Enough to make old eyes feel young again

Rating: 10/10 (23 December 2009)

I'm not really that old, but I've seen quite a few movies in my day. After Lord of the Rings was completed, I wondered if I'd ever be truly excited by a motion picture again. Well, James Cameron has done it with Avatar. There are the obvious cinematic innovations to acknowledge: carefully used 3D, the new motion capture technology, etc. The film just simply LOOKS great. I found myself giggling with joy at the pure beauty of so many of the scenes of Pandora (the alien planet) and its fauna. Cameron's time deep sea diving has obviously fired his imagination for strange and wonderful creatures. There is solid acting (particularly Stephen Lang, as the Colonel, who somehow pulls off a gritty depiction of a now very clichéd role), and there wasn't a single line in the script that had me checking my brain at the door. (There are some recycled lines, to be sure, but I didn't find them distracting.) Score by Horner was subtle, yet still moving. Frankly, though, what worked more than anything for me was the overall storytelling. A number of my friends were disappointed with the "gone native" tale, that has been "done to death" through previous works like "Dances With Wolves" or "Last Samurai", but I didn't find it old at all. Rather, this is a fantastic re-imagining of the age old human tendency to colonize and obliterate other cultures and environments. Cameron is definitely spinning us a morality yarn, but it is one that cannot be spun enough times, and he does make every effort to make this iteration the most beautiful you will ever see. 10/10 p.s. Without any intentional hyperbole, I consider this to be the finest movie I've ever seen.