A movie that ticks all the boxes

Rating: Null/10 (3 January 2010)

Avatar manages to contain just about every mainstream film genre in the book.
At its heart is a stock standard romance formula: boy and girl are thrown together in an adversarial relationship but discover they are really kindred souls and fall in love. A crisis in their relationship tears them apart and it looks like all is over. But they find each other and live happily every after. (a template shared by fairy tales and just about every Mills and Boon ever written).
It's also the "hero" story, of the reluctant "chosen one" whose path it is to save the world (Think Ulysses and The Matrix here) and in the process discover himself.
It's an action film with plenty of fighting (Apocalypse now) and, probably first and foremost, a special effects film that revels in its own high-tech whiz bangery.
And of course Avatar is a Zeitgiest film, tapping into environmental and indigenous issues with commendable Hollywood high-horse PC, not to mention post-George W Bush anti-Iraq sentiment. Pandora will also be familiar to gamers.
You can look at Avatar in any way you like. For me, it was a visual feast and a trip in every sense of the word into a gorgeous, lush fantasy world with luminescent plants, fetching golden eyed aliens and cool floating mountains.
It was long but entertaining. Hard not to be for a film that ticks so many of the boxes.