For as much of a fuss as James Cameron and the folks surrounding and responsible for Avatar made about the movie being a 'game changer,' the movie was going to have to be something extraordinary for me not to walk out disappointed.  Well, I saw Avatar tonight in digital 3D and I was not at all disappointed.  I'll leave the discussion of just what the film means to 'the game' and the declarations of success or failure over box office numbers to other people.  Instead, I'll try to explain why I thought Avatar was one of the most astounding things I've ever seen on the big screen.

The world of CGI film making has given us some incredible, impossible images.  A movie like 300 couldn't even exist a decade ago, at least not with THAT look.  David Fincher flies his camera through coffee pots and under chairs not because it serves the story but because he can and it's more interesting than a straight dolly shot.  We could have seen a Lord of the Rings trilogy where Gollum was played by an oddly shaped guy in a suit and makeup, but the version we got is just so much better because of those terabytes of pixels flying off the screen.  Of course the CGI world has given us some real stinkers too.  Van Helsing's monsters would have looked much better as puppets and the Star Wars prequels, for all their whiz-bang, left characters behind as they focused on wave after wave of digital clone troopers and exotic beasts.  This technology is here to stay, and it's transforming the way movies are made to such an extent that we may start to take for granted the wonderful things that film makers will throw at us.  But with all of the successes and failures, the amazing feats and the woeful misapplications, the fantastic and the laughable, I can honestly say I've never seen something quite as astonishing as Avatar.

There are long segments of Avatar that may be completely computer-animated, but I just couldn't tell.  So much of the film is fantastic and other-worldly that it seems impossible to think that any of it was filmed as practical sets, models, or locations, but then it is all so seamlessly believable that it's impossible to tell where the camera ends and the computer begins.  Well, for the most part.  There are certainly some shots of the main characters where the laws of physics as we know them don't seem correctly applied, but for the vast majority of the film, there's nothing to question.  I know that the plants and creatures aren't real, but they don't stick out like the sore thumbs that similar effects brought in Star Wars.  I know that the mech suits and gunships aren't real, but they look perfectly integrated with the scenery and the whole thing is just a perfect illusion.  I wouldn't say that there was any point in the movie where I thought that the six-legged horses actually existed somewhere, but I was never distracted by the fact that they looked less a part of the scene than the actors.

It's easy to forget sometimes that film is always and has always been an illusion.  The earliest special effect was crude--a guy stood in front of the camera then they stopped rolling, he walked away, and they picked back up and it looked like magic.  To people who had no film vocabulary, this probably seemed like real magic--withouht understanding the techniques of film editing, it probably looked impossible.  It must have been incredible and it must have inspired people all over the place to think about what other tricks they could play with the camera.  I think Cameron has done the same thing with Avatar.  We know that the world isn't real, that this is all a manufactured illusion, and I don't think it's necessarily photo-real or grounded in any particular way (the way the effects in District 9 were, for instance,) but Avatar is so complete in its illusion that it's utterly engrossing.  At no point did the effects sizzle for the sake of sizzling.  Everything served the story and made the experience of watching the film as fantastic as the Avatar experience seemed to the film's hero.

That may in fact be the film's greatest achievement--that the film making technology does for the audience essentially what the technology IN the film does for the characters.  The central Sci Fi concept at play is the idea that some of the characters can jack into a machine to allow them to control a living, physical being that's been grown from human and alien DNA.  I would have liked some more exploration of the ethics of this concept and the inner struggle of the people who spent much of the movie acting through their avatars, but that's a minor qualm.  In order for this idea to work meta-texturally, the film has to be completely engaging and almost overwhelmingly captivating.  Thankfully, it is.  It took my eyes a few minutes to adjust to the 3D, which was not unlike the moments that it took the hero to get used to the perspective of the world through his avatar.  After I had bought into the look of the film, I never looked back because the movie never gave me a way out.  It was a pure escape to an incredible alien world and while Star Wars tried this over and over, it just never quite got it right with those prequels.

It might seem like the story of Avatar is an afterthought to the experience, and to a certain extent, that's true.  The story, on paper, is not likely to be much more captivating than many similar stories. You could remake Avatar in the wild west and not miss nearly a single story beat.  But the magic of movies is that they are never just about the story as words on a page--the images and music, the pace of the editing, the acting, and in this case the 3D effect all create an experience that is completely unique to the medium.  The story isn't all that unique, but the way in which the story is told is unquestionably fantastic and it's something that could only be that fantastic as a movie.  Sure there are a few scenes of mind-numbing expository dialog and a few characters who deserve to be more than just character types, but the plot is clear and uncluttered and the conflicts are full of drama.  James Cameron isn't one of my favorite directors and I think he makes some pretty safe choices in Avatar, but there's no way to deny that he directs some amazing action sequences and that he can hold down the character beats when he slows down enough for them.  

Will Avatar hold up over time?  Will the effects in this film eventually be eclipsed by something else?  I don't know for sure.  The morphing in Cameron's T2 seemed amazing at the time and it looks almost quaint now.  I imagine that people will eventually catch up, the technology will get cheaper, and the average summer blockbusters will look just as good and rich as Avatar in a few years.  At the moment though, James Cameron is the only person who has taken it to this level.  I would still prefer to see the technology and money behind Avatar in the hands of someone who could make a more intellectually audacious movie, but I'll settle for seeing this kind of populist movie as long as it's made with as much care and attention to detail as Avatar.  I don't think that this movie has necessarily changed the game, but it has certainly upped the bar.  If we are just now seeing the result of a generation of film makers who were inspired by Star Wars, I can't wait to see what the kids who are awed by Avatar come up with.