Excellent!! Yay! (I my go see it again tonight.....)

Rating: 10/10 (21 December 2009)

This is the first movie I remember feeling like I felt after reading a good sci-fi fantasy book; I didn't want it to end and was sad it was over. A good book does that, but I've never had a movie do that for me, and I've seen a good deal of movies...
As the saying goes, there are only 9 plots in existence, so I am not upset by any overlaps with other movies I've watched in the past that have similar plot elements. I did find myself caring about the main characters, and while the similarities to native American movies (as mentioned in other posts, Dances with Wolves) is not surprising considering the type of characters in the movie and the motivations of the foreign invaders, the sci-fi element of a neurally connected planet was an intriguing plot element.
As in all sci-fi, you need to put your present-life science knowledge in your back pocket, and assume Clarke's Three Laws of Prediction:
1) When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2) The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3) Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
I liked this better than Star Wars, and I grew up watching those movies when they came out. But perhaps that is because nothing as involving as the original trilogy has been released since they first came out! I loved the Lord of the Rings, but it didn't make me feel this way when all was said and done...