Avatar

I don't give 5 stars to many films. I'm kind of surprised at how much I love this movie, in fact, because I never even bothered to see it when it was in the theatre. After all, I reasoned, while it's goundbreaking in terms of the way it was made -- and even though it's opened up an entirely new way

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of making a movie, no one's ever said anything good about the story. And isn't that the real reason for making a movie? To tell a story? And Cameron _did_ have a story to tell.

Even though the story reminds me greatly of _Dances With Wolves_, it is told beautifully. A man from a different way of life, living in a dystopia, comes to a new place and meets a different people. Unlike his own, these folks live in unity with the land and nature. He learns their ways and comes to love them and their world passionately. At last, however, his own people come and try to destroy the simpler, gentler culture because they have something the dystopians want/need. In the case of the Lakota people of _Dances_, it would ultimately gold. Here, on Pandora, it is "unobtainium."

Remarkably, the addition of the extra few minutes in the Collectors' special edition makes a great movie even better. The added footage shows how bad Earth has become, explains exactly why unobtainium is so highly sought-after (It's not too big a spoiler for me to reveal that it's a room temperature superconductor, something of a "holy grail" to today's scientists), and expands on the link types of critters found on Pandora and the Na'vi's link to them and all of nature. I wish (and hope) that in the ultimate edition, he spends more time letting us get to know the People better, since all but Natiri are one-dimensional. This was one of the strengths in Dances With Wolves -- Costner fleshed out many of his Lakotas, and we grew to love the people individually as well as the culture.

Do I recommend Avatar? You betcha. I've got both releases now, and will spend more money buying the next, ultimate version when it is released in the future (or, to quote Tommy Lee Jones in _Men in Black_, "I guess I'm going to have to buy the White Album all over again."). I'm not anywhere near bored with watching it, and it's going to stay in my DVD player for a while longer. I hope that, if you haven't discovered this great piece of filmmaking for both its story and its ground-breaking techniques.

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