I watched it twice within 24 hours!

Rating: 10/10 (22 December 2009)

Never before have I felt the need to express my views about a movie online except when I saw Lord of the Rings for the first time.
Let's get it straight- the ONLY thing ordinary about Avatar is its screenplay. It's not bad, just ordinary. Story is clichéd, but very relevant. Everything else about the movie is just out of the world, literally! This is not a movie like Pulp Fiction or Fight Club. It doesn't require intelligence to understand the plot. But seriously, who cares? The visuals are so stunning and wonderful that you are sucked into Pandora. You feel like you are living on Pandora and watching the actors over their shoulders. This is where 3D filming has been put to great use in this movie. I can only speak for myself but I related to the characters so well that I was almost emotionally attached to them an hour into the movie.
The two main messages of the story are environmentalism and peace. Both of them are extremely relevant today. But then again, the purpose of this movie is not just to carry those messages across. It's to show a completely different world in stunning detail and to let the viewers relate that world to our own. To me, it talks also about fighting injustice, even if it is perpetuated by "your own" people. The biological theory of connections between all the living things on the planet was pretty cool and is truly, the worldwide web.
The acting doesn't stand out as mind-blowing but blame it not on the actors, but the visuals. James Horner, as always, delivers with the music. It is so inextricably linked to the scenes that you probably won't be able to imagine enjoying the movie without it. Special effects, needless to say, are outstanding! CGI on this scale for hundreds of characters is no mean task. Dialogs, as I mentioned before, are not extra-ordinary but then again, you don't expect a marine to be Shakespeare in his linguistic articulation. They definitely fit in with the plot.
This definitely is another milestone in movie-making and will definitely spawn a lot more special-effects filled movies. All in all, the movie rises above others of its class for the way in which this rather simple-minded story is told. I still can't stop playing through the scenes in my mind. Go watch it and let go of your worries and live in Pandora for 166 minutes and trust me, it's a wonderful life!