Avatar - Breathtakingly Beautiful

Rating: 10/10 (18 December 2009)

When movies are created, they are done so with intent. Different genres of film target specific audiences, a formula which has sustained Hollywood and it's industries since the beginning of the blockbuster movies. When a movie is created in a manner that sets in motion any given goal, said films success is pendant on whether or not that goal is reached. If a comedy creates laughter, or if a romance produces tears, then they are successes in their own right. So when a massively ambitious, seemingly impossible to create film aiming to usher in a new era manages to grab hold of it's audience and take them on an unprecedented cinematic roller coaster ride that delivers the goods every turn of the way, it can be considered successful. Avatar is that success.
A work in progress that spanned a decade and a half, Avatar is more than just a film - it's an experience, an event. When James Cameron set out to make this movie back in the mid 90's, he realized that his ambitions were simply too far ahead of their time. His ideas could not be reached in a feasible manner, and due to this, he had to wait. Or create. Once informed that the image he held for this film was one that was out of grasp, he began working on the technology that would bring his masterpiece within reach. Fifteen years and nearly half a billion dollars later, James Cameron has brought that vision to the screen, and has done so in an extravagant and showstopping way.
Avatar tells the tale of a war between species, each fighting for the ultimate survival of their race. Desperate to find the fuel for their dying planet, human soldiers and scientists set out from earth and set course for Pandora. A planet connected by all living things, Pandora is home to an indigenous species known as the Na'vi, as well as the precious element Unobtanium needed to save earth. Using transference technology, paralyzed marine Jake Sully is volunteered for the "Avatar Program", which enables the thoughts and mind of a human to be placed within the shell of a tube-born Na'vi body. Using this as technique to their advantage, Jake is sent into the harsh Jungles of Pandora in order to bond with the natives, thus gaining knowledge and insight on their ways. Having originally planned to use this knowledge as a means of negotiating the natives relocation, so that the humans can access the deposit of Unobtainium - which just happens to sit below their most worshiped and valued pseudo-deity of their planet.
While the plot on paper may read as a standard shoot'em-up action sci-fi flick, it is a near inconceivable task to truly explain how incorrect this appearance truly is. This takes a stroke from every movie, and a dab from every genre, and manages to create a portrait of beauty, in which all pre-existing notion of what cinema can and cannot do is destroyed. Within the lengthy hundred and sixty some odd minutes of film, moviegoers will find that there is always something to keep them enthralled, a merciful gift when considering how tedious many of the longer film of recent memory can become.
No matter what can be said about the overtly cheesy script,a criticism that, while holding true, manages to fit charmingly into the over-the-top nature of the film, Avatar does as it set out to do, bringing moviegoers a cinematic experience rather than a film. Relying on the technology that he created, Cameron pours his heart into this movie, and it shows in every scene. Ranging from the absurdly detailed creatures to all-too-realistic planet, this flick manages to tell a fulfilling story while all the while throwing jaw-dropping scenery at the audience, giving them only enough time to recover before bombarding them with yet another breathtaking shot.
Be it the fantastical and charming love story told between the native and the outsider, or the too-real-to-be-true action scenes between gunships and foreign ferals, Avatar is what Star Wars was too the 70's, the Wizard Of Oz of the 40's - a masterpiece that will go down in movie history as a game changer of it's time.
4 Stars out of 4 Stars