As stunning as it looks and as riveting as it is, it's been done before.

Rating: 7/10 (10 October 2017)

I've been badgered to see this film for years, and when I finally do, I come out of it fairly impressed, but something tells me that this plot line is a tale as old as time. Another case of "Uh oh, there goes the neighborhood". The dreaded earthling, apparently already having destroyed their own planet, settles on what appears to be the moon of a huge planet called Pandora, and decides to take over. The best way to interact with the residents of this colorful planet is something called an avatar, or fake body in which the soul of an earthling is suddenly put into the avatar, a proxy of what the residents of this place looks like.
The avatars interact with the residents, feel everything they do, but when the day is over and the human soul wakes up, the avatar simply passes out as their soul has been removed. Then a ruthless marine commander decides that the residents of this planet need to move from where they are, and the scientist (Sigourney Weaver) running the avatar program objects, leading her and a crippled marine (Sam Worthington) to steal one of the marines' aircraft to warn the natives and prevent the nasty Stephen Lang, the colonel who has no regards for the residents, the native American like Na'vi, turning this into a modern science fiction version of many classic westerns.
This takes time to build, but once Worthington is in his avatar body, the action really takes off, especially after he meets Na'vi princess Zoe Saldana. The strong Saldana, seeing Worthington as a "baby", educates him after her parents, the clan and spiritual leaders of the tribe, insist that he is now one of them. Of course, Saldana already has an admirer, promised as her mate, and this sets up potential rivalry. But as Lang's anger towards the betrayal of Weaver, Worthington and the few who followed them out grows, so does the violence, and it's up to this small group of avatars to warn the tribe to get out before its too late, because the power of Lang's weapons of mass destruction knows no barriers.
As I am not a huge fan of modern CGI or the loud special effects that have overtaken modern cinema, I have avoided many films like this over the past decade, but on home video, find you can easily control the volume rather than be blasted by theater speakers. I instantly recognized the plot structure from many films over the years, but was impressed by the colorful photography and human way the natives were presented, instantly correlating it with real earth native American tribes, so often abused and misunderstood in Hollywood movies. The script is indeed better than I expected, and I was grabbed emotionally nearly from the start. Like other blockbuster franchises, I suspect that future entries in this film series will not nearly be as powerfully ingrained on my memory, and I hope that the time is taken to write great stories with great scripts that won't rely on old tricks and thus become a pale imitation of this film which for future generations should be seen on a large screen to get the full impact, something I missed.