Best one sentence review of Avatar

I wish I could take credit for this one, but I heard it from my son-in-law:

Avatar: Ferngully meets Dances With Wolves.

This is not a knock against the movie. I saw it this weekend in 3D and enjoyed it immensely. The indispensable Roger Ebert compared Avatar to the original Star Wars in his review. The comparison is appropriate: Like Lucas in 1977, James Cameron has stretched technology in remarkable ways in order to create a wonderful new world.

Pandora is so breathtakingly beautiful, in fact, that we don't mind the derivative plot, which here is a not-very-thinly disguised Halliburton vs. Noble Savages morality play. Guess who Mr. Cameron is rooting for? We don't even mind that a key plot point involves mountains floating in mid-air (a nod to Flash Gordon, presumably?) or that the mineral that the Earthpeople want to extract from Pandora is called "unobtainium."

Like the original Star Wars, Avatar will long retain the power to transport the people who saw it in first run to a wonderful place -- even after the technology that made it possible becomes commonplace. But one also hopes that Mr. Cameron will learn from Mr. Lucas' experience with Star Wars: No matter how much we loved Avatar, that doesn't mean that we'd be interested in a prequel.

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By the way, the human behind the beautiful blue Princess Neytiri is Zoe Saldana -- who played Lt. Uhura in last summer's Star Trek remake.