Certain film directors and producers have also been inventors and innovators, and the films they’ve made have led to advances in filmmaking techniques. Walt Disney, Stanley Kubrick, and Steven Spielberg come to mind. And if you’ve seen Aliens, The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day, The Abyss, and Titanic, you know that director James Cameron belongs in that company and has few peers when it comes to pushing the envelope for special effects.

I believe that Avatar has more special-effects shots than any film I’ve ever seen, but Cameron uses his bag of tricks old and new to create a world where everything seems natural. He makes the viewer believe that the planet Pandora, with its floating mountains, viny flora, Empire State Building-sized trees, and exotic rain forests, really exists. He also makes the avatar technology seem quite possible. In short, Cameron has created a world where everything is exotic and strange to us, yet it’s a place where everything works in partnership with everything else. Pandora has not only a heart and soul, as we learn in the green-themed script, but also a logic in the way it’s put together.

Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a decorated and crippled-to-prove-it Marine comes to Pandora. Two different Earthman factions are trying to study the planet. The scientific arm, headed by Grace (Sigourney Weaver), wants to investigate how the planet functions as a living entity, while the military, headed by Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), simply wants to overpower the planet and is willing to destroy it to get at the precious mineral they need to help a ravaged Earth survive. Unfortunately, that mineral happens to be under a giant tree that serves as home to a native colony, the Na’vi, who are literally connected to their planet in a spiritual way. For instance, they can plug their long ponytails into the beasts that transport them so that they become one with their mounts, and they can also plug into the planet in other ways.

An avatar, a creature that looks like a Na’vi but contains both human and Na’vi DNA and is controlled by a human counterpart lying in a suspended state, is created for Sully in hopes that he can gain trust within the colony and convince them to move, giving humans access to the mineral. Jake is very successful at becoming a native, so much so that he falls in love with Neytiri (Zoe Saldana). He ends up going completely native and helps Pandora’s tribes fight the Earthmen, headed by Col Quaritch, who becomes more zealous and unscrupulous as the movie progresses.

The green message is a little heavy at times (the parallels to our failing rain forests are anything but subtle), and Quaritch is a stereotype of the slightly insane military commander. The love story is also often sacrificed to special effects. But without those flaws this would be a five-star film. Everything else is perfect, especially the look and sound of Pandora. The colors of the planet (a lot of purples and blues) are simply beautiful. A simple nighttime scene in the forest looks like the most incredible fiber-optic show in the universe. The Na’vi, 10’ tall and lean, with long hair and cat-like tails, are graceful and quite believable. It’s easy to side with them, so it’s no wonder that Sully jumps ship.

Cameron has said that if this movie is successful, he’d like to make it into a trilogy. I’d be all for that, so long as it doesn’t take quite so long to produce parts two and three. Otherwise we’ll have to relate to Jake and Neytiri as grandparents.

By all means see this movie now on a big screen. I didn’t see it in 3D because it would have involved a trip out of town and we were facing an imminent snowstorm, but the 2D scenes had great depth. You can tell that this is what Cameron was going for, rather than spears and other objects jumping out from the screen. I liked the movie enough that I plan to see it again in 3D once we dig out, but a big screen is mandatory. The movie will make a superb Blu-ray release later on, but even today’s advanced home theaters can’t draw you into the picture the way the big-screen presentation will.

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