A friend of mine asked if we wanted to see the Avatar at an IMAX theater in 3D. Being a tech geek of sorts I was all in on this one. I went online and reserved a few tickets Thursday because being opening weekend we knew it might be tough to get in.

We had an adventure in the morning with car problems that started the day off in a crazy way. Cassie’s car has been having coolant issues, so she decided to take mine because she thought it might break down. If you leave a car outside here (as mine was) you have to scrape the frost off the windows before you can drive. It is so cold that when you drive the windows frost up again. Cassie had to pull over a few times due to the fact she couldn’t see and was swerving all over the place. She had only gotten a few blocks away so I had to get out of bed, into my robe and sandals and then pull her car out of the garage that hadn’t been ‘frosted’ to do an early morning rescue and swapped cars. She ended up being late, but safe and luckily her car didn’t break down as well on the way there…have I mentioned winters in Colorado are so much fun?

Car antenna being attacked by cold

I put a downspout on the rental house and ended the day driving to Denver with Cassie. We left our house at around 5pm. We encountered traffic jams and we took a wrong turn that almost took us to DIA. It was a good thing my friend had saved 2 seats for us. “Top row middle” was the IM I received on my cell phone. We ended up being about 10-15 min late.

Top row middle means that if you want to sit down you’d have to scooch past about 25 people. We decided to just hop over the chairs instead. We put our 3D glasses on and….wait…there was…No magic? WTF? Cassie hadn’t ever seen a new 3D movie and was thinking it wasn’t too cool. In fact it was blurry. I asked my friend Clifton to see his glasses…Oh..WOW. Apparently we got the wrong glasses.

I had to jump over the seats again and go to the lobby. Told them we had the wrong glasses. The guy sez “Let me see your ticket stub”. Of course when I got in the door man didn’t give me back my stub. I told him that “I don’t have it.”. Of course he rolled his eyes and replied “Well then how am I supposed to know which 3D glasses you’re supposed to have?”. Well….that was a good point and it makes you wonder how many types of 3D glasses do they have?! Turns out they have 2 types and since the ones I was holding weren’t the right ones that left…the other pair.

He reluctantly gave me the other pair of glasses. I went back to the theatre and hopped over the seats yet again. Finally…I got where I wanted to be.

The movie was pretty cool. It was a lot of ‘cartoon’ looking scenes blended with ‘real life’ scenes. They used the science fiction to mask the real life issues we face. Things like environmental destruction, how we use force to destroy and get what we want at any cost, and our lack of caring for indigenous people, plants or animals. I was surprised to see the film makers paint the military as an evil force. You usually don’t see that side of things in American films. Instead we usually get Transformers types of films that are meant to recruit people for the armed services and to buy new Camaros by showing ‘kick ass’ scenes. This was the anti-transformers.

One thing Cassie of course noticed was the couple of smoking scenes in the movie. I thought it was kind of odd as well. Why would a scientist/biologist (the character played by Sigourney Weaver) be smoking in space? In a cabin where they have to pipe in oxygen to stay alive no less. For one thing, most scientists and people in other highly esteemed professions (like doctors) don’t smoke. You would be hard pressed to find 3% of the highly educated, wealthy group smoking. For another, this is supposed to be set in the future. Do you think many people will be smoking in the future? Hopefully not. And the risk of fire or blowing up your spaceship would be way too high. Makes you wonder if the tobacco industry was involved in financing this movie…hmm

Technologically it was far beyond what Transformers achieved and Avatar has a decent storyline too. When we got done watching the movie we snapped a picture with some of the people waiting to see the next showing.

Cassie with the ‘correct’ 3D glasses and a guy dresses as one of the ‘blue monkey cats’

Afterward, we went over to Dave and Busters and had a snack and talked about the movie, the day and how our lives are always such an adventure/