home viewing this year.

All of which is well and good, although it could do tricky stuff to our synapses over the long run. And remember this: Just because it's in 3-D doesn't ipso facto mean it's going to be awesome, or even any good. In 2008, Cameron lent his very same Avatar Fusion 3-D cameras to the Brendan Fraser/Jules Verne redo Journey to the Center of the Earth, and the only memorable thing about that dud is the POV shot of Fraser's toothpaste spittle as it goes down the sink.

Toothpaste spittle, in 3-D!

It still comes down to the script, the story, the performances, and the images being created for the screen. And in those departments, despite a few narrative flaws and its obvious riffs off earlier films (Dances With Wolves, FernGully), Cameron's Avatar is king. King of the world.

The legendary floating mountains of Pandora, indeed.

AMC Loews Cherry Hill 24, 2121 Route 38, Cherry Hill

AMC Neshaminy 24, 3900 Rockhill Dr., Bensalem

UA King of Prussia Stadium 16 & Imax, 300 Goddard Blvd., King of Prussia EndText

Avatar is screening nationwide in four formats:

Standard two-dimensional screen projection, no supplemental eye-gear required. Face the screen, keep your lids open, et voila!

RealD 3D, the dominant 3-D system, employs a shutter system for digital projectors, with the image rendered 3-D by wearing polarized plastic-frame glasses with gray lenses.

Dolby 3D, which uses a color filter coating technology instead of polarized/LCD shutter systems, promises less degradation of the image and less color diffusion. This is the format James Cameron chose when he premiered Avatar footage at Comic-Con in the summer, and it's the system that's wowing crowds at the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood. The eyeglasses are costlier, so fewer theater chains have embraced Dolby to date.

Imax 3D uses a patented twin projection system (one for each eye) and big, chunky polarized glasses or (in some Imax-owned theaters) a headset that includes electronic liquid-crystal shutter glasses.

- Steven ReaEndText