Avatar

Avatar is bone-headed, but it’s also beautiful — not just exciting and technically impressive, like Jurassic Park, but wondrous and exhilarating. How many movies can you say that about? It may be an inch deep, but it’s a mile wide, it gushes and roars like Niagara Falls, and it’s a sight to behold.

While it’s being sold as a quantum leap forward in special effects, Avatar is not so much something that has never been done as something that everything else has been trying to be or preparing for — in terms of technique and imaginative spectacle, anyway — from the Star Wars prequels to The Lord of the Rings to King Kong. It may not quite be the Star Wars or The Matrix of its generation, but it’s about as close to being both at the same time as anything is likely to be.

But it’s more than that: Not only is it Star Wars and The Matrix, it’s also John Smith and Pocahontas, Dances With Wolves and Fahrenheit 9/11, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Rider Haggard, Hayao Miyazaki and Jack Kirby, Ferngully: The Last Rainforest and Battle for Terra, Jurassic Park and Aliens. It’s noble primitives and warmongering Westerners, imperialist and expansionist guilt and no blood for oil, Cortez and Custer and George W. Bush in one fell swoop. It’s environmental apocalypticism, Gaia and the Force, Vulcan mind-melding and fal tor pan mysticism and Disney’s Grandmother Willow. It’s space marines and military oppressiveness, mystic/enlightened feminist consciousness and interspecies romance.

Much enthusiasm for and criticism of Avatar is fragmented, parsing out the heart-stopping pictures, the hackneyed plot and the hippie politics. This, though, is to miss Cameron’s mythopoeic gift, which is precisely a knack for synthesis.