I'm not going to talk about plot (or that I thought to myself, Dances with Wolves in space more than once). I'm not going to talk about dialog or pacing (or that the limited narration was totally unnecessary). There are other reviews, more reviewy type reviews, that have all that covered. I'm not going to spoil anything, either. Heck, I'm not even going to talk about Avatar...not just yet.

I want to talk about Jurassic Park.

Jurassic Park was the first movie I remember being excited to an unhealthily obsessive level. My dad, a huge Michael Crichton fan, did his best to tempt my young self into reading the full-out book. So he told me a sort of good parts version, filling my head with tales of dinosaur resurrection from amber dug up deep in the Earth, all while I would do my best to get more and more out of him without actually having to crack open a book.

So when I heard Jurassic Park was becoming a movie, not only did that dash any chance of me reading the story, but I literally could not fathom a world in which I'd be patient enough to wait to see it (not that I had any other option). I mean, dinosaurs, theme parks, and terror? Jurassic Park was biologically engineered for young boys.

All of this is nice background, but my point is simpler. When I saw those dinosaurs on screen, knowing that, in many cases, they'd been modeled purely by computers—computers!—I felt like anything was possible. Yes, it's a cliche feeling. That's actually why I'm sharing it. Because ultimately, we all have that movie—be it Star Wars or Terminator or whatever—that movie we actually felt a bit humbled, even challenged, watching because it was was an amuse-bouche of the future, even if a bit cheesy at heart.

Avatar is that movie for the new generation.

I don't expect you to believe me if you haven't seen the film yet. I, myself, was a huge skeptic until a few hours ago. Blue people? Papyrus font?? What the fuck happened to dinosaurs and light sabers and killer robots from the future? Did we use all the cool stuff up?

But about 30 minutes in to the film, you realize that the marketing has undersold the movie. In an era when every great moment of a film makes its way to a trailer, Avatar surprised me with an endless amount of unparalleled optical overload. Every single shot is just so full of detail that you literally open your eyes wider to take as much in as you can before each cut.

Gizmodo readers will love the tech, especially as that about 50% of the film's budget apparently went to rendering badass 3D curved displays and absurdly awesome cockpits. But sequences from Pandora's woods at night...let's just say they're the first luminescent visual effects I've seen that made 1982's Tron look like a 27-year-old movie.

Also, while shots of the Na'vi (the blue dudes) clearly deviate from a 50/50 balance between real footage and CGI depending on the scene, their body animation, even for motion capture, is unparalleled. While their faces and eyes especially can appear a tad cartoony at times, the overall effect is not done justice by YouTube trailers or that shot pasted above. Call the effect hyperreal or even unreal, but it's certainly doesn't look "fake." I don't know that I've ever witnessed complete humanoid models move so realistically, especially given their exposure (in both screen time and skin).

Of course, Avatar's 3D is the basis of my obnoxious zeal for the aesthetics. I viewed the film in a full-sized IMAX theater. And while I knew that a fair share of missiles would fly off the screen (and ZOMG the mechs look amazing), I couldn't have expected the sheer tangibility that 3D—what I once supposed a gimmick—added to the experience. I mean, I saw textures in this film that I've never seen in a movie before, like wet, rubbery skin on the wildcats of Pandora that made people around me gasp more than once. There's a more understated moment, too, when Sam Worthington shaves and you realize, wow, stubble is pretty remarkable in 3D. The jagged hairs bring a level of humanity to his character, adding something unexpectedly corporeal to what's really a 30-foot-tall head in closeup.

So yes, 3D is more than a gimmick. The glasses are still a pain, but 3D is here to stay.

Avatar doesn't handle this new technology perfectly, however, and I hope that other filmmakers learn from its mistakes. Especially early in the film during shots in close quarters, the direction allowed many objects to break frame (think of a person walking from one end of the screen to the other). For my untrained eyes, seeing a figure go from 2D to 3D to 2D was not only distracting, it was tiring. And the same can be said for a constantly shifting depth of field—based upon where the camera is focusing, you'll need to figure out whether to look deep into the screen or right in front of you.

An out of focus shoulder breaking the corner of the frame is pretty much the worst implementation of 3D I could imagine. Luckily, the forest sequences that make up the majority of the film seemed to have been planned with a wider depth of field—more of the shot is in focus.

After 2 1/2 hours in the theater, I am exhausted far more than the same amount of time playing an FPS would make me, but Avatar was so remarkable that it was well-worth the work of watching it.

I still can't imagine popping on a pair of glasses to watch the evening news after a long day of work, and I sympathized for the guy sitting beside me as he started rubbing his eyes about halfway through. As someone with a slight uncorrected astigmatism, my left eye was ready to fall out of its socket by the final climactic sequence.

But as viewers, we'll adapt to the new tech. And as technicians, Hollywood will learn the rules of 3D as it writes them.

So for now, I'm not quite ready to see every piece of the world's media in 3D. But Avatar? Yeah, I'll be seeing it again...and maybe again...just in hopes of absorbing a bit more of the visual splendor.

