Avatar SCIENCE FICTION: United States, 2009 U.S. Release Date: 2009-12-18 Running Length: 2:41 MPAA Classification: PG-13 (Violence, Nudity) Theatrical Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1 Cast: Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang, Michelle Rodriguez, Giovanni Ribisi, Joel David Moore Director: James Cameron Screenplay: James Cameron Cinematography: Mauro Fiore Music: James Horner U.S. Distributor: 20th Century Fox Subtitles: none 
 
 Screened in standard (non-IMAX) digital 3D. 
 
 Avatar has been described as a "game-changer," and perhaps it is. I'll leave that for future historians to determine. What I can say with some assuredness is this is the most technically amazing motion picture to have arrived on screens in many years - perhaps since Peter Jackson's The Return of the King. It's also among the most anticipated openings of the decade. Expectations can be a double-edged sword; ask George Lucas. But when a filmmaker meets or exceeds them, the results are tremendous, and that's the case with Avatar. James Cameron has a lot riding on this film, his long-delayed follow-up to Titanic (which came out an even dozen years ago), the all-time box office champion in unadjusted dollars. Under "normal" circumstances, at stake would have been only Cameron's reputation and future autonomy with astronomical budgets. But Cameron has hitched his wagon to 3D and declared this to be the wave of the future. Watching Avatar, I can almost believe it. If every filmmaker could do with 3D what Cameron achieves, I'd gladly wear the uncomfortable glasses to every screening. 
 
 Avatar is entertainment of the highest order. It's the best movie of 2009. In 3D, it's immersive (that's the buzzword everyone uses for the 3D experience), but the traditional film elements - story, character, editing, theme, emotional resonance, etc. - are presented with sufficient expertise to make even the 2D version an engrossing 2 1/2-hour experience. Despite expending an extraordinary amount of time, money, and effort perfecting the 3D elements, Cameron never lost sight of what's important. His narrative could almost be considered a science fiction version of Dances with Wolves (by way of Surrogates), and it works for many of the reasons Dances worked. Cameron also borrows from his own catalog. The space/military culture is reminiscent of that in Aliens and the cross-cultural romance recalls Titanic. Avatar doesn't have Leonardo DiCaprio but its love story is in some ways more potent than the one told in Titanic because the stakes are higher. From a purely visual perspective, Cameron gives us one of the most amazing presentations ever of an alien world and builds toward an epic clash that may only have been matched twice previously in movie theaters (both times by Peter Jackson). 
 
 Avatar takes us to the planet Pandora in the year 2154. Pandora is a jungle world at which Earthmen have arrived with the intention of performing some strip-mining. Although corporations run the show, the military, led by Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), is on hand to provide protection and lend support. The humans' engagements with the indigenous humanoid population, the 10-foot high, blue-skinned Na'vi, have been contentious, bordering on hostile. For a while, Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) had some success interacting with the natives by using "avatars"(synthetic Na'vi remotely controlled by humans) to provide education and technological advancement, but progress slowed and Grace was closed out of Na'vi society. Now, she and her group of avatars are trying to find a way back in. 
 
 That portal comes in the unlikely person of Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a paraplegic ex-marine. Sam's journey to Pandora is a fluke. His twin brother, who had trained for years to inhabit an avatar and whose genetic identity was imprinted upon one, died unexpectedly and Jake was the only one who could take his place. He is caught between two masters: Colonel Quartich, who wants the soldier to form a bond with the Na'vi so he can pass back valuable tactical information, and Grace, who wants to rebuild the lines of communication. A series of events in the jungle separate Jake from the other avatars and place him in mortal danger. His life is saved by Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), who distrusts him but believes he is touched by the Na'vi god. She takes him to the "home tree" where he must not only plead for his life but for the opportunity to learn their ways. Neytiri becomes his mentor and he soon finds himself more in sympathy with his blue-skinned "brothers" than with Colonel Quartich, who is planning a massive operation to relocate the Na'vi away from a rich load of ore. 
 
 Most 3D films use the technology as a gimmick - a means to prompt younger audience members to "ooh" and "aah." That's not the case here. Cameron's film is immersive because the 3D was ingrained in its cinematic DNA. He has compensated for the pervasive dimness caused by polarized lenses by increasing the brightness (the images look too bright when viewed without the glasses). He has avoided 3D "tricks" (throwing things at the audience) that might take the viewer out of the experience. Avatar's visuals are so sumptuous that, perhaps as little as ten minutes into the movie, I forgot I was wearing the glasses. I'm still not as bullish as Cameron about the future of 3D, but I see potential where I had not previously perceived it. 
 
