Even after a 12 year hiatus, Cameron still hasn't lost his touch at masterpiece film-making.

Rating: 10/10 (10 March 2010)

(note:I first saw this just a few days after its release, and I purposely waited in the case that it won Best Picture. Unfortunately it was overlooked by the Academy.) For a bit over a year now, I have become a James Cameron fan. I was blown away by Aliens, and I felt that The Terminator and T2 were also quality science fiction films. And then I finally saw Titanic thinking that it was just going to be overrated and boring. I was proved dead wrong. And then I saw The Abyss and True Lies and enjoyed those as well. Half a year later, Avatar finally comes out and although it looks like it could be amazing, there's no way that it could be better some of the best Cameron films.
As I expected, I was blown away, but far more than I expected to be. It wasn't quite the film it might be. It was far deeper and less simple minded than critics were making it out to be.
Of course everybody knows the plot. I knew it a while before it came out. In 2154, crippled marine Jake Sully goes to the world of Pandora to be involved in the Avatar project. The purpose of Avatars is that they are human brain-controlled vessels that have the body of the native species, the Na'vi. The humans are mining Pandora for a valuable substance known as unobtanium. They want Jake to gain their trust, so that he can find out about the planets largest stores of it. In the planet's lush forests, he finds a Na'vi princess named Neytiri, who dislikes him at first for what the humans have been doing to the planet, but soon discovers that he is much more than they are, just as Jake finds more in the Na'vi than he would at face-value.
Simple plot, yes. However, a part of what makes a movie good is how it's presented. On paper the story would look very weak. But mixed with the visuals, the movie is given more power and depth than most of the CGI-based blockbusters in recent years. If it were just visuals and no story, then it would just be the mess that is a film like Transformers 2.