James Cameron doesn't do anything small. Just about every motion picture he directs turns into a major blockbuster: Terminator, Aliens, Terminator 2: Judgement Day, The Abyss, and the highest grossing movie of all time Titanic. (Let's just pretend Piranha Part Two: The Spawning never happened okay?)

With a track record like that, it's hard for a movie studio to say no when he comes along and asks for $300 million to make a movie. Lucky for us. After watching Avatar you can clearly see that $300 million went all over the screen in dazzling three dimensions.

Avatar is quite simply ground breaking cinema. As the theater experience gets better and better at home, it gets harder and harder to get people to leave the house to see a movie. Why not just wait for it on Blu-Ray and watch it at home on your 60" plasma with 7.1 Dolby Digital surround sound? The movie studios needed to kick it up a notch and make movie going an experience again. The entire movie industry should be thanking James Cameron right now for doing just that.

What Avatar does is what Star Wars did in 1977 when you saw the Imperial Star Destroyer fill the movie screen and give you a sense of size unmatched in cinema. Avatar immerses you in a world that you know does not exist, yet feels so real as you watch it that you almost forget it's all created with microprocessors.

Oh and there's a plot too.

In 2154 humans are colonizing the planet Pandora, an exotic jungle like world with an atmosphere toxic to humans. The 10 foot tall blue skinned native life forms called the Na'vi are viewed by the humans much like the native Americans were viewed by the European colonists of North America. Humans want to drive the Na'vi out of their land to take precious minerals from the ground which are suppose to fix the energy crisis that had overtaken Earth.

To interact with the Na'vi in the deadly-to-human atmosphere, humans connect with a genetically engineered human-Na'vi hybrid called an Avatar. The human stays safely at a base while they control and feel all the sensory input from their Avatar.

The plot has a very predictable anti-war/save the planet message, but it's no less enjoyable because of it. Even though you can guess what's going to happen, you still can't wait to see it play out on the screen because every scene dazzles the senses.

Motion capture technology has been around for a long time, but James Cameron takes it one step further. Not only are the actors movements captured and translated to a computer generated character, their emotions are captured as well. It's the one thing that has always been lacking with CGI characters. Sure they can walk, jump, fly and look like and do things like no human can, but they just can't act. Their faces always look like puppets.

Not so with Avatar. You see something in these characters eyes. You see emotions you never thought possible. You see love, anger, worry, hatred, sorrow. You can connect with these characters and think that they are actually real. Zoe Saldaña should get an Oscar nomination for her performance even though she's never physically on camera.

The same feelings occur with the planet Pandora and everything on it. It's a lush, vibrant colorful world, so exotic you know it's not real, yet you're still surprised when its animal life does something you never expected but seems perfectly natural here.

Avatar is an event you must experience at a theater, and preferably in IMAX 3D if you can. It's worth the extra ticket price for the experience. As great as your home theater set up is, a lot of Avatar will be lost in a home viewing. If you never saw Star Wars in a theater you missed out on a similar experience. Here's your chance to make up for it. Go buy your ticket now!