Digital Domain was already working on some secondary characters for Transformers 2 while George Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic building the main robots like Optimus Prime. Yes, Transformers 2 had such a big budget that DD was hired just to ride shotgun.

One key moment of DD's handiwork depicts the transformation of a girl named Alice—played by actress Isabel Lucas—into a lethal robot. The main shot, seen above, uses digital techniques like advanced particle simulation (physics) to tear 10,000 pieces of skin away from a girl's body—the kind of high-concept graphics that require lots of software know-how, and computers to do incredible amounts of heavy lifting. It was the sort of shot that showcased everything DD could do.

When Michael Bay saw it, he found it lacking.

After watching an early edit of the movie, Bay had decided that although the wide shot of Alice was nice, the film was missing a close-up—he wanted 40 frames of the girl's face as she began transforming.

The close-up wouldn't take as much as the full-body master shot. Instead of 10,000 pieces of skin, only about 50 had to move. But because of time, budget and manpower constraints, this animation had to be done the old-fashioned way—working by hand. It meant that five guys would spend the next three months of their lives on less than two seconds of the finished film.

Computer graphics supervisor Paul George Palop walked me through their process of crafting the "very, very painful" 40 frames.

The goal sounded simple: Transform this closeup of a human into a closeup of a robot. Alice's face would begin to shatter away, revealing a gruesome creature underneath. But to model in 3D over digital film takes some prep work. To make the effect look real, the guys would need to map the 2D film original shot into digital 3D space. Then they could add all the neat robot stuff.

First, the DD team cut out all of the background and extraneous objects (including Shia LaBeouf's head), isolating the female figure. It's the first step of a classic technique known as rotoscoping, a trick that predates Disney, in which animators overlay cartoon characters and other animation on top of live action backgrounds. (Now that CG has blended humans and cartoons, it's probably safe to say that there isn't an FX-heavy movie made now that doesn't involve some kind of rotoscoping.)

With the basic 2D work done, DD used a laser scan of Lucas' figure to create a perfect 3D map. The rotoscope plate was then laid over this map, allowing the animators to work with real image depth and geometry. We don't have that exact shot, so we stole a still from the later wide shot to make the point. On the right, you have the 3D body scan model. On the left, you can see the 3D applied to the 2D figure.

One artist worked solely on the little skin plates that cracked away around Alice's mouth. Each of these 50 or so pieces was hand-animated, frame by frame, to create the short effect. But to enhance the illusion of movement, artists applied extra texture to the tiles along with some displacement mapping to each tile's edge, which essentially complicates the square shape into an array of small triangles. (See how they look all jagged in the version on the right?) One the 3D-animated shapes were laid out, they had to be naturally lit, lest the girl's skin look unnatural before she transformed completely into a metal monster.

In the meantime, the exact movements of the human Alice head needed to be applied to the newly animated robot Alice head, so that any movement from the former could be copied instantly in the latter.

Finally, all of the pieces were composited, rendered and placed on a newly drawn background. You'll notice that beyond the obvious visual effects, artists beefed up Alice's figure a bit. They rebuilt the end of her left arm and, while they were at it, added a bit more lift in the back of her hair. Even with a blockbuster megamovie deadline, there's always time for last-minute styling.

After all of this meticulous work—three months of effort from digital effects masters—audiences everywhere got a bonus 40 frames of remarkable robotic transformation. Ironically, one of the movie's chief complaints would be its length.

That's what Ed Ulbrich, Executive VP of Production at Digital Domain told me about designing the 100% digital head seen in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button—a challenge he justly refers to as the "Holy Grail" of special effects imaging.

In case you were interested in a few more specifics regarding the process, Ulbrich's TED talk from a few months back is quite revealing. Despite the ludicrously complicated methodology (conveniently abbreviated during TED), Ulbrich can't deny that human recreation will democratize like every other in the special effects industry, like morphing.

"In 1991 when I saw Terminator 2, it blew my mind. It made me want to be in this business. It was a miracle," Ulbrich said. "Now, I have a 5-year-old daughter who has a little program on the Mac that can take two photos and morph them. It becomes just another arrow in your quiver."

The movie is out today on Blu-ray and DVD. More from our talk with Ulbrich to come later.

It's one thing to make robots or aliens or whatever look "real," but it's something entirely different to completely generate an actors face and place it on another actors body and have it look completely seamless. This video, which shows some behind-the-scenes footage of how they took Brad Pitt's face and placed it, aged up, on a smaller actor's body. While Iron Man might seem like the natural choice for Best Visual Effects at the Oscars, Benjamin Button is the film that used the most impressive effects. I'll take realism over flashiness any day of the week. [Rope of Silicon via io9]

Of course the well-deserving staples show up in the list (Star Wars, Tron and Jurassic Park), but there was one in particular that I didn't know about, and it may be the most convincing moment on the list.

In Total Recall, there's a brief moment when a secretary changes the colors of her nails with the tap of a wand. How did they do it? The illusion was created through rotoscoping, a layered matte animation in use since 1915.

Since you're not doing anything at work today, hit the link and enjoy the whole list. And no, there was no mention of that other effect from Total Recall in the top 50. [Den of Geek via OhGizmo!]