A moment of evolution

Rating: 8/10 (8 September 2010)

12 years back, Jim Cameron recapitulated a certain form of cinema - the narrative, entertaining, blockbusting one -and crowned himself with 11 Academy awards just to let us know who the king was. 12 years on certain Matrixes and Rings of Power questioned this authority.
By the end of this decade, 12 uninterrupted years without a fiction film outing by the director later – he royally strikes again, if only to reclaim what's rightfully his. This time re-inventing popular culture as this is defined by cinema, re-imagining film, re-inventing theater-going experience and, alas, presenting us with a cinematic phenomenon similar to which are only, Melies' Voyage dans La Lune (1902), King Kong (1933), Gone with the Wind (1939) and, maybe, Truffaut's Le 400 coups (1959) and Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). To put it simply, Avatar, is a cultural episode of our time, a monumentally significant movie so indebted in its era as it is charioting ahead of it. To watch Avatar, is to participate in something grander, something the ages to come – if that holds any significance – will treasure and remember: The moment cinema evolved.
As plausibly one will guess, commenting on plot (the usual Cameronian plot of true love under impossible circumstances) or theme (typical Cameron dialectics of technology Vs Ecology and militarism Vs humanism) can be regarded as out of focus – and disturbing- movie reviewer's pedanticism.