 Cameron understands how the pieces of the puzzle need to come together to form a complete motion picture, and he assembles them as only a master can. The story, although simple, resonates deeply at a time when media battles rage about whether or not humanity is destroying itself and its planet. As with Dances with Wolves and The Last Samurai, this is about a military man who finds himself transformed by the culture he adopts and ends up opposing his own people in an impossible battle. Jake's love affair with Neytiri confirms Cameron as being a romantic at heart. The Pandora menagerie is like something out of a dungeon master's wet dream: dinosaur-like creatures that are impervious to bullets, vicious carnivores that make T-Rexes look tame, scavengers that roam and attack in packs, dragon-like flying creatures that populate the skies, and vegetation that's just as alive as the animals. The blue-skinned Na'vi, clearly modeled after the Native Americans, are among the most "ordinary" of Pandora's inhabitants. 
 
 All movies like this must have a villain; Avatar provides two. The first is the bureaucrat, Parker Selfridge (Giovanni Ribisi), who is devoted to the profit margin above all else. Any resemblance to the Paul Reiser character in Aliens is intentional. Maybe Cameron was thinking of the studio bosses controlling his budget when he created Selfridge. Then there's Colonel Quartich, who is brought brilliantly to life by the scene-stealing performance of Stephen Lang. This man's a real sonofabitch, but it's impossible not to admire him on one level. Like Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now, he loves the smell of napalm in the morning… at noon, and during the night. Quartich is never CGI animated but he always seems bigger than life. If there's a human star of Avatar, it's Lang. 
 
 Lang may have the showiest role but he's not the only actor to do a creditable job. Sam Worthington and Sigourney Weaver are both solid, even though a good portion of their characters' screen time is animated. Zoe Saldana is even more challenged, since she never appears "in the flesh." Like Andy Serkis' Gollum, she is entirely CGI-rendered, but she accomplished her own motion capture work and provided the voice. Michelle Rodriquez, like Stephen Lang, is never required to become blue. Her role is secondary but unambiguously heroic. Weaver's presence affirms that, as bad as Cameron's reputation as a taskmaster may be, there are actors who appreciate his perfectionist approach. (Others in this group include Michael Biehn, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bill Paxton, and Linda Hamilton.) 
 
 After the late summer 20-minute preview of Avatar, there was some unease about the look of the Na'vi. Such concerns are baseless. They can appear opposite humans without the special effects being called into question; we never view them as anything less than three-dimensional. Like Gollum, they transcend their pixel-based conception. We believe them. We accept them. We care about them. That's the key to Avatar being more than a hollow spectacle. In Transformers 2, everything (including the humans) is soulless. Here, there's heart and soul to spare. 
 
 Any criticisms I have of Avatar are in the nature of nit-picks, but I will mention them for completeness' sake. At worst, they are ephemeral distractions, easily dismissed. At best, they will not be noticed at all. Sam Worthington's performance is solid but his American accent is not. As was evident in Terminator: Salvation, Worthington's "American" sometimes comes with an Aussie twang. Visually, Avatar is almost flawless, but there are some instances when the camera moves so fast that the 3D effect doesn't track well, resulting in a brief moment of disorientation. Finally, although James Horner's score is predominantly effective, there are instances in which he again engages in self-cannibalization. Material sounding a lot like it originated in his often-used Star Trek II and Aliens scores pops up from time-to-time. 
 
 Avatar is the most engaging and enthralling motion picture I have experienced this year - and "experience" is the appropriate word. There's a rush associated with coming to Pandora; this feels more like an interactive endeavor than a passive one. In addition to being emotionally satisfying and one hell of a wild ride, Avatar boasts a smart script, reminding us that would-be blockbusters don't have to be defined by the imbecility of a Transformers 2 or a 2012. James Cameron has been entertaining movie-goers for more than a quarter century and he is in an elite category of filmmakers who has yet to spawn a dog. For quality like this, I'm willing to wait, although hopefully his next movie will come a little more quickly than the 12 years of Avatar's gestation. 
 
