Avatar

I'm not giving it high marks for plot. The plot isn't very original and more than half of the time you can finish the characters' lines (except the ones in the alien language) before they do because James Cameron cannot write dialogue to save his life. The plot, however, isn't terrible, and if we can just stop trying to pick it apart for all it's not-very-deep meanings we can enjoy this for what it is; an unparalleled movie going experience. I hate empty spectacle, and this isn't it. It's not an intellectually complex spectacle or anything, but it can pull its own weight.

Because Cameron's last movie was the reigning box office champion Titanic, comparisons are inevitable. This is a love story within an epic crisis, but instead of a car we've got a phosphorescent orchard, instead of the unsinkable ship floundering we've got the tree of life getting blown to sawdust, and when the lovers in this movie go flying it's not on the bow of a ship and that's for damn sure. In terms of technical mastery, shock and awe factor, and limits on excessively cheesy content, Avatar bests Titanic on all fronts, and I'm a guy who is unashamed to say he really digs Titanic.

Enough about the plot, generic or otherwise, let's talk about how this movie is beyond anything any of us has ever seen. Just look at any shot on Pandora and remind yourself that this is one man's vision. I tried to imagine, both during and after the movie, just how much work he must have put into this movie. He's been working on it for fourteen years, they say, and I believe it. I sure as hell couldn't come up with all this, in fourteen years or forty.

What's more important than the fact that he came up with those whole world, is that he invented the means for realizing it. I have never seen as immersive a 3D movie and while movies to come will match and exceed (I presume) this will always be the first, the milestone, the vanguard. I'm not kidding when I say our generation may finally have an idea of what it was like for our parents to see Star Wars when it revolutionized science fiction cinema.

This is an important movie. It's beyond a matter of opinion, mine or anyone else's. I enjoyed the story and I absolutely enjoyed the way it was told, but if someone else didn't enjoy the story I couldn't blame them. It's still worth seeing, on the biggest screen you can find and unquestionably in 3D (extra charges are worth it), because Cameron delivered what his raging hubris almost guaranteed he couldn't. We're not talking about the eventual DVD, or a 2D dollar theater experience, we're talking about seeing it as the director intended: in the best theater you can where, miraculously, we can get inside his head and see the whole world he imagined. I know I sound excessive and dramatic when I say that it's more than a movie, it's an experience, but I'm saying it anyway. It's more than a movie. It's an experience. And while it's not perfect, it is unlike anything you have ever seen before.

A