Who knew that I would find giant blue women with tails attractive?

I enjoyed it, but there were some inconsistencies that bothered me. Why, for example, are there floating mountains, with waterfalls? It seems you can't have both of those existing at the same time. Then again, I'm not an astrophysicist.

The 3D is good, but hard to watch for three hours. I'd prefer a 2D screening.

Opening night here in Japan tonight....wow!

I think JeffO said, "This movie is such eye candy that it is worth that alone.".....well said.

For the rest, what can't you like about a 10ft blue chick with a tail....tell me you wouldn't hit it?

Preachy...? Yea, but who gives a s***, it was 4+ entertainment, truly worth it.

Really liked it. Saw the 2D version - 3D movies give me a headache. I figured with a running time of 2:40 this action/CG hit would be no different. Lots of PC & green references (not such a bad thing these days) and a good story - though very predictable and no surprises. My favorite human was by far Michelle Rodriguez - reminded me of tough girl Vasquez from Aliens.

That was me. :D

It's by far the best 3d i ever saw, very natural.

Definitely worth it to see the 3d if at all possible.

The hot latino chick also played in Resident Evil. I agree with you, she be flat sexy. :)

It was ok for a while, but then turned a bit into Disney's Lion King in the end...
Watchable, just wouldn't pay for it..

I thought it was very good. The VFX were great, and it actually had a plot. Best 3D I've seen as well. AND I had two free passes!

Great stoner film.

Directed by one of the great Canadian stoners.

Angela, the language the smurf and smurfette kitties speak was created by some linguist guy, I seem to remember reading somewhere.

wasn't that his first movie

Oh thank you for posting that!

I really swore I could "hear" a language in that - a real one. In this case one made up by a linguist but as such, probably with all the features of an existing languages.

Nice to know I haven't lost my marbles. Oh wait...nevermind... You guys know better! :p

angela

sounded a like a mix up of some african and native american to me..

Miss if you ever lost your marbles i would be more than happy to pick them all up for you.

Space may contain real "Pandoras"

Special to LiveScience
SPACE.com – Mon Dec 28, 8:00 am ET

The new science fiction blockbuster "Avatar" is set on habitable and inhabited moon Pandora, which orbits the fictional gas giant Polyphemus in the real Alpha Centauri system.


Although life-bearing moons like Pandora or the Star Wars forest moon of Endor are staples of science fiction, astronomers have yet to discover any moons beyond our solar system. However, they could be science fact, and researchers might soon not only be able to spot them, but also scan their atmospheres for key signs of life as we know it, such as oxygen and water.

"If Pandora existed, we potentially could detect it and study its atmosphere in the next decade," said astrophysicist Lisa Kaltenegger of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass.


Gas giants in our own solar system have many moons, and if the same holds true with alien planets and their moons, "that's a lot of potential habitats," Kaltenegger told SPACE.com.

Finding alien moons


So far, planet searches have detected hundreds of Jupiter-sized objects in a range of orbits around their stars. These giant planets are easier to see because they are huge, but could not serve as homes for life as we know it. However, scientists have speculated whether rocky moons orbiting gas giants could be friendly to life, if that planet orbited within the star's habitable zone – the region warm enough for liquid water to exist on the surface.

"All of the gas giant planets in our solar system have rocky and icy moons," Kaltenegger said. "That raises the possibility that alien Jupiters will also have moons. Some of those may be Earth-sized and able to hold onto an atmosphere."


NASA's Kepler mission, launched in March, could find alien moons, or exomoons. Currently it looks for alien planets, or exoplanets, which cross in front of their host stars, eclipsing the star's light by a small but detectable amount. Such a "transit" lasts only hours and requires exact alignment of star and planet along our line of sight.

"Before, we had not found a way to detect and separate the light from the exoplanet and its moons, since they're so close together and the signal we'd get off a planet would be roughly 100 times greater than its moon because of its surface area," Kaltenegger said. "But now we've figured out that if everything is right, we have a way to tell them apart."


An exomoon's gravity would tug on its planet and either speed or slow its transit, depending on whether the moon leads or trails the planet, she explained. The resulting variations in each transit's length of time would indicate an exomoon's existence. Alternatively, when an exomoon passes between the star and us, it would make it look slightly dimmer, a change scientists might also be able to detect.

Probing an alien moon's sky


Once a moon is found, the next obvious question would be whether it had an atmosphere. If it does, those gases will absorb a fraction of the star's light during the transit, leaving a tiny, telltale fingerprint to the atmosphere's composition.

An Earth-sized moon could be studied if conditions are just right. For example, the separation of moon and planet needs to be large enough that we could catch just the moon in transit, while its planet is off to one side of the star.