 Discuss this topic in the ReelViews Forums. ||||| 20th Century Fox / WETA / Reuters Actors Sam Worthington, left, and Zoe Saldana as Jake and Neytiri in Avatar 
 
 In the last shot of Avatar, someone's closed eyes snap open. That's the climax and the message of James Cameron's first fiction feature since 1997's Titanic: Look around! Embrace the movie  surely the most vivid and convincing creation of a fantasy world ever seen in the history of moving pictures  as a total sensory, sensuous, sensual experience. The planet Pandora that Cameron and his army of artist-technicians have created  at a budget believed to be in excess of $300 million  is a wonder world of flora and fauna: a rain forest (where it hardly ever rains) of gigantic trees and phosphorescent plants, of six-legged flying horses, panther dogs and hammerhead dinosaurs. Living among these creatures is Pandora's humanish tribe, the Na'vi, a lean, 10-ft.-tall, blue-striped people with yellow eyes, or what mankind might have been if it had evolved in harmony with, and not in opposition to, the Edenic environment that gave rise to its birth. (See 10 things you need to know for Avatar's opening day.) 
 
 It's the year 2154, and Pandora, a moon of the Alpha Centauri star, is the reluctant host to an expedition of Americans seeking to mine an incredibly valuable rock called unobtainium  a joke term that was coined in the 1950s and refers to any kind of material that's unavailable or impractical to use, which Cameron employs to locate his movie among science-fiction adventures of the period. The expedition, headed by sleazy entrepreneur Parker Selfridge (Giovanni Ribisi), includes scientists working for Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) and a Blackwater-type security force led by the malevolently macho Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang). The scientists have hatched avatars (known as "dreamwalkers") that look like Na'vi but blend their DNA with that of humans, who will steer them by remote control. Augustine is entranced by the Na'vi's aristocratic gentility, but to Selfridge and Quaritch they are "blue monkeys," "savages," "an aboriginal horde." Or for want of a better word: disposable. (See the top 10 movies of 2009.) 
 
 The new guy in this program is Jake Sully (Sam Worthington, last seen going up against machinery in Terminator Salvation), a paraplegic ex-Marine whose dead identical twin brother had been in the project. Since Sully has the same DNA, he's chosen to man his late brother's avatar. Augustine wants Sully to befriend the Na'vi and help her unearth precious biological samples; Quaritch orders him to become a secret spy, as part of the company's plan to drive the tribe away from a sacred tree, under which can be found vast reserves of unobtainium. In this double role, Sully meets Neyfiri (Zoe Saldana), daughter of the tribal chief. At first suspicious of his motives and contemptuous of his clumsiness  "Ignorant, like a child," is the way she puts it  Neyfiri is nevertheless impressed by Sully's adaptability. Somehow he has an affinity for this place, for the Na'vi and for her. Someday he will be their savior. 
 
 For me to say that Avatar is better than Titanic is not the highest possible praise. I was no ardent fan of Cameron's grafting of a poor-boy/rich-girl love story onto the true saga of that doomed ship, which set sail from Southampton in 1912. But it was a night to remember for enough moviegoers, becoming the all-time top-grossing film, with a take of just over $1.8 billion (though it ranks sixth in real dollars, after Gone With the Wind, Star Wars, The Sound of Music, E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial and the 1956 version of The Ten Commandments). What Cameron earned from Titanic's enormous success was the cachet (11 Oscars, tying the record with Ben-Hur and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King) and cash to make Avatar, which has been called the most expensive picture ever made (though, again in real dollars, that record is probably held by 1963's Cleopatra). That shouldn't matter to viewers. The democratizing principle of the box office is that moviegoers pay the same amount to see Avatar, in its 2-D form, as they do for Paranormal Activity, with its $11,000 budget. The only question they need have is: Is the movie worth it? (See TIME's 2009 holiday movie preview.) 
 
 I say yes, for Avatar is a state-of-the-art experience that for years to come will define what movies can achieve, not in duplicating our existence but in confecting new ones. The story may be familiar from countless old movies, from those made out of Hollywood like Dances With Wolves (an American grows sympathetic to the tribes he was meant to annihilate) and Apocalypse Now (and any number of anti-imperialist war epics) to those made abroad, like this year's District 9 (set in South Africa, where a human becomes part-alien and is hunted down by his old own kind). Some of the dialogue in Avatar's opening sequences may be on the starchy side  Cameron has never been a great director of actors nor sympathetic to their sensitive needs  but objections shrink to quibbles and then simply disappear in the face of the picture's unprecedented visual flourishes. (Read an interview with Avatar director James Cameron.) 
 
