Avatar

Writer/Director: James Cameron
Starring: Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Stephen Lang, Sigourney Weaver, Michelle Rodriguez, Giovanni Ribisi
Review: 5 stars (of five)

(Note: This breathless review was written shortly after midnight, right after I got home from the screening. While I was still drunk on the experience. I could get all sober and stuffy on later reflection, but I think this reaction is the reaction that matters.)

When I was eight years old, my parents came home from seeing Star Wars (one of only two films I can ever remember them going to see in the theater) and raving like lunatics. The opening shot, with this giant ship that just keeps getting bigger! They wouldn’t shut up about it. It was something they’d never seen before, it was an imaginative leap forward in their cinematic experience — and mine, too, at a matinée a few days later.

That’s what seeing Avatar is like.

Seeing this, on a big screen in a good theater, in 3D, is simply a qualitative leap forward in the moviegoing experience, and to miss it would be like passing on Star Wars, back in 1977 when we were all so impressionable, or blowing off The Wizard of Oz in bleak, black-and-white 1939. Like Star Wars, the story can be recited as a simple journey that is as basic and familiar as the setting is alien. A few pompous, grumbly critics whose neglected inner children have died lingering deaths will harp on this sort of thing. Pity them, and show up early to get a good seat.

James Cameron does here what he did with Titanic, which was to take a certain (often crappy) genre of film (two, actually — the romance, in the first half, and the disaster flick, in the second) and raise it to perfection. Is Titanic schmaltzy and over the top? Yeah, but it does what it sets out to do with absolute perfection, with an obsessive dedication to world-building, and so magnificently that once you’ve seen it, you don’t need to see another film in either of its genres again. You’re good.

Avatar takes the fantasy epic, throws in a little science fiction and military action movie, and masters ‘em all. If there’s a drawback to the film, it’s that it’s too intense. An old guy limping out of my screening muttered to his companion that it was too long and too violent. Guess he’d have liked a bit less action/war flick in his fantasy epic — but he’s wrong. The movie shows restraint only in its romantic elements, everything else is not just there, but there to destroy your desire to see anyone else ever try to play in the same sandbox again.

I was transported. I had visceral emotional reactions, and not usually to the more familiar story beats that are probably supposed to evoke our programmed responses. I was overwhelmed just to be in this amazingly realized world, I was thrilled, and by the end, I was exhilarated, to a medically measurable degree.

You’ve stuck with me so far and gotten no real spoilers. You should turn back now, even though there’s little ahead to ruin your experience.

The pacing of the story is great. Yeah, the film is 2 hours, 45 minutes, but the story moves at an astonishing clip, cutting out all the fat, and only lingering on moments of aesthetic wonder. In fact, as the film’s conflicts built and I realized that an inevitable war machine was about to kick into motion, I regretted the film couldn’t be longer, that I couldn’t spend more time in this fantastic world, following this fantastic story, before it had to become something else.

The film has a pro-environment spiritual core that will be familiar to anyone who’s seen, say, Princess Mononoke or Dances With Wolves (this film is pretty much Dances With Wolves on an alien planet), or is familiar with villainous corporate efforts to pave the Amazon. If you were, like me, a little kid when you saw Star Wars, you might remember how the whole idea of “the Force” resonated. The energy field that penetrates us, binds us … Cameron mirrors some of that language in his Gaia-hugging vision of the native culture on this distant planet Pandora, and does so more than once. That Force stuff is so ingrained into any moviegoer’s consciousness that it has to be a deliberate echo. It becomes a delight that a science fiction movie set 150 years in our future becomes about getting in touch with our spiritual, pagan natures. Again, not complex or original, but deeply resonant and presented in an amazing context.

The acting is solid. Sam Worthington spends most of his time, and Zoe Saldana and the other aliens do all their work, in computer-generated alien bodies. Nothing is lost, though — the effects are magnificent, and the actors are expressive. Sigourney Weaver is a solid, brass-balls bitch in human form, but when we see her spend a little time in a lithe young “avatar” body, there’s something touching about seeing her Aliens director restore her youth for us. Stephen Lang is the militaristic heavy in this film, and nails every requirement of that role. The big surprise is Giovanni Ribisi, who’ll forever be Phoebe’s half-retarded little brother on Friends, playing a profit-minded asshole for the corporation that provides the film’s evils.

There was a time when a movie came in the theaters just once, and then was gone. You might catch it on your tiny, crappy, rabbit-eared television sometime, but that would be a faint echo of cinematic grandeur. Now, of course, everything is on DVD within six months and you can watch it on your 52-inch flat-panel. Even the effects films that you “should” see in the theater, your Iron Mans and such, become easier to skip until Netflix will just mail ‘em to you. This, beyond a doubt, is a film to experience in the cinema. It’s a film to either see in the theater over and over until you’re sick of every amazing unreal creature and vista, or to see only once and never again, even on DVD, to preserve the experience against diminishing returns.

I don’t think I’m gonna have that kind of discipline.