Avatar

10 years and 300 million dollars later and we get...an okay movie with some VERY pretty graphics.

James Cameron's triumphant return to the screen after Titanic comes as an ode to the future of motion capture, special effects, and 3-D. Even if the plot and script were as bad as Transformers 2, I'd probably still give this movie a solid 5/10 (instead of 1/10) just for the incredible epic quality to every little graphical detail in this movie. Trust me. See it in 3-D. Don't worry about IMAX since it appeared they just projected a normal screen size onto the IMAX screen (top, bottom and sides all had sizable black margins). For all those who looked at the trailers and were skeptical, don't bother with anything less than was intended, which is a full 3-D experience.

Cause otherwise...let's just say I hope they didn't spend most of those 10 years working on the script. If they did, wow did they waste their money. It's a paint-by-numbers plot of the evil human invaders conquering a less powerful race, with the race then rebelling with the help of truly good humans and conquering the invading force. There's also a routine love story thrown in there for good measure.

Basically the only new bit is that instead of just being normal good humans who help, they're humans who mentally inhabit specially grown bodies (avatars) that look like the alien inhabitants.

The first half hour or so that sets all this up is frankly boring and derivative. It's also easily forgotten once we are finally exposed to the lush world of the Na'vi. Every single scene is breathtaking. The motion capture and graphical detailing is so lifelike and vivid that you often forget that every single thing you're looking at on screen was generated by a computer. The traipsing through the jungle, finding curious and interesting lifeforms that do funny things, the Na'vi themselves, and the flying...oh god, the flying. Once they started soaring around on tons of awesome looking birds, that was enough to seal the deal and make me like this movie despite its faults.

When the final battle rolled around I was mesmerized and on the edge of my seat. It didn't matter that everything was completely predictable, it didn't matter that they blatantly bashed Bush (you should never mimic George Lucas' star wars prequels in any way), it didn't matter that the dialogue was mostly trite and filled with cliches, it didn't matter that the Na'vi were basically all black people in blue bodies and I think all but one of the invaders were white. The pure spectacle of that last battle was jaw dropping, as was all the spectacle before it, and that can't be denied.

Honestly, this movie should've been made in less than a decade, since I doubt the graphics took that long to perfect, and that means the rest of it was script writing or bureaucracy and that's really sad. However, even the bad stuff isn't terrible, it's just kind of average, and the technological feats of this movie more than make up for it. It's an achievement that will be hard to top for quite some time.

Avatar gets an 8/10.

EDIT: The more and more I think about this movie, and have settled down from the initial awe of the effects, the more I have realized that honestly I shouldn't have given as much credit to it as I did. Even writing this review I knew that much of it simply wasn't that great, but because of the effects I could be forgiving. But now that it's up for Best Picture I simply feel it's my duty to calm down, clear my head, and rethink my review. With that in mind, the average story, average to below average acting, below average script and above average spectacle/graphics add up to just an average movie.

Avatar gets a 7/10.