 Cameron has devised a romance similar to Titanic's  a grunt falls in love with a princess  but this time with far more emotive power. Instead of embracing on a ship's prow, Sully and Neyfiri ride their banshee steeds in ecstatic communion across the Pandoran sky. Think of them as the prince and princess of the world. Worthington  an Australian actor who had the second lead in the recent Terminator movie  has little of Titanic lead Leonardo DiCaprio's star power, but the resolve and good nature he radiates make Sully one of those ordinary heroes who rise to extraordinary heights. Saldana, though encased in CGI blue throughout the movie, manages to be the driving force: yet again in a Cameron film, we find a strong woman seeking a man whose strength she can tap. But unlike the tryst between DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, this love affair has consequences. It is not a footnote to history; it makes history, as two species merge to save a planet. (Read "King of the [Blue] World.") 
 
 And by a planet, Cameron clearly means our planet. Among his activities in the dozen years since Titanic, the director made two underwater documentaries (Ghosts of the Abyss and Aliens of the Deep) that marked him as both an explorer and a conservationist. Avatar brings his social concerns to the surface. This is not only the most elaborate public-service commercial for those of the tree-hugger persuasion; it's also a call to save what we've got, environmentally, and leave indigenous people as they are  an argument applicable to the attempt of any nation (say, the U.S.) to colonize another land (say, Iraq or Afghanistan). The rooting interest in Avatar is for the Na'vi and against the American ex-soldiers whose job it is to police the planet. When some of them die in the battle that consumes the final third of this 2-hr. 42-min. extravaganza, you're meant to cheer. And you will. (Read about Avatar on Techland.) 
 
 That climactic face-off is stage-managed for maximum thrills, as the creatures we met in the first part of the film join the Na'vi in opposing the rotten humans. But the supreme joy of Avatar is in its long central portion: a safari through the luscious landscape of Pandora. After all those years on the water (with Titanic) and underwater (with The Abyss and his two documentaries), Cameron has surfaced to put his vision of Pandora on screen. It's an impossible but completely plausible and seductive world that invites your total immersion. Don't resist it; sink in and fly with it. All Cameron asks is that you open your eyes. 
 
 See the Top 10 James Cameron Moments. ||||| Two alternate titles come to mind when watching Avatar, the modest little indie by way of James "King of the World" Cameron: How about Runs With Na'vis, or Flies With Banshees? 
 
 The filmmaker's epic adventure - which cost upward of $230 million and, actually, happens to be great fun - is the gamer generation's answer to Dances With Wolves. It's a trippy sci-fi tale about an ex-Marine, trained to fight an indigenous people, who comes to understand the tribal culture in ways that make him terribly conflicted about annihilating them. 
 
 He falls in love, discovers their spiritual connection to nature, and finds himself at odds with his gung-ho superiors. 
 
 In Dances With Wolves (1990), it's Kevin Costner's U.S. Cavalry officer who insinuates himself into the world of the Lakota Sioux. In Avatar, it's Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a member of the "Jarhead Clan," who learns the ways of the Na'vi - a blue-skinned, NBA-tall race of humanoids living in paradise on the planet Pandora. The Na'vi, who resemble buff, pointy-eared runway models, live in a lush rain forest teeming with exotic beasts, including those aforementioned banshees - flying reptile-like creatures that Na'vi warriors must bond with in a rite of passage. 
 
 And it's at that point in Cameron's two-hour, 41-minute marvel - when Sully's Na'vi avatar and his female friend Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) take to the air, astride winged banshees - that Cameron's long-borning baby really kicks in. It's like a runner hitting the Zone: All of a sudden, the movie, with its elaborate motion-capture technology (real actors' movements and gestures turned into computer-generated images), breaks into a new dimension - even if you're not watching in 3-D. (Avatar is being released in multiple formats: 3-D, Real-D, IMAX, and lowly, old-fashioned 2-D.) 
 
 Set in 2154, Avatar begins with Sully, who is paralyzed from the waist down (there have been military conflagrations in Nigeria and Venezuela, if you're keeping track), set to replace his dead twin brother in an avatar program on faraway Pandora. Climb into a pod, hook up the circuitry, and let your mind and body enter a Na'vi alter ego. 
 
