Avatar has been hyped as the most amazing piece of filmmaking in years. The marketing has been EVERYWHERE. Mostly because it has to be. The film cost over 300 million dollars to make putting it in a category above all movies that came before. Probably the most expensive film ever made.It does not dissapoint.
  The thing that makes this movie special is that it was filmed on another planet. The entire film was shot on the planet Pandora. Now you are saying WTF there arent other inhabitable planets yet. Well James Cameron(Writer, Director) knew this so he built the planet Pandora. Within a computer they built an entire new world. Every single detail from the beings that live there(the Navi) down to the bugs that glow in the forest at night. This is amazing and has sort of been done before in video games. The thing that makes this amazing is that after creating this world they took real actors into it and filmed a movie. They used a technology called Performance Capture. Similar to motion capture but they actually filmed scenes inside of the computerized world. As the director is watching the actor he can see the actual world that is on screen however the actor is standing in a giant gray warehouse surrounded by lights and equipment.
   At first thought it reminds you of other movies with fake characters that just seem cheesy and you can see the CGI of everything. I saw the movie in 3D Imax and I will tell you that from the 1st second of the movie I was completely convinced everything was real. No detail was missed. I fully believed the alien beings were real. There are times as I watched where you actually see pores sweat on their skin. Its nothing less than EPIC. I found myself sucked in and really being a part of the movie. I felt emotionally invovled throughout.
   The story is not especially original but that does not take away from the brilliance of this movie. Americans have run out of resources on Earth so they travel to Pandora to exploit their planet. The native Navi people stand in the way of getting the resources. Military force is used while scientists and people with a heart realize the beauty of Pandora and its people. A war between the beings as well as your emotions roller coasters you through the film ultimately ending in a some what predictable fashion. All the while you are such a part of the world and the peoples lives that rather than seeing a story you are living it so the effect brings a new life to a standard idea.
  Without a doubt this movie is the most EPIC film I have seen in the past 20 years, if not my entire life. The beauty and awe of the graphical accomplishments are unmatched. The 3D IMAX version is proabably the best use of this format yet. Ive spent $11 more times than I would like to admit seeing a movie that didnt live up to that price. This one feels like I got a $50 experience for a huge discount. It is 2hrs and 40 mins long and when it was over I felt that if they had restarted it again immediately I would have sat through the entire film again.  Please go out and check this out. If not for the science fiction story, the graphical accomplishments, or the everyone else is doing it factor. Do it because this will be one of those films like Star Wars that you look back and say "WOW remember when we saw that in the theatre"(Not that I ever did but now I have Avatar). Watch it, NOW!