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Genre: Action/Adventure, SciFi/Fantasy, Suspense/Thriller
Release Date: 12/18/2009
Running Time: 160 mins
Director: James Cameron
Cast: Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Stephen Lang, Michelle Rodriguez, Sigourney Weaver, Giovanni Ribisi, CCH Pounder, Joel Moore, Laz Alonso, Wes Studi
Producer: James Cameron, Jon Landau
Writer: James Cameron
Distributor: 20th Century Fox
Offical Site: Click Here
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Box Office

Alice in Wonderland, 62.7 mil, 209.3 mil
Green Zone, 14.3 mil, 14.3 mil
She's Out of My League, 9.8 mil, 9.8 mil
Shutter Island, 8.1 mil, 108.0 mil
Remember Me, 8.1 mil, 8.1 mil
Our Family Wedding, 7.6 mil, 7.6 mil
Avatar, 6.5 mil, 730.3 mil
Brooklyn's Finest, 4.5 mil, 21.5 mil
Cop Out, 4.3 mil, 39.5 mil
The Crazies, 3.7 mil, 33.4 mil

Movie Title, Weekly Earnings, Total Earnings

Avatar

Technology advances so quickly nowadays that it's easy to shrug off the latest miracle — which is to say that James Cameron's long-awaited follow-up to Titanic is one of the most remarkable achievements in motion picture history, and yet who really cares? For all its techno-splendor, it essentially amounts to a sci-fi remake of Dances With Wolves. Replacing the Native Americans are the Na'vi ("native" with E.T. removed—cute), a primitive-looking humanoid species communing peacefully with nature on a jungle moon called Pandora. Unfortunately, the tribe's primary digs are situated directly atop a big hunk of "unobtainium," which Earth needs to reverse its own environmental catastrophe. Preferring a diplomatic solution, the Earthly colonizers engineer hybrid Na'vi bodies to be controlled by the brainwaves of supine grunts—including paraplegic ex-Marine Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), who's drafted into the project after his identical twin brother, a scientist whose DNA was used to harvest an expensive avatar, is suddenly killed. At first, Jake merely exults in the euphoric feeling of being able to hop, skip and jump again; gradually, however, he begins to…well, to go Na'vi, thanks in large part to his growing love for Neytiri (Zoë Saldana, sort of), a lithe, blue-skinned hottie in an extremely skimpy outfit. Will he lead the revolt against his own people? Does a motion-captured bear shit in the computer-generated woods? Cameron first announced the project back in 1996, claiming that his vision was so far-reaching that he might have to wait years for the state of the art to catch up. Turns out he wasn't kidding: The movie’s giant blue-skinned extraterrestrials are by far the most photorealistic imaginary creatures ever devised, and their jungle world makes previous CGI environments seem remote and insubstantial by comparison. Take this movie back to 1984 and the gasping would never stop. But arriving as it does on the heels of a series of incremental digital revolutions—arguably dating back to Cameron's own Terminator 2—Avatar comes across as merely the next obvious step, leaving us free to look right past its singular visual effects and be only marginally absorbed by its clunky, painfully derivative storyline. Granted, it boasts some reasonably exciting action sequences, but not enough to fill up a three-hour picture; there's a lot of dull exposition, sappy romance and back-to-nature boilerplate to endure. In the end, Avatar is yet another Hollywood movie that romanticizes the alleged purity of people in loincloths, creating a patronizing and simplistic dichotomy between technology and nature—as if space stations are somehow less "natural" than beaver dams. Which is the very line, actually, that Cameron's mundanely sensational F/X strives to erase. — Mike D'Angelo