Welcome back, Mr. Cameron. We missed ya.

All right, go ahead and make your jokes. "Dances With Wolves in space", right? "Ooh, it's Pocahontas with dinosaurs. Whoopee." Yeah, it's a story you've heard before; the outsider familiarizes himself with a strange new culture, and ultimately joins its people when it's threatened by his own kind. I have no response to that other than a big fat so the hell what? News flash: Dances With Wolves did not originate the concept. In fact, y'know what? F*CK Dances With Wolves, that movie bored the shit out of me. The Last Samurai told that story better anyhow. Hell, Outlander was more entertaining than any version of Beowulf I can remember. The fact alone that a story's been told before doesn't make the retelling any less worthy, as it's the execution that makes or breaks it.

Obviously the defining feature of this retelling are the visuals, which are aces every step of the way. While the Na'vi body movements aren't always convincing, the facial expressions are incredible, to the point of looking far more like extensive makeup than motion-capture CGI. The rub is that the souls of the actors shine through the shiny CGI and really give the characters substance. The environment is absolutely convincing; Cameron now has me believing there's a planet with floating mountains somewhere in the universe. The creature design, from the winged Banshees to the tiny glowing tree spores, are a wonder to behold, and provide a supporting cast just as involving as any of the humans or Na'vi.

There are times when I really disliked Sam Worthington's Jake Sully for the decisions he made, but enjoyed his journey from a bumbling impostor to full-fledged tribal member; Worthington gives Sully a quiet anxiety that builds as the situation gets worse and he gets more intimately involved. Zoe Saldana's Neytiri may be your typical hot-to-trot warrior babe in a so-thin-it's-likely-to-malfunction wardrobe, but........okay, I don't have an end to that sentence, but punchline is I liked her a lot. While normally the female lead is intrigued with the outsider regardless of her clan's standing, Neytiri is united with them in her initial disgust with Jake, and it's during moments where Saldana's unmistakable smile appears that I got to enjoy her more and more. Stephen Lang lets Col. Quaritch's badass scars do most of the acting, but he makes a credible enough villain; not quite matching the crazed menace of Michael Biehn's Lt. Coffey in The Abyss (the bar to reach for as for as Cameron baddies go...human ones, anyway), but you root for his ass to die pretty easily. Sigourney Weaver's Dr. Augustine is a likeable hardass, the Jane Goodall of Na'vi cultural studies; her avatar strangely resembles her the most closely, especially in the shape of the nose, which I thought was odd at first, but in fact helped make the effect flesh itself out more. Giovanni Ribisi plays a great corporate slimeball, the man whose job it is to scoff at everything the natives hold dear.

So aside from the amazing visuals - and they are amazing...I saw this in 3D, and it thankfully has a minimum of those obvious pointing-objects-at-the-camera shots - what did I enjoy about Avatar? Well, I won't lie, the visuals are the major drawing point; the film has kind of an uphill battle to convince folks it's worth anything beyond that, but I think that's because of the dismissive "Dances With Smurf-Cats" attitudes I mentioned earlier, and also because the film's message will be oversimplified into "HUMANS ARE EVIL!!!", and that's not what the movie is saying. We're not evil; we're just enormous dickbags who collectively have no regard for opposing cultures or viewpoints, and historically speaking, we really can't say that's inaccurate.

There was many a time I forgot about the 3D and the CGI and just got swept up in the story; in Jake's experiences learning the Na'vi customs, language, and rituals, in Augustine's clash with Ribisi the slimeball, in Neytiri's utter anguish as her home is torn apart once Jake confesses his motives. The movie also retreads the old argument of nature vs. technology, and spirituality vs. cynicism, but actually shows it in a slightly new light. When Augustine explains the relationship between the planet and its flora and fauna, she's almost arguing the existence of God through science (which is refreshing to hear when everyone else is in one camp or the other, refusing to see the other point of view when really they're looking at the same damn thing); as a result, Avatar comes to feel like a sci-fi analogue of Princess Mononoke. And you just want to punch Ribisi when he chuckles and replies, "They're just trees."

There are faults, of course; for a 162-minute movie, certain points feel glanced over, and characters seem to find solutions like they're just plucked out of the air. Jake's recruitment to the Pandora mission is covered in only the first few minutes of the movie, when I'd have liked to learn more about him and the brother whose place on the mission he's taken. As well, he acclimates to his avatar body in about a single scene, when but a few shots of him re-training himself to walk and move might have lent it credibility. Finally, at a point in which Jake must gain the trust of the Na'vi when they should have no reason to, he figures out how to get them to listen with such speed that all that was missing was the actual light bulb going off over his head; on the one hand, it was a rather genius move on his part, but after folks spending half the movie joking about how dumb he can be, is it more surprising or unrealistic that he accomplishes what he does?

The greatest compliment I can pay Avatar, a project reportedly 15 years in the making, is that it brought James Cameron back into filmmaking after a interminable 12-year hiatus. I said before a retold story is made or broken by its execution. Avatar makes it. Big time.