Spectacular !!!

Rating: 10/10 (27 December 2009)

Quite simply the most astounding movie I've seen as a visual experience.
I am in awe.
I hope Cameron makes a billion dollars for this truly amazing piece of art!
Forget the people who talk about the storyline, the plot, as if it somehow fails to live up to the rest of the movie. This is a great story!--- this is sci-fi on a very high level. Is the story less than novel?----what stories aren't rehashes and blendings of other story lines...? This is a morality tale with good and bad very clearly drawn. It is a disavowal of technology and the greed that drives profit and power, and an extraordinary affirmation of the organic world, the vegetative and animal forces that constitute life.
Others will comment at greater length of Cameron's rejection of man's attempt to conquer the universe by technologically violent means-----this is not that different a view than the one that drove John Borman's tale of the Brazilian native people's lives being destroyed by the advancing bulldozers in "The Emerald Forest"----but more than that it focuses on the incapacity of those blinded by greed who cannot empathize with the sufferings of those they are harming. Cameron again is not inventing anything new, but taking a very old human story to very powerful heights. George Carlin would have loved this movie. It attacks some people as shallow and mechanistic, cruel and barbaric, narcissistically destructive... after seeing war movies for years of humans killing one another I must agree with Cameron.
At one point the Na'vi are called "blue monkeys" by the humans..... human hubris denigrating non-human lifeforms. At another point the idea that there would be sacred areas to the Na'vi is laughed at by the corporate mercenaries------as if spirituality is either non-existent or only a human trait. Yet in Cameron's world the profit-hungry humans have no concept of God or spirituality at all----they are as soulfully dead as the machines they climb into----while those who live sans technology are very strongly spiritual. They are the essence of spiritual beings fully in touch with the life streaming through and around them.
Good v bad. Mechanical worldview v pantheism. Pro-life v anti-life. Cameron's movie isn't about inventing these themes, only the way he portrays them with amazing beauty and boldness.
I cannot say enough about the grandiosity of this cinematic effort. It is not only groundbreaking, but the first major step into the next wave of visual entertainment. The glasses-aided 3-D is superb, entrancing. The blend of CGI and actors is as seamless as the sky . . . will this lead to 3-D in home cinema, in TV broadcasting? Cameron is marking a trail that others will undoubtedly carve more completely. Tomorrow is bright with promise.
Thank you, James Cameron. I love sci-fi when it is done well, and with "Avatar" you have done it as well as can be imagined, and better than anyone else previously has.
A beautiful and timeless movie, "Avatar."
I look forward eagerly to your future offerings.