In a paper submitted to Astrophysical Journal Letters, Kaltenegger calculated what conditions are best for analyzing the atmospheres of alien moons. She found that Alpha Centauri A, the star featured in "Avatar," would be an example of an excellent target that researchers could scan with the next-generation James Webb Space Telescope in the near future.

"Alpha Centauri A is a bright, nearby star very similar to our Sun, so it gives us a strong signal," Kaltenegger explained. "You would only need a handful of transits to find water, oxygen, carbon dioxide, and methane on an Earth-like moon such as Pandora."


Unfortunately, Alpha Centauri A does not seem to possess a giant planet. Still, "a lot of close stars have extrasolar giant planets," Kaltenegger said, "and some of them orbit in the habitable zones of their stars, making them potential 'Pandora' systems."

The Goldilocks zone


Although Alpha Centauri A offers tantalizing possibilities, small, dim, red dwarf stars might be better targets when looking for life-bearing planets or moons. The habitable zone for a red dwarf is closer to the star, which increases the chances of spotting an exoplanet's transit.

One dilemma a planet in a red dwarf's habitable zone might face is that it would also be close enough for the star's gravity to slow it until one side always faces the red dwarf – the same process that keeps one side of the Moon always facing Earth. One side of this "tidally locked" planet then would be baked in constant sunlight while the other side would be trapped in constant darkness, potentially with strong winds constantly driven from the hot to cold side.

An exomoon in a red dwarf's habitable zone wouldn't face this problem. The moon would be tidally locked to its planet, not to the star, and therefore would have regular day-night cycles just like Earth. Its atmosphere would moderate temperatures, and plant life would have a source of energy moon-wide.

"Alien moons orbiting gas giant planets may be more likely to be habitable than tidally locked Earth-sized planets or super-Earths," Kaltenegger said. "We should certainly keep them in mind as we work toward the ultimate goal of finding alien life."

Life on the moon

If there is life on alien moons, it might have to deal with a host of challenges beyond the flying dragon-like creatures "Avatar" depicts.

Jupiter's moons exist within an intense radiation belt of electrons and ions trapped in the planet's magnetic field, and Saturn's gravitational pull leads to extraordinary tidal effects that may have once ripped apart nascent moons to produce its rings. Even today, Saturn's tidal effect on its moon Titan – some 400 times greater than our moon's effect on Earth – can drive winds and volcanic eruptions.

When analyzing if a rocky exomoon can support life as we know it, Kaltenegger explained the first step is seeing whether it is big enough to hold onto an atmosphere. While our moon is too small, Saturn's moon Titan is massive enough to keep an atmosphere. Heat is an issue when it comes to holding onto a sky, however – "if you were to heat up Titan to Earth's temperatures, it would lose part of its atmosphere," Kaltenegger explained. "So massive is good." She noted that past studies calculated at least one-tenth of Earth's mass was desirable.

The next step is finding out if the exomoon has a magnetosphere to protect it from streams of particles from its star and radiation from its planet, which could strip the moon's atmosphere off. "Ganymede is the largest moon in our solar system, and it has a magnetosphere," Kaltenegger noted.

Tides on such moons would be very strong – "probably a surfer's paradise," Kaltenegger said. "From watching Jupiter's moon Io, we'd expect a big potential for tidally induced volcanism, especially if there is more than one exomoon."

The skies of these moons could be dramatic.

"I'd speculate that there'd be spectacular aurorae from the interactions between an exomoon's magnetic field and its star or planet," Kaltenegger said. "What color of course will depend on what the atmosphere is made of, but it might lead to amazing light shows in the moon's sky."

Many of the exoplanets discovered so far are more massive than Jupiter, the most massive planet in our solar system.

"The fun thing is that if you make a planet bigger, the moons should be bigger too, roughly, which means those can start to hold onto atmospheres more," Kaltenegger said. "So you could have situations where you could have a gas giant with four moons that are all habitable. That depends, again, on if they have magnetospheres and can hold onto atmospheres, but all of a sudden, you've opened up the opportunity for habitats that can be completely new, fascinatingly different and potentially very weird."

Which means that he has made how many good movies? ;)

Heck of a movie. I liked it on many levels. Been a long time since a movie was sold out as much as this one has been.

I know, I know, I just wanted to make that point obvious.

I just saw the 2D version of it yesterday. Fantastic! One of the best movies I have seen in a long time. The only thing that sucked was that we got there a bit later then planned and had to sit in the very front of the theater. I dealt with it okay but my wife got a headache from being too close.
I plan on seeing it again in the 3D version when the crowds smooth out a bit.

The family and I saw it last weekend in 3D and we all loved it. Great movie with fantastic graphics. We arrived early and had to sit on the second row also.

Avatar sails past $1B, now 5th biggest movie of all time, in just 3 weeks....

