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Avatar (12A.) 

Directed by James Cameron.


Starring Sam Worthington, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang, Michelle Rodriquez, Giovani Ribisi, Zoe Saldana. 161 mins


Cast your mind back twelve years to watching Titanic in the cinema, and if you were any kind of a man you spent those long, endless, interminable, three hours thinking, “What this film needs is Arnie beaming aboard along with a stash of weaponry and some kind of extra terrestrial menace to confront. All on a sinking liner – now that would be a film.”


Well, it’s taken some time but director James Cameron has now come up with something similar, an amazing sci-fi/ action/ eco-preaching/ Iraq War allegory/ Dance With Wolves style romance. Though James Horner’s score continually seems poised to break into My Heart Will Go On the love story between a blue skinned alien (Saldana) and the marine (Worthington) who is part of a mission to exploit her planet is subsumed in the sweeping epic adventure.


The two years spent in post production perfecting the effects have been well spent. Granted during that time audiences have got a taste for immersive 3D but what’s so striking about Avatar is that although in one sense there’s nothing here that you haven’t seen before, you’ve still never seen anything like this before. It takes all the faltering small technical advances that have been made this decade and binds them together into one great leap forward. The sheer, grandiose spectacle of it all will overwhelm you.


The genius is in the details – in previous incarnations 3D used to leap out at you. Now it sinks away back into the screen sucking viewers into its incredibly intricate vision. The alien landscapes are like a thousand pulp sci-fi paperback covers brought to life. They occasionally look a touch cartoony but all the human scenes are almost documentary realistic.


He’s an odd kind of visionary this Cameron fellow. Though it is set some 145 years in the future, the equivalent of going back to a time when Queen Victoria was recently widowed, spoken English, even the slang, is exactly the same as it is now. I can’t decide if calling the substance the colonists are mining for Unobtainium, is lazy writing or a sly dig at humanity’s poor naming skills.


It is a broad, simplistic story but it is a story and all the wonderful special effects are there to serve it. I could pick you a hundred holes in Avatar but really none of them remotely matter. It’s a thrilling experience. If you said never again after being repeatedly gypped by grasping scams like Transformers 2, 2012 or Wolverine, here’s a film that makes cramming into a packed auditorium to see a blockbuster movie dignified again.

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