Avatar

162 minutes; PG-13

Theater Release Date : 18 December 2009

DVD Release Date : 22 April 2010

Overall Rating : 9½*/10

. Director James Cameron's high budget hit from last Christmas; you know it's a good movie when it ends after 2½ hours and you go, "Is it over already?" . The film felt like a mix of Dances With Wolves, Star Wars, The Matrix, and one of my personal favorites, Starship Troopers. Corporal Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), although wheelchair-bound, takes the place of his brother who died on the way to the planet Pandora. The humans are there to mine something more valuable than spice on Dune - Unobtainium. Unfortunately, the ore lies on land held sacred by the native Na'Vi, so we have to use one of two things to convince them to move - charm or napalm. Sigurney Weaver also stars as Dr. Grace Augustine. After battling Aliens for three films, the Na'Vi are childsplay. . What's To Like... We watched this on our big-screen at home, and the visual effects were absolutely stunning. I can only dream of what this was like in 3-D in the theaters. The storyline was straightforward and has been done many times before, but that doesn't matter, because it was convincingly done. The UE (Col. Miles Quaritch, played by Stephen Lang) isn't completely "black", and Sully's main Na'Vi squeeze (Neytiri, played by Zoe Saldana) is way cooler than Princess Leia and any of the green alien vixens that James T. Kirk ever bedded. . My quibbles are small. I can't see why it took everyone so long to figure out a way for Jake to overcome his handicap. And why the scriptwriters couldn't come up with a better name for the ore than Unobtainium. Geez, guys. . I thoroughly enjoyed Avatar, despite its predictability. It may well turn out to be the best film I watch this year. 9½ Stars.