By David Germain, AP Movie Writer , On Sunday January 3, 2010, 9:37 pm EST

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- James Cameron's science-fiction epic "Avatar" had another stellar weekend with $68.3 million domestically, shooting past $1 billion worldwide, only the fifth movie ever to hit that mark.

No. 1 for the third-straight weekend, 20th Century Fox's "Avatar" raised its domestic total to $352.1 million after just 17 days. The film added $133 million overseas to lift its international haul to $670 million, for a worldwide gross of $1.02 billion.

"Avatar" opened two weekends earlier with $77 million, a strong start but far below dozens of other blockbusters that debuted as high as $158 million. But business for other blockbusters usually tumbles in following weekends, while "Avatar" revenues barely dropped over the busy Christmas and New Year's weekends.

"It's like a runaway freight train. It just keeps doing business," said Fox distribution executive Bert Livingston. "Here's what's happening: I think everybody has to see `Avatar' once. Even people who don't normally go to the movies, they've heard about it and are saying, `I have to see it.' Then there's those people seeing it multiple times."

"Avatar" was Cameron's first film since 1997's "Titanic," the biggest modern blockbuster with $1.8 billion worldwide.

Cameron now is the only filmmaker to direct two movies that have topped $1 billion. Along with "Titanic," the others are "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King" at $1.13 billion, "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest" at $1.06 billion and "The Dark Knight" at a fraction over $1 billion, according to box-office tracker Hollywood.com.

With "Avatar" closing in on No. 2 film "The Return of the King," Cameron is in striking distance of having the two top-grossing movies globally.

"Avatar" has had a price advantage over those other billion-dollar movies. About 75 percent of its domestic business has come from theaters showing it in digital 3-D presentation, those tickets typically costing a few dollars more than admissions for the 2-D version.

Finishing at No. 2 for the weekend was Robert Downey Jr.'s crime caper "Sherlock Holmes" with $38.4 million. The Warner Bros. film lifted its domestic total to $140.7 million after 10 days in theaters.

In third place was 20th Century Fox's family tale "Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel" with $36.6 million. It raised its 10-day total to $157.3 million.

The top-three movies, along with solid holdovers that included Universal's "It's Complicated" at No. 4 with $18.7 million, steered Hollywood to a big start to 2010 after a year of record revenue.

Hollywood finished 2009 with $10.6 billion domestically, easily surpassing the previous record of $9.7 billion in 2007, according to Hollywood.com.

Factoring in today's higher admission prices, the year was strong but not a modern record-breaker for number of tickets sold. According to Hollywood.com, domestic admissions came in at 1.42 billion in 2009, the most in the last five years, though well below the modern record of 1.6 billion in 2002.

In Hollywood's glory years of the 1930s and '40s, before television eroded the movie audience, estimated movie attendance ran as high as 4 billion some years.

Studios began 2010 with a headstart over last year. Overall revenues came in at $230 million, up 50 percent from New Year's weekend in 2009, when "Marley & Me" was No. 1 with $24.3 million.

Like "Titanic" 12 years ago, "Avatar" has fairly clear sailing now that the holidays are over. Hollywood is entering a slow season, when fewer big movies arrive and competition is lighter.

"Titanic" lingered as the No. 1 film for months leading up to the Academy Awards, where it won 11 Oscars, including best picture and director.

"Avatar" also proved a critical favorite with strong Oscar potential. Cameron broke new ground in combining live-action, digitally-enhanced performances, visual effects and 3-D presentation to immerse viewers in his futuristic tale of humans and aliens on a distant moon.

"Leave it to James Cameron to do this. To not only set the technical world on fire, the visual world on fire, but also the box-office world on fire 12 years after `Titanic,'" said Paul Dergarabedian, box-office analyst for Hollywood.com.

Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Hollywood.com. Final figures will be released Monday.

1. "Avatar," $68.3 million.

2. "Sherlock Holmes," $38.4 million.

3. "Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel," $36.6 million.

4. "It's Complicated," $18.7 million.

5. "The Blind Side," $12.7 million.

6. "Up in the Air," $11.4 million.

7. "The Princess and the Frog," $10 million.

8. "Did You Hear About the Morgans?", $5.2 million.

9. "Nine," $4.3 million.

10. "Invictus," $4.1 million.

Box Office at Hollywood.com

I wish they'd only publish the number of tickets sold... not dollars. That way you'd have a fair comparison with other movies from the past. It's easy to make current movies' dollar figures surpass a movie from five or more years ago... they raise ticket prices so often.

Tallying number of tickets would also level the playing field another way... tickets sold at matinee prices would be on a level playing field with non-matinee tickets.

One more... I assume ticket prices in different countries vary somewhat.