Avatar's story is exactly what you expect from the trailers, but the visuals and 3D effects more than make up for the cookie-cutter characters. Sigourney Weaver adds soul to the film, and every dollar spent on this mammoth production is seen on the screen. Our review inside.

Avatar may be hurt by the curse of expectation, and it's hard to keep the message that MOVIE MAKING HAS BEEN CHANGED FOREVER out of your mind once your butt is actually in a seat in front of the thing. The trailers keep telling us how nothing will ever be the same again, and we know the budget of the movie was anywhere from $200 million to $500 million, depending on what report you're reading. Who knows how much R&D Cameron put into the technology behind the movie.

Even the credits of the film are monstrous: after Industrial Light and Magic and Weta Digital were credited for the special effects, the long line of other effects houses that worked on the movie scrolled by. I lost count of how many different companies leveraged how many different forms of technology to get Avatar filmed. If you're a fan of cinema, no matter how you feel about the trailer, you need to see this movie; it represents the absolute best that technology can give us in film—at least with an unlimited budget and a small city of geniuses working across a decade to bring it to life...