There's something wrong with you if you don't like this film

Rating: 10/10 (20 December 2009)

When I left my flat to see a screening of Avatar earlier, I noticed a beautiful, thin, orange sliver of a crescent moon in the sky, and it was, from my perspective, sitting just above the cinema I was going to and I thought 'How beautiful, I hope it's a sign of how good this film is going to be.' It was.
What other action director has a heart as big as Jim Cameron? Remember the way he brought Linsay back to life and how she and Virgil fall in love with each other all over again in The Abyss? The relationship between Arnie's terminator and young John Connor in T2? The romance at the heart of True Lies? And then he gave us the emotional mega-whammy of 'Titanic'! Now he delivers a film with not only a beautiful love story at it's heart, but suggests that there is a planet somewhere on which every inhabitant is completely in tune with every other creature and the planet's ROOTS in such a way that if and when it's existence is threatened, they all come together to defend it....
Any director who goes to the trouble of INVENTING the technology needed to see his vision come to life the way he wants and the patience to disappear off the radar for 12 years, painstakingly making sure it looks and feels and sounds exactly as he envisioned it deserves a new category of Academy Award. Most Groundbreaking Film of the Year award perhaps? About half an hour into watching this film, I realised I was watching it as a film critic, looking for flaws, then I turned that part of my mind off and decided to just let myself enjoy the story, and the effects, and the music, and the colours, and the humour....
Yes, we have seen the basic story before, it does resemble Dances With Wolves and The Last Samurai, and Cameron sets it all up a bit quickly and too easily, but I can think of no other director who can take such familiar material and inject it with such joyous, ecstatic enthusiasm. It does take a while to build up, but until the action really kicks off just sit back and soak up the beauty of what you are seeing (the reinvention of how films are made). Incidentally, don't go in expecting any shocking moments of things seemingly flying out of the screen, it's not that kind of 3D film (although there are little white spidery type things that seem to dance in front of the screen), the 3D here just invites you in, in fact I'm looking forward to seeing it again in 2D just to enjoy the emotion of it, and again in IMAX to really get the full monty, and probably again just because it has to be seen on a big screen before it leaves cinemas, but I suspect that is a long way off.
Michael Bay and Roland Emmerich take note, the master is back, and he has pushed 'the boat' out yet again.
Edited 24/12/09....I have been watching this films position on IMDBs highest grossing movies of all time and it has jumped from #295 to #240 in 24 hours!!! So to all you naysayers, whether you like it or not, something about this film has captured people's imaginations and hearts just like Titanic did. According to my calculations, all Avatar has to do is perform like this for another month or so and it will be neck and neck with Titanic as far as gross ticket sales is concerned, and I couldn't be happier!!