It’s not often that a guy like me feels quite at a loss for words, but today is one of those times. To be more specific, I have lots of words, many of them big, superlative even, but one feels that they just don’t measure up to the task. I watched Avatar.

To say that I was mesmerized, sucked in into the magical, ethereal world of Pandora, would be an understatement. All I can say is that I’m really glad that I turned down many of my friends’ generous offers of ‘excellent’ quality pirated prints of the movie and instead chose to wait to catch it on the big screen, in 3d at that..

No movie that I have ever watched came quite close to offering what Avatar had to offer, as a complete package. My friend pointed out that Avatar was not the movie that showed some of the biggest and most massive props and stuff.. and that on emotional quotient many other movies outdo it.. which may be factual, but one feels statistics and factoids like these are highly irrelevant. It’s not the bodycount shown, the size or scale of objects or even the 3d.. all of those were just accessories used to tell the story, but it was the story of a pristine and pure race of creatures with a far higher spiritual and emotional quotient than the one possessed by mankind as we know it, that packed all the punch.. It delved into philosophy, spiritualism, the true meaning of life and living and still never seemed like it was a sermon or a lesson..

People have chosen to describe the movie using words like allegory, fable and many others but I think the movie goes beyond all those simplistic tags. I happened to read Stephen King’s ‘The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger’ recently. It was a lovely read which really posed some profound questions about the nature of our universe and our true size and significance in the cosmic scale of things, questioning whether our entire universe as we know it was anything more significant than a blade of grass in a different universe.. Whether a grain of sand in our own world is a collection of several galaxies in an infinitesimally smaller universe.. Avatar makes those very points but in a much grander way. James Cameron had the luxury of using advanced computer generated imagery and 3d rendering but the fact that he used it with such telling effect simply means that he deserves all the accolades that come his way, and much more than that.

If you haven’t watched Avatar, do yourself a big favor: watch it.
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