Avatar ****

About a third of the way through Avatar I was convinced the film was little more than glow-in-the-dark Lord of the Rings meets a Saturday morning cartoon version of Star Wars. The film had started to drag, the visuals had suffocated the plot, and I hadn’t seen a real-life human in about ten minutes. I quickly realized that in my haste to reconcile my own expectations with the hype surrounding the film I was attempting to appease the movie gods with some sort of homebred objectivity, however misguided. After all, this is James Cameron’s first film in twelve years; since Titanic, the most successful movie of all time, winner of eleven Academy Awards, and one of my favorite films of all time. What would—what could—I think of Avatar?

At the film’s end I was utterly bemused and simultaneously moved. But let me first rewind. The story centers on Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), an ex-marine who’s paralyzed from the waist down. His identical twin brother was a scientist working on an alien planet called Pandora. After he is shot and killed, Jake is recruited to replace his brother in the Avatar program. Led by Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver), Jake and a team of scientists link up to Avatar bodies that resemble the native humanoids called the Navi—tall, blue, and primitive in all but kicking ass. Jake and company are there to study Pandora, including its indigenous plants and people. However, Jake is tapped by Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), who wants him to assimilate into Navi society with the aim of removing the natives from their homeland. Both the scientists and the private military contractors are being paid by a private energy company. They need the Navi to relocate because their land also happens to be sitting on top of a large reserve of the energy resource.

Surprising to everyone, Jake successfully integrates into the Navi culture with the help of Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), the warrior princess of her tribe. In his Avatar body, Jake is known as a Dreamwalker to the Navi. They know he is not like them, yet they still train him in their ways and ultimately accept him into their clan. As the film progresses, we find it always visually dazzling but frequently poignant as well. Like Titanic, there is a love story—in this case, for both a person and a people—at the forefront of visually dynamic and often brutal scenes.

The film does not break new ground when it comes to the story, but it doesn’t need to. It’s obvious where the characters are heading, but it’s still satisfying when it happens. And in the third act, the film’s best, Cameron unleashes a torrent of battles and destruction and inspiration, of blood and tears and smiles. And when the credits roll, more people than not will realize what I realized: Avatar is one of the ballsiest and best movies of 2009. And I saw it in 2D.