 It's a last-ditch effort led by Dr. Grace Augustine (a butt-smokin' Sigourney Weaver) and her group of science nerds to befriend "the indigenous" with these human/Na'vi hybrids. If they fail, the private military force led by Col. Miles Quaritch (a cartoonish Stephen Lang), will start killing the Na'vi and defoliating their Eden. 
 
 Why? Because they're sitting on mounds of Unobtainium (sounds like something from Rocky and Bullwinkle!) - a mineral vital to Earth's energy needs. Giovanni Ribisi is the squirrelly industrialist overseeing the rape and pillage. 
 
 Avatar isn't deep: It has an obvious antiwar, tree-hugging message, and its characters are literally and figuratively archetypes. But Worthington, in both his human and Na'vi incarnations, makes the transition from warmonger to peacenik more than believable. One of Avatar's many brilliant strokes is to have its hero in a wheelchair: When his avatar-self starts running barefoot through the jungles, as agile as a cat, it's exhilarating and liberating - for both Sully and the audience. 
 
 (Early on in Dances With Wolves, Costner's Lt. Dunbar is in danger of having his leg amputated - go figure.) 
 
 Cameron is not a filmmaker to shy away from spectacle and the gizmos to deliver it. The first two Terminators, Aliens (with Weaver), The Abyss, and, of course, Titanic, all cost plenty, but with the exception of The Abyss, they sold more than enough tickets to make up for the expenditure. Whether Avatar recoups its outsize production and marketing outlays is a topic for the business wags to mull. 
 
 For the folks who plunk down their dollars (and pick up the plastic 3-D glasses), Avatar delivers. Combining beyond-state-of-the-art moviemaking with a tried-and-true storyline and a gamer-geek sensibility - not to mention a love angle, an otherworldly bestiary, and an arsenal of 22d-century weaponry - the movie quite simply rocks. 
 
 Contact movie critic Steven Rea at 215-854-5629 or srea@phillynews.com. Read his blog, "On Movies Online," at http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/onmovies/ 
 
 Avatar Directed by James Cameron. With Joel Moore, Wes Studi, Michelle Rodriguez, Stephen Lang, CCH Pounder, Laz Alonso, Zoe Saldana, Giovanni Ribisi, Sam Worthington, Sigourney Weaver. Distributed by 20th Century Fox. Running time: 2 hours, 40 minutes. Parent's guide: PG-13 (for intense epic battle sequences and warfare, sensuality, language and some smoking). ||||| Movie Review 
 
 With “Avatar” James Cameron has turned one man’s dream of the movies into a trippy joy ride about the end of life — our moviegoing life included — as we know it. Several decades in the dreaming and more than four years in the actual making, the movie is a song to the natural world that was largely produced with software, an Emersonian exploration of the invisible world of the spirit filled with Cameronian rock ’em, sock ’em pulpy action. Created to conquer hearts, minds, history books and box-office records, the movie — one of the most expensive in history, the jungle drums thump — is glorious and goofy and blissfully deranged. 
 
 The story behind the story, including a production budget estimated to top $230 million, and Mr. Cameron’s future-shock ambitions for the medium have already begun to settle into myth (a process partly driven by the publicity, certainly). Every filmmaker is something of a visionary, just by virtue of the medium. But Mr. Cameron, who directed the megamelodrama “Titanic” and, more notably, several of the most influential science-fiction films of the past few decades (“The Terminator,” “Aliens” and “The Abyss”), is a filmmaker whose ambitions transcend a single movie or mere stories to embrace cinema as an art, as a social experience and a shamanistic ritual, one still capable of producing the big WOW. 
 
 The scale of his new movie, which brings you into a meticulous and brilliantly colored alien world for a fast 2 hours 46 minutes, factors into that wow. Its scope is evident in an early scene on a spaceship (the year is 2154), where the passengers, including a paraplegic ex-Marine, Jake (Sam Worthington, a gruffly sensitive heartthrob), are being roused from a yearslong sleep before landing on a distant inhabited moon, Pandora. Jake is woken by an attendant floating in zero gravity, one of many such aides. As Jake himself glides through the bright cavernous space, you know you’re not in Kansas anymore, as someone soon quips (a nod to “The Wizard of Oz,” Mr. Cameron’s favorite film). You also know you’re not in the gloom of “The Matrix.” 
 
