Sorry folks. Avatar isn’t the film version of that Nickelodeon show where a bald kid kicks the stuffing out of an empire. This movie, released last Friday, is instead more Star Trek meets Dances with Wolves. From the graphics, to the culture, the flora, the fauna, and the machinery, the film was a masterpiece of the human creative capacity. Director James Cameron shows how far our imaginations can take us. This single movie was well worth its$300 million budget and its ten years in development, during which James Cameron waited for technology to catch up with his ideas. We could be looking at a new sci-fi franchise here.

The plot begins in a future where humans have gone beyond our solar system and discovered an earth-like world called Pandora. Pandora is a lush rainforest planet, and it contains vast quantities of the valuable substance “Unobtainium” (one of the two jokes in this movie).  So naturally, the humans want to strip mine the planet and harvest it. The only thing blocking them is the Na’Vi, an indigenous alien population with a culture that is strikingly similar to American Indians, and a hostile environment for humans. In order to mollify the Na’Vi while negotiating with them, the human corporations destroying their planet have created the Avatar program. The program allows humans to use “avatars”– bodies created in the image of the Na’Vi, to interact with the Na’Vi themselves.

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The movie is gorgeous. It spends much of its time completely immersed in layers of godly graphics; the real actors themselves seem to play a minor role in this film. I didn’t notice the special effects all that often — the movie simply blended the 3-D into the total vision, making it look natural and real, unlike other 3-D films that overdo these effects. In addition to the visual effects of the film, the creators do an excellent job creating both the Na’Vi and their culture, and the human’s military industrial complex.

The one major failing of this film is that the the plot is not as stellar as the film’s graphics. You can see the ending a mile away. If a sequel is made, as Cameron has suggested it might be, I hope that the next film’s storyline would be a little bit more unpredictable; otherwise even the great graphics will get boring fast.

As an overall experience, this is one movie I’d go to again, especially in 3-D. This one movie could be the point film historians look back on when they say, “And this marked the beginning of the 3D film era.”  Its beauty far outweighs any  faults in its storyline.