The Avatar AMP Suit

I don’t think anybody was surprised when Avatar boasted a near perfect replica of Aliens’ Power Suit. After all, James Cameron’s fascination with power gadgets is well known, and he still is the one who made the most faithful movie adaptation of Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. Despite not being called Starship Troopers at all!

I just love the A.M.P. Suit. There’s a great video, here showing both conceptual drawings and behind the scenes green screen effect shots. Don’t know about you, but I would gladly have the ‘practical one’ in my backyard.

What about some AMP blueprints?

This article gives some wonderful insights about Avatar, and above all has nice front view of the AMP Suit (scroll down to see it). It comes from something called the “design book”, and makes me drool. Modeling such a nice beast shouldn’t be too hard, provided you don’t have to mix it seamlessy with the real world props that were built to accomodate actors.

What I like most of AMP’s is the extra large hunting knife, something that makes sense in a jungle setting, yet I would have expected something like that from -say- Peter Jackson but not from James Cameron.