 Though it’s easy to pigeonhole Mr. Cameron as a gear head who’s more interested in cool tools (which here include 3-D), he is, with “Avatar,” also making a credible attempt to create a paradigm shift in science-fiction cinema. Since it was first released in 1999, “The Matrix,” which owes a large debt to Mr. Cameron’s own science-fiction films as well as the literary subgenre of cyberpunk, has hung heavily over both SF and action filmmaking. Most films that crib from “The Matrix” tend to borrow only its slo-mo death waltzes and leather fetishism, keeping its nihilism while ditching the intellectual inquiries. Although “Avatar” delivers a late kick to the gut that might be seen as nihilistic (and how!), it is strangely utopian. 
 
 It doesn’t take Jake long to feel the good vibes. Like Neo, the savior-hero of the “Matrix” series played by Keanu Reeves, Jake is himself an avatar because he’s both a special being and an embodiment of an idea, namely that of the hero’s journey. What initially makes Jake unusual is that he has been tapped to inhabit a part-alien, part-human body that he controls, like a puppeteer, from its head to its prehensile tail. Like the rest of the human visitors who’ve made camp on Pandora, he has signed on with a corporation that’s intent on extracting a valuable if mysterious substance from the moon called unobtainium, a great whatsit that is an emblem of humanity’s greed and folly. With his avatar, Jake will look just like one of the natives, the Na’vi, a new identity that gives the movie its plot turns and politics. 
 
 The first part of Jake’s voyage — for this is, above all, a boy’s rocking adventure, if one populated by the usual tough Cameron chicks — takes him from a wheelchair into a 10-foot, blue-skinned Na’vi body. At once familiar and pleasingly exotic, the humanoid Na’vi come with supermodel dimensions (slender hips, a miniature-apple rear); long articulated digits, the better to grip with; and the slanted eyes and twitchy ears of a cat. (The gently curved stripes that line their blue skin, the color of twilight, bring to mind the markings on mackerel tabby cats.) For Jake his avatar, which he hooks into through sensors while lying in a remote pod in a semiconscious state, is at first a giddy novelty and then a means to liberation. 
 
 Plugging into the avatar gives Jake an instant high, allowing him to run, leap and sift dirt through his toes, and freeing him from the constraints of his body. Although physically emancipated, he remains bound, contractually and existentially, to the base camp, where he works for the corporation’s top scientist, Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver, amused and amusing), even while taking orders from its head of security, Col. Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), a military man turned warrior for hire. A cartoon of masculinity, Quaritch strides around barking orders like some intransigent representation of American military might (or a bossy movie director). It’s a favorite Cameron type, and Mr. Lang, who until this year had long been grievously underemployed, tears into the role like a starved man gorging on steak. 
 
 Mr. Cameron lays out the fundamentals of the narrative efficiently, grabbing you at once with one eye-popping detail after another and on occasion almost losing you with some of the comically broad dialogue. He’s a masterly storyteller if a rather less nimble prose writer. (He has sole script credit: this is personal filmmaking on an industrial scale.) Some of the clunkier lines (“Yeah, who’s bad,” Jake taunts a rhinolike creature he encounters) seem to have been written to placate those members of the Michael Bay demographic who might find themselves squirming at the story’s touchier, feelier elements, its ardent environmentalism and sincere love story, all of which kick in once Jake meets Neytiri, a female Na’vi (Zoë Saldana, seen only in slinky Na’vi form). 
 
 Mr. Cameron has said that he started thinking about the alien universe that became Pandora and its galactic environs in “Avatar” back in the 1970s. He wrote a treatment in 1996, but the technologies he needed to turn his ideas into images didn’t exist until recently. New digital technologies gave him the necessary tools, including performance capture, which translates an actor’s physical movements into a computer-generated image (CGI). Until now, by far the most plausible character created in this manner has been slithery Gollum from Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” cycle. The exotic creatures in “Avatar,” which include an astonishment of undulating, flying, twitching and galloping organisms, don’t just crawl through the underbrush; they thunder and shriek, yip and hiss, pointy teeth gleaming. 
 
 The most important of these are the Na’vi, and while their movements can bring to mind old-fashioned stop-motion animation, their faces are a triumph of tech innovation, with tremors and twitches that make them immediately appealing and empathetic. By the time Neytiri ushers Jake into her world of wonders — a lush dreamscape filled with kaleidoscopic and bioluminescent flora and fauna, with pink jellyfishlike creatures that hang in the air and pleated orange flowers that snap shut like parasols — you are deep in the Na’vi-land. It’s a world that looks as if it had been created by someone who’s watched a lot of Jacques Cousteau television or, like Mr. Cameron, done a lot of diving. It’s also familiar because, like John Smith in “The New World,” Terrence Malick’s retelling of the Pocahontas story, Jake has discovered Eden. 
 
