Avatar: Critic Reviews

As visual spectacle, Avatar is indelible, but as a movie it all but evaporates as you watch it.

James Cameron has turned one man's dream of the movies into a trippy joy ride about the end of life -- our moviegoing life included -- as we know it.

The effects of Avatar are certainly something to see, especially on an Imax screen the size of an upended football field. But it's difficult to tell if the game has really been changed or not.

It's baggy, longwinded and, for all the light-speed imagery, just not quick on its feet. Cameron used to be the tautest film-maker around, but he just got slack.

For all the grandeur and technical virtuosity of the mythical 3-D universe Cameron labored for years to perfect, his characters are one-dimensional, rarely saying anything unexpected. But for much of the movie, that hardly matters.

An ambitious, fully immersive cinematic experience.

Avatar is an entertainment to be not just seen but absorbed on a molecular level; it's as close to a full-body experience as we'll get until they invent the holo-suits. Cameron aims for sheer wonderment, and he delivers.

The muscular, coming-atcha visuals trump the movie's camp dialogue and corny conception, but only up to a point.

Along with the eye-popping visuals in writer-director James Cameron's sci-fi epic, there's also a lot of eye-rollingly silly stuff.

Mr. Cameron's singular vision has upped the ante for filmed entertainment, and given us a travelogue unlike any other. I wouldn't want to live on Pandora, mainly because of the bad air, but I'm glad to have paid it a visit.

It is cool. But all this "change the way you look at films" hype is just that. While Avatar is impressively seamless, you're never fooled. This doesn't look like a documentary film; it looks like a video game.

Cameron and his legion of CGI experts and skilled craftspeople have delivered a lovely, misty, dangerous world.

'Avatar' is a very big, very enjoyable, summertime action film that, much as it covers several actors in computer-generated imagery, drapes new flesh over very old bones.

The narrative would be ho-hum without the spectacle. But what spectacle! Avatar is dizzying, enveloping, vertiginous ... I ran out of adjectives an hour into its 161 minutes.

James Cameron's Avatar is the most beautiful film I've seen in years.

There is still at least one man in Hollywood who knows how to spend $250 million, or was it $300 million, wisely.

If your exhilaration with the (approximate) first half is undercut by an increasingly deflating pffffftttt sound, Cameron nonetheless has delivered the screen's most anticipated and persuasive blend of live-action and motion-capture animation to date.

Watching it, I began to understand how people in 1933 must have felt when they saw King Kong.

Combining beyond-state-of-the-art moviemaking with a tried-and-true storyline and a gamer-geek sensibility -- not to mention a love angle, an otherworldly bestiary, and an arsenal of 22d-century weaponry -- the movie quite simply rocks.

The film vibrates with the excitement of discovery and awe. Not just for the sight of six-legged rhinos and butterfly-hued dragons, but for the thousands of hours of work that unite here in a creative epiphany.

I have seen the future of movies, and it is Avatar.

If only Cameron, who also wrote the script, had spent as much time on the story as he did the effects he uses to tell it.

Did everything make sense? Nope. And you know what? Who cares! Avatar is thrilling, exciting and, best of all, something new that your eyeballs didn't even know they very much wanted to see.

The King of the World sets his sights on creating another world entirely in Avatar, and it's very much a place worth visiting.

It's rarely less than absorbing and never boring over its nearly three-hour length.