Cameron is still the king of this or any other world!

Rating: 10/10 (22 December 2009)

My Take: A jaw-dropping and visually-thrilling experience. An event movie that lives up to the hype.
Watching and judging a movie primarily on its special effects would seem like a shallow way to look at movie-making, but for movies like James Cameron's latest AVATAR (A pet-project of his since he became "king-of-the-world" in TITANIC), you can't help but get carried away by the brilliant visual magic in place. But I mean that in the best way, because you don't only see AVATAR as an event movie, you experience it as an event itself. Since I saw the movie in Digital 3-D, I don't know how AVATAR would fare in 2-D. But I'll have you this: 3-D is the best possible way to see this movie, if not THE only way to see it. The last time I saw a movie on 3-D was the awful G-FORCE, which had me exhausted with wearing those glasses in the first 15 minutes (let alone, 88 minutes). Well, I wore those glasses for almost three hours in AVATAR, and I never got tired. Here's a movie where 3-D doesn't only enhance the already impressive effects, it also enhances the story into a full-blown experience.
I've heard a lot of people (critics mostly) complaining that the plot was mundane, but Cameron was the first to admit that this would be an old-fashioned adventure story. Along with the many old-fashioned stories, there are also several allusions to Cameron's ALIENS, 2007's BATTLE FOR TERRA, KING KONG, DANCES WITH WOLVES, and even POCAHONTAS as well as some of the "save the rain forest" elements of FERNGULLY: THE LAST RAINFOREST. At first, Sam Worthington had me a little nervous as the hero, but he turned out to be just fine as Jake Sully, a paraplegic wheelchair-bound Marine who must continue his brother's task to study the inhabitants of a beautiful yet dangerous moon called Pandora called the Na'Vi, by infiltrating their environments by means of replicates called Avatars. Their mission is to study these humanoid natives so that the company he serves will know how to extract Unobtainium, a precious rock-like material, hidden somewhere in the moon. But this is just the movie's McGuffin as the story focuses more on Jake's love for the beautiful forests of Pandora, his appreciation for its culture, his romance with a Na'Vi warrior Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) and eventually the battle to save the planet from the greed of humanity.
Cameron has been known to push the envelope in his movies, but after TITANIC (still a placeholder for #1 highest-grossing movie of all time), how could he possibly top anything that he had done before? Well AVATAR not only lives up to the hype before it, it may have even surpassed it. AVATAR has been dubbed a "game-changer", and visually, it might be. The technology used in AVATAR is not only impressive, it might just change the way we see movies in the future (if ever this would be topped). Motion-capture has been done several times before, but (maybe with a few exceptions) no other film has done it so perfectly. The CGI avatars (so to speak) are not some dead-eyed CGI critter, you care for them as if they were more human than the actual flesh-and-blood characters on-screen. Cameron not only waited for the right technology to make AVATAR (this was supposed to be done back in 1999 after TITANIC, but the technology wouldn't allow it), he made sure it was perfect. Call him a perfectionist, but don't say he doesn't succeed. But you'd think, with all the visual hokus-pokus he had in his hands, Cameron might just be another George Lucas. But his years in hiatus has not stopped him from being a professional storyteller. Old-fashioned or not, he tells the story in the most spectacular way possible. From the opening scenes to the spectacular, eye-popping finale, AVATAR never lets up for 3 hours (actually, 162 minutes). It's gonna be hard to top this one, maybe even for Cameron himself!
Rating: ***** out of 5.