I feel a bit curious even bothering to review Avatar. I feel like it is the sort of movie whose fate was decided eons ago. By the nerdigentsia. Right about fifteen months before the trailer even came out, people were totally definitely going to hate it. And for those people, you have a litany of complaints that you concocted during the first trailer, or the advertising campaign, and a lot of your criticisms are probably true. But you know what? Avatar is fucking fantastic. Despite all its indefensible faults, it’s an experience anyone who loves a spectacle should take in. Avatar is two-hours and some change of existing on a different plane, engrossed in a gorgeous, foreign world.

Haters, you go on and hate. It’s cool. But if you’re on the fence, come hither and I’ll try and persuade you.

I took my boy, and exquisite coder of this wonderful site, Bags, to see Avatar on Friday evening. Even bought him the ticket. Yeah, I’m a fucking class act. It’s worth mentioning, since right from around the time that I began jerking off uncontrollably to the original trailer, he began to express skepticism. While I was mentioning how sweet I thought the uber-mechs and the ridiculous dragons and shit looked, he muttered things like “I don’t know, the two worlds don’t seem to mesh” and “I’m just not that excited” and maybe even “It doesn’t seem as fun a way to spend a Friday night as dressing up in my Mom’s underwear.” So Bags was the perfect foil for my fanboyism. If I was guaranteed to love it, then his opinion may count for more than mine. While he was skeptical, he’s was willing to keep an open mind about the whole fucking shebang.

Bags walked out of the theater in love. I could see his erection. It was mountainous. It throbbed and I rubbed it if only because I was so happy he enjoyed the movie as much as me.

Why is Avatar so fucking amazing? You already know the answer. And either you believe in it, or you don’t. Avatar is amazing because of the zillion dollars that James Cameron spent in meticulously creating another world. Pandora lives and breathes, and you’re there alongside it, engulfed by it. I don’t even know why this movie is available for public consumption in some stone-age two-dimension version. Two-dimensions! Pfft! Fuck that, that is so last millennium.

Avatar is beyond gorgeous. People write about visuals this, and visuals that. But Avatar is more about immersion. You’re plunked into Pandora, and boy does she feel real. There are portions that take place during the night, and I swear to you this cheeseball asshole had goosebumps. Pandora is that pretty. Very pretty. Objects whirl and light up in Pandora for no good reason. Smack a flower and it brightens and retracts into itself. Why? Because it is pretty and awesome and it makes you go Ohhhhh.

I kept turning to Bags during the showing. Dude, I’d say. That looks fucking real. And at some points of absurd awesomeness, he’d just turn to me and laugh. It was a laugh of incredulous excitement. As if to say, jesus christ, this is unfathomably cool. And I’d nod and say something like seriously.

The Na’Vi? I dug them. Not only did I dig them, but I found Neytiri downright sexy. She was some beautiful exotic alien lady who I didn’t feel unjust at all in fawning over. A big beautiful blue babe that can rocket arrows into dragons and shit? Sign me up. Raise your hand if you kept trying to see if you could spot areolar.

Avatar is more of an experience than a movie. And I’m heartened by the fact that it is making a zillion dollars, because I want more movies like this. I want to be inserted, Solid Snake-stylee into some foreign world. Embedded into some exotic beauty. The entire film is predicated on you experiencing this world, which is why it makes what I’m about to say okay.

The story isn’t amazing. It isn’t. We probably all know this already. But to be fair, it’s actually a hell of a lot better than I thought it was going to be. It’s standard Uprising of the People plus preachy commentary on everything from deforestation to contractors like Blackwater running around in places like Iraq. It’s a mish-mash of slightly groan-worthy themes. But they’re all conveyed through common tropes. The savior of the people, the disenfranchised soldier, et cetera. It isn’t ground breaking, and it struggles at points.

But that’s okay, I really promise it is.

The next day after I saw the movie I was whipping fluids everywhere as I talked to my Pepsibro about it. I was all, dude, you really have to see this fucking movie. It’s very cool. Very cool. And he asked me, but like, was it a good movie?

No conversation between Pepsibones and I is complete without some sort of Socratic discourse, and I asked him, well, what do you mean by a good movie? And he responded, well like, is the story good? And my response was two-pronged: Is the story good? Yes and no. And does it matter? The story is good enough to connect one excuse for beautiful visuals to another. I would describe the storyline as functional. It serves its purpose.

As a side-note, I really have to give Big Ups to Cameron for his typical propensity for using strong women. As a fan of powerful, intelligent women, I enjoyed seeing Neytiri being a source of strength throughout the movie. It’s nice to see a female role whose personality doesn’t wilt into a messy pile of butter once the big strong dude shows up.

But anyways.

Avatar really is about the visuals. And it is the visuals that can carry the storyline as its weakest points, and glide you through some of the stilted acting. The acting isn’t piss-poor, but there’s some cardboard amongst the actors and actresses. I’ve heard this written away as Cameron’s desire to show the burgeoning disconnect between Sully’s life as an Avatar, and what is becoming an increasingly disconnected and foreign world with the humans.

Please.

I’m a lit major pal, and I know when to throw the Red Flag on intellectual masturbation. The acting is choppy because it is choppy. The dialogue sucks because the dialogue sucks. Nothing can save lines such as “We’re going to fight terror with terror!” and Cameron actually using the phrase “Shock and Awe”, no matter how much academic wanking you want to pull off. It’s cute though.

Avatar is a fun as fuck movie with flaws. There is a soggy middle section and one really awkward elf seance and some barfy dialogue. But none of that stopped me from having my eyepieces rocked with visual splendor. Take it from me, and one skeptical friend, who both left the movie theater jonesing for some fuggin’ Pandora. Slap on your 3D glasses, ditch the snark for like three hours, and enjoy hanging out in a different world.