Avatar (2009 film) the Rings" (literature). It was a tougher sell ..." The film received mostly positive reviews. On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a rating of 83% based on 301 reviews, with a rating average of 7.5/10. The site's consensus reads "It might be more impressive on a technical level than as a piece of storytelling, but "Avatar" reaffirms James Cameron's singular gift for imaginative, absorbing filmmaking." On Metacritic — which assigns a weighted mean score — the film has a score of 83 out of 100 based on 35 critics, indicating "universal acclaim". CinemaScore polls conducted during the opening
Avatar (2009 film) said he had been "surprised at how much it did look like ". Principal photography for "Avatar" began in in Los Angeles and Wellington, New Zealand. Cameron described the film as a hybrid with a full live-action shoot in combination with computer-generated characters and live environments. "Ideally at the end of the day the audience has no idea which they're looking at," Cameron said. The director indicated that he had already worked four months on nonprincipal scenes for the film. The live action was shot with a modified version of the proprietary digital 3-D Fusion Camera System, developed by Cameron