Avatar both excites and disappoints at the box off. Review on Avatar Movie

Avatar both excites and disappoints at the box office. The only way to tell if you are going to like Avatar is to go and see it for yourself. You can read movie reviews until you are blue in the face, but the fact remains that everyone has their own tastes. If you like video games, fantasy, and sci-fi, chances are you will like this movie a lot.

Still yet, there's one thing everyone agrees on: the special effects are awesome. The Na'vi - the 10 foot tall blue creatures that Sully encounters - are unlike anything ever seen before. The colors, the special effects, everything in this film(which cost hundreds of millions of dollars to produce) are what makes the show so awesome.

Avatar's love story is also not quite there. There's no chemistry between the leads and it's hard to relate to these giant blue people.

To say that Avatar is perfect would be a huge mistake, yet the imperfections too have their own standing in this tale. The characters are totally one dimensional and flawed. There's the human who turns into a super hero, the bad guy who just won't die, the nasty bossy woman who turns softie just in time for the climax, or the Na'vi tribe who despite their elevated senses and intuition don't see the oncoming doom.

Pandora is a fully realized world, the intricacy and detail astonishing. The exploration unfolds with a sense of wonder, joy, and danger reminiscent of the first half of Jurassic Park. Composites of dinosaurs, tigers, horses, wolves, monkeys, and yes, dragons. They’re not just obstacles or eye candy, they each have their own behavior, their own essence as living and breathing creatures.

The details are monumental: mile high trees stretch into the sky, floating mountains hang in midair, waterfalls tumbling down off their rocky flanks into oblivion. The details are tiny and delicate: enormous plants s*cking down into the soil with a plop when touched, the gentle bio luminescence of the flowers at night, delicate semi-sentient spores floating like over-sized dandelion dust on the breeze. The genius isn't in any one thing, or in the scenic perfection, it’s in the uniqueness, the creativity. This is not Vancouver or Mexico shot on location. By force of vision, will and technology Cameron has dreamed something magnificently alien into existence.

Story: Cameron's story is both timely and topical with a strong anti-war statement finely blended with the evergreen romance between a human and an alien.

"Avatar" is definitely not into breaking new narrative ground, but its ability to balance a familiar story with groundbreaking visuals is potent enough that even at an overly long 2 hours and 40 minutes this is a film people will be seeing more than once.