Chino, I want to know what you thought about your visit. It looks really cool from the pics. But what did you think about it?
Story time.
I freaking loved it. Had you never seen the movie, I think the place would have been really enjoyable, but as a full blown Avatard, I think they knocked it out of the park. There were two rides in Pandora. One was an indoor river boat ride through a Pandora stream during the night. You start in a relatively quiet forest with some background animal sounds, and the entire ride takes place in bioluminescent surroundings that look just like they did in the movie. There's some crazy projection systems in there that put animals and Na'vi groups all over the place that really fooled me at first. I thought they were animatronics until we got really close to the viperwolves. As you progress through the forest, you hear some background music and na'vi singing/chanting getting progressively louder. It's actually a really cool song even though I admittedly didn't understand a single word of the lyrics. As the ride ends, you encounter a life-sized version of Mo'at doing some spirit dance in sync with the songs the tribe is singing and she's screaming away. Hands down the most advanced animatronic I have ever seen. Everything about her seemed real.
The second ride was "The flight of passage". It's about 4 minutes long and you're hauling ass on the back of an ikran around Pandora. This was the best ride I have ever been on in my life, and I'm not just saying that as die-hard fan of the movie. Unless you're satan, I don't think it's possible for anyone to get on that ride and not feel exactly the same. You sit on this "link chairs" that pair you to an Avatar and you go for a flight. 3D effects of the screen you're looking at combined with the effects generated by the room make for a really intense experience. You feel the breeze, orientation changes, temperature variation, water, and smells as you fly around. I kept a sharp eye out and counted at least four creatures that we hadn't seen in the first movie. We went on it a total of four times. The third time we went on it, the ride started and Victoria realized her glasses were missing the right eyepiece. She told a guy after the ride and he brought us to the front of the 115 minute line. I wish I could have ridden this ride 50 times.
The rest of the world was great. We didn't eat at the restaurant, but it looked pretty cool. The attention to detail throughout the park was incredible. I couldn't get enough of it. We spent about 12 hours in Animal Kingdom and 8 of those were in Pandora. I will admit though, I was a little underwhelmed by the nighttime version of the park. It was cool, don't get me wrong, but I was expecting way too much. The riverboat ride absolutely nailed nighttime Pandora, and part of me was really hoping the entire park would look that way once it got dark. It looked great, but it did fall a little short of the movie.
I had a great time at the rest of Animal Kingdom as well. So many people told me it was the shittiest of the Disney parks, and while I've only been to Epcot prior (10 years ago) and didn't have much to compare it to, I enjoyed the hell out of it.
Topic: Avatar (Read 173804 times)
