It is unfortunate in a way that this movie is so easily billed as sci-fi, because as a result it alientates (no pun intended) a large portion of its potential audience, myself included - but I am glad I went to see it. It truly is a remarkable experience unlike anything I have ever seen at the movies, and as one of the reviews I read says, it on this basis alone effectively demands to be seen. There have been two other movies this year that I have walked out of grinning from to ear to ear and said, "Wow" -- after Avatar, I wasn't grinning but I did say "Wow", and I also thought to myself, "this is why I love going to the movies"; from time to time you see something that really causes you to step outside yourself in the midst of your viewing and realize what an amazing, liberating, magical experience the cinema can be at its best, and this movie is absolutely a shining example of one of those experiences, for better or for worse.
Despite how overwhelming and impressive the big budget aspects of this movie can be - and rest assured, those moments are hardly few and far between, and more than won over this dubious cynic - Avatar really struck me for a few smaller details that I found brilliant, for example (SPOILERS): the way the falling of the big tree evokes the same kind of panicked, larger-than-life grandeur of Cameron's Titanic ship coming apart at the seams, and indeed, seemed to me a rather obvious homage; the symbolic meaning that almost leaps out at you when two central characters finally meet face to face in their true form (and at the same time, late in the film, the live-action world and the gorgeous digital fantasy of Pandora finally meet vis-a-vis at the center of the action); the thematic thrust of what I read as a sort of subversive take on the big reveal in The Planet of The Apes, where instead of a race of simian creatures are discovered to have become the Earth's main inhabitants, we see a distant planet populated by beings who embody and live out the better aspects of humanity in a dreamlike, harmonious world.
Avatar will challenge for major hardware when awards season hits. 2009 has been a lukewarm year at the movies, punctuated especially here by this universal, commercially-appealing vehicle that truly delivers and fully succeeds in what so many movies all year would die to: bring people into the cinema to experience it, because that is how this movie must be seen.
I think I might be too drunk to go on further with any coherence.
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