"Avatar" isn't a perfect film - and a few cliches short of a great one - but at its best, you'll leave the theater feeling puny and dazed, certain you just spent two hours and 41 minutes on a lush alien moon watching 10-foot blue people re-enact the plot of "Pocahontas" or "Dances with Wolves."
"Avatar" marks writer-director James Cameron's return to full-fledged narrative filmmaking - some 12 years after "Titanic." Once again, he's whipped up a monumental feast for the eyes. Once again, it features an epic length and bouts of corny dialogue. Once again, according to some reports, the result is the costliest movie ever made.
Exploiting the newest of 3-D and motion-capture technologies, "Avatar" tells the story of Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a paralyzed marine of the future who "drives" a hybrid body crafted from his dead brother's DNA and DNA sampled from the tall blue beings of Pandora. Jake does this by crawling into a glorified tanning bed that connects his neural motherboard with the avatar's, and he's off and running through a phantasmagoric extraterrestrial landscape.
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