I can't imagine the render farm this took to make!

Rating: 9/10 (22 December 2009)

Years ago when Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within was released (2001), it set a benchmark for rendered animated actors in a movie. I remember reading about the hundreds of hours of rendering time it took to make and was in awe of the animation. Man have we come a long way! Thanks to Moore's law, computing power has nearly tripled since then and the complexity of animation that's capable now blurs the line between CG and live-action & effects. Cameron has reportedly spent MILLIONS of $ on this movie and it shows in every aspect of the movie. Cameron is a master at telling a story and what I HATE in a lot of movies using live action and animated/CG characters is certainly absent from this movie. I SO hate it when some CG monster pops out at the actors and it HAS to roar (or do some OTHER formulaic action that's been miserably repeated ad nauseum in other movies) and stands there for a few seconds looking menacing and THEN it attacks our main character(s). I think Cameron must have did some homework and observations in nature to see how animals and such respond to threats and aggress in the wild. That part I feel he got pretty bang on and you CAN feel hair rise up on your skin and some semblance of what the character would probably be feeling. One example is when Jake accompanies the two scientist as a guard and is chased by some kind of creature. You can literally feel the panic, the branches banging on the characters face, and the wind as the creature takes swipes at him. I also like that the character's CG looked about 95% lifelike and not hyper-rendered or ultra-fluid. We CAN see the state-of-the-art in Avatar. The CG animation is ALMOST 100% like-like. Better than anything we've seen to date. When you encounter an animated actor in other movies, you can tell right away they are animated as they just don't have that certain human gait to their mannerisms and expressions. Cameron has pulled an ace out of the hat with the CG in that respect. I would guess a LOT of characters in the movie had some kind of motion-capture applied to them as they appeared vastly more realistic to what we recognize as motion and expression in the natural world. OK, on to the story and other elements.
I can see some of the elements of what people say with regard to Last Samurai and Dances With Wolves BUT this is not THAT kind of movie. If you don't want to know TOO much of the movie, skip this part NOW! We learn that humans have pretty much plundered and rendered their own world sans "green" and have traveled 6 years (light years?) to a planet called Pandora because it has this stuff called Unobtainium (probably because it's unobtainable on earth, could have had a better name but I "get" why it's called that, slight allusion there) that goes for 20 million an ounce (or some such measure of weight) and the aliens are sitting on a mother-load of it. The human have been trying to court the aliens to swindle them...I mean, relocate them so they can dig up the Unobtanium. That's as much as you'll need to know in terms of premise of the movie. So with that, you can see the allusion to the "white man" coming in and taking away the Native American's land for a few baubles and beans. I think it was Cameron's intent to liken the aliens to Native Americans as it gives the story a bit of accessibility and digs into our collective past and how we treated the Native American's when "we" arrived. What it boils down to is Cameron saying to his audience that we as humans need to do a much better job of taking care of what we HAVE rather than progressing towards being a people who take from others and will ignorantly kill anything and anyone just to get what we THINK is ours.
Overall, I don't agree with others saying this is the Star Wars of this generation. I thought the story was worthy of Cameron's name and his production and direction of this movie will not be rivaled ANY time soon. You will not notice the 2 1/2 hours length of the movie. Yes, it is THAT good. I look forward to watching it on BluRay or in 3D to see what I am really missing. If you walk away from this movie thinking "stupid CGI, pro-alien, and anti-human", you missed the whole point of the movie. BUT, if you walk away thinking that even if we ever live long enough or advance far enough to explore other worlds, we should always remember that if there is life already on another planet, it was there, long, long, LONG ago before we showed up.