The most visually stunning film ever put to the screen

Rating: 10/10 (27 January 2010)

Having avoided seeing Avatar, first due to being away over Christmas and then the bad snow and ice we had (worst for 30 years), I finally got to the cinema to see what all the hype was about (Avatar had just beaten Titanic as the highest grossing movie ever).
I should say this is the first of the new style 3D movies I've seen (i.e. with polarising glasses).
The story is pretty generic; nasty, greedy humans (noticeably mostly white) out exploit a new world for it's mineral wealth, at the expense of the weaker native people and the ecology, backed up with military might. A re-telling of many a tale of the American Indians, Maori, Aboriginal Australians, Aztecs, etc. Thrown in are a bunch of "lefty tree hugging" scientists lead by Sigourney Weaver who are trying to communicate with and understand the culture of the "primitive" people (the hairless blue semi-cat like Na'vi). Enter our hero Jake Sulley, crippled ex-marine but also twinned with one of the scientists who happens to have recently died, he bonds with the natives (via his Avatar in A Man Called Horse kind of way through various trails) rebels against the nasty military industrial might and leads the natives to victory. There's lots of undercurrent to past and present events (destruction of religious /cultural icons, ethnic cleansing, habitat destruction, etc, etc).
Whilst the story isn't the greatest ever told, the visuals and sounds are quite breathtaking, I very quickly forgot what was cgi and what was life action and other than a few moments of poor animation found the whole film utterly realistic and as for the 3D, it made some of the sequences (in particular night scenes with the fluorescence of the flora and fauna on Pandora) a sight to behold, I have never seen anything comparable. The surround sound was also exquisite with it echoing the visuals perfectly, lots of jungle noises.
Does Avatar deserve to be the biggest grossing movie ever, yes it does, because as entertainment it is hard to beat, a long film at kept my attention unwavered for the entire duration, as a piece of brilliant story telling although well paced, no, even with the subtext (District 9 did that better despite being much more in your face about it).
See it in the cinema in 3D, it will never look or sound as good on a TV, even a very big one in Blu Ray with DTS Master Audio.
10 out of 10.