 An Eden in three dimensions, that is. In keeping with his maximalist tendencies, Mr. Cameron has shot “Avatar” in 3-D (because many theaters are not equipped to show 3-D, the movie will also be shown in the usual 2), an experiment that serves his material beautifully. This isn’t the 3-D of the 1950s or even contemporary films, those flicks that try to give you a virtual poke in the eye with flying spears. Rather Mr. Cameron uses 3-D to amplify the immersive experience of spectacle cinema. Instead of bringing you into the movie with the customary tricks, with a widescreen or even Imax image filled with sweeping landscapes and big action, he uses 3-D seemingly to close the space between the audience and the screen. He brings the movie to you. 
 
 After a few minutes the novelty of people and objects hovering above the row in front of you wears off, and you tend not to notice the 3-D, which speaks to the subtlety of its use and potential future applications. Mr. Cameron might like to play with high-tech gadgets, but he’s an old-fashioned filmmaker at heart, and he wants us to get as lost in his fictional paradise as Jake eventually does. On the face of it there might seem something absurd about a movie that asks you to thrill to a natural world made almost entirely out of zeroes and ones (and that feeds you an anticorporate line in a corporately financed entertainment). But one of the pleasures of the movies is that they transport us, as Neytiri does with Jake, into imaginary realms, into Eden and over the rainbow to Oz. 
 
 If the story of a paradise found and potentially lost feels resonant, it’s because “Avatar” is as much about our Earth as the universe that Mr. Cameron has invented. But the movie’s truer meaning is in the audacity of its filmmaking. 
 
 Few films return us to the lost world of our first cinematic experiences, to that magical moment when movies really were bigger than life (instead of iPhone size), if only because we were children. Movies rarely carry us away, few even try. They entertain and instruct and sometimes enlighten. Some attempt to overwhelm us, but their efforts are usually a matter of volume. What’s often missing is awe, something Mr. Cameron has, after an absence from Hollywood, returned to the screen with a vengeance. He hasn’t changed cinema, but with blue people and pink blooms he has confirmed its wonder. 
 
 “Avatar” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Gun and explosive violence, death and despair. 
 
 AVATAR 
 
 Opens on Friday nationwide. 
 
 Written and directed by James Cameron; director of photography, Mauro Fiore; edited by Mr. Cameron, John Refoua and Stephen Rivkin; music by James Horner; visual effects supervisor, Joe Letteri; production designers, Rick Carter and Robert Stromberg; produced by Mr. Cameron and Jon Landau; released by 20th Century Fox. Running time: 2 hours 46 minutes. 
 
 WITH: Sam Worthington (Jake Sully), Zoë Saldana (Neytiri), Sigourney Weaver (Dr. Grace Augustine), Stephen Lang (Col. Miles Quaritch), Michelle Rodriguez (Trudy Chacon), Giovanni Ribisi (Carter Selfridge), Joel David Moore (Norm), C C H Pounder (Mo’at), Wes Studi (Eytukan) and Laz Alonso (Tsu’Tey).
– James Cameron's sci-fi epic Avatar has been hailed as the future of filmmaking and the stunning fantasy world he has created more than lives up to the hype, say impressed critics. "Avatar delivers," writes Steven Rea at the Philadelphia Inquirer. "Combining beyond-state-of-the-art moviemaking with a tried-and-true storyline and a gamer-geek sensibility—not to mention a love angle, an otherworldly bestiary, and an arsenal of 22nd-century weaponry—the movie quite simply rocks." Calling the world Cameron has created in Avatar " an Eden in three dimensions," Manhola Dargis credits him with returning awe to the movie experience. "Created to conquer hearts, minds, history books and box-office records, the movie is glorious and goofy and blissfully deranged," she writes in the New York Times. "This is the most technically amazing motion picture to have arrived on screens in many years" and easily the best movie of 2009, raves James Berardinelli at Reelviews. Cameron has created "the most vivid and convincing creation of a fantasy world ever seen in the history of moving pictures" writes Richard Corliss at Time. Avatar should be embraced "as a total sensory, sensuous, sensual experience."