Avatar

  If you're anywhere near the geek that I am, when you first heard about James Cameron's Avatar movie your inner skeptic probably said the following in a sarcastic tone: "Oh boy! Another 'CGI Cinematic Adventure' guaranteed to get your hopes up just high enough for them to shatter when they hit the ground!" But at the same time another small voice in your head--the voice that told you it was totally cool to drop that Star Wars reference into otherwise polite conversation--screamed out, "Oh please! Oh pleaze! Oh pleeze! O pleeez! Let this be everything I want it to be!"

  And then the endless ads and cross-promotions started and there was that 5-minute Avatar intro to the World Series and your inner skeptic said, "See! They know they have a flop on their hands and they're promoting the shit out of it just to get droves of unsuspecting geeks like you to fork over the cash in the first weekend so they can recoup their losses!" All the while that other small voice is nearly chanting, "This is the same guy that brought us Terminator and Aliens! What could possibly go wrong!?"

As the release of the film in London came and went, reviews started leaking into the US press (FOX had embargoed US reviewers from reviewing the film before its US release, giving my inner skeptic even more ammunition.) and the reviews were almost unanimously positive, even excellent. Still, I was unconvinced and willing to ignore that small voice (Now relentlessly chanting, "AV-A-TAR ! AV-A-TAR!") until Roger Ebert gave it four frickin' stars. Even the inner skeptic mumbled something about the price of movie theater popcorn and went silent.

  Needless to say I saw a midnight showing of Avatar: 3D. And it was, in fact, an epic film the likes of which I have never seen before and can only hope to see again. The nine years and hundreds of millions of dollars that Cameron burned making this film were meticulously well-spent. I suspect that most of the time and money were spent developing the technology to do an almost entirely CGI film at a level that matched the imagination of its creator. In the same way that Jurassic Park broke down the barrier between computer generated special effects and computer generated characters in a live action film, Avatar blurs and maybe even erases the line between a CGI film and a live action film. This is a live action/CGI/3D film and I can say that with a straight face.

  There are no groundbreaking plot themes in this film, nor are there any totally new Sci-Fi concepts, but there are many of both and they are dovetailed in a way that makes them both believable and unobtrusive. The science fiction and the morals are there by the truckload, but the story is constructed well enough to not collapse under their weight. The dialogue is not Shakespeare or Tarantino, but it never induced a cringe or a groan and it far surpasses Lucas' best efforts in either of the Star Wars trilogies. The acting is similiar in the sense that no one steals any scenes outright, but there is not a weak link among them. Zoe Saldana gets extra credit for setting the new gold standard in motion capture acting previously set by Andy Serkis with Gollum in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. She clearly gave the computers and their handlers a lot of great stuff to work with.

 Where Avatar really shines is in its balanced execution. The CGI is, again, unlike any we've seen before and seems to mostly know its own limitations. The use of 3D is environmental and only very rarely used to do anything other than provide depth to the image. The world is detailed and immersive and the creatures are vicious and unique without being completely inconceivable. If you are a fan of World of Warcraft* or any Tolkein-esque fantasy world, Cameron made this film just for you. At the same time, the hardcore Sci Fi tech heads and Starcraft* fans will make those half-grunting/half-chuckling noises over and over again when they see the tech this film delivers--it's nothing in any way original, but it looks so real you have to wonder if DARPA didn't pick up the bill for their development. Finally, while most of the serious combat action is in the film's final third, action fans will spend the last 40 minutes alternatingly fist-pumping and dancing in the aisle. Michael Bay should be forced to watch this action sequence Clockwork Orange style for weeks on end, so thoroughly does Cameron embarrass him.

  There are things about the film that are not perfect, but in the scope of the entire work, it feels almost pedantic to even mention them. Cameron clearly got married to certain ideas over the years of conceiving the film that perhaps someone should have gently pried from his hands. The fact that he actually named the mineral the humans are mining "Unobtanium" sort of boggles the mind considering how well he conceived the rest of this new world. One could tell that Giovanni Ribisi (who is unfortunately underutilized) did not deliver that line with a straight face during the first thirty takes. I thought that while Sigourney Weaver treated her character well, her casting brought too many echoes of Ripley into a world that already had a few too many Aliens resurrections to begin with. Ribisi also seems to be reprising Paul Resiser's role with Parker Selfridge--another naming travesty. It could also be said that Cameron bangs a little too hard on the Native American drum, but even that fades nearly seamlessly into the landscape.

  Despite the little flaws and the very rare moments where either the 3D or the CGI fails to keep up with the action or actor, Avatar does far more than merely avoid dissapointing. The movie is a toybox full of things you'd like to pick up and play with, or rather, things that might want to pick you up and play with you. In either case one could easily imagine this world being described in as much rich detail as Tolkein's or Lucas' have been in the decades since their inception.

 I imagine and hope that this film will have a sequel (or two given Cameron's oeuvre, Titanic the obvious and understandable exception) but even if it doesn't and this is the last we see of Pandora, it will have been a trip well worth making, if for no other reason than for the first time in my life my inner skeptic shut the fuck up for three straight hours and that other small voice spent every second of the 162 minute film making loud noises like "Wheeeeeeee!!" "WooooHoooo!" and "See! This is why you listen to me!"

*If the folks at Blizzard do not get down on their knees and beg Cameron to direct both of the films for these franchises, they do not deserve to live.