Promising revolutionary digital effects and an epic storyline, the hugely anticipated Avatar sees the director of Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgement Day, James Cameron, returns to breathe new life into the sci-fi genre.

Winner of the BAFTA Awards for Best Production Design and Special Visual Effects.

Winner of the Academy Awards for Best Art Direction, Best Visual Effects & Best Cinematography.

Featuring Terminator Salvation's Sam Worthington, Star Trek's Zoe Saldana and James Cameron's Aliens star, Sigourney Weaver, Avatar tells of a future conflict between resource-guzzling humans and the indigenous inhabitants of the planet Pandora: the Na'vi. Humans can't breathe Pandoran air, so paraplegic marine Jake volunteers to become an Avatar: a genetically engineered half human/half Na'vi controlled via a mental link. Sent to scout out the `enemy`, Jake falls for the Na'vi princess, Neytir, forcing him to choose sides when the conflict escalates into full-blown war.

After 12 years of thinking about it (and waiting for movie technology to catch up with his visions), James Cameron followed up his unsinkable Titanic with Avatar, a sci-fi epic meant to trump all previous sci-fi epics. Set in the future on a distant planet, Avatar spins a simple little parable about greedy colonisers (that would be mankind) messing up the lush tribal world of Pandora. A paraplegic Marine named Jake (Sam Worthington) acts through a 9-foot-tall avatar that allows him to roam the planet and pass as one of the Na'vi, the blue-skinned, large-eyed native people who would very much like to live their peaceful lives without the interference of the visitors. Although he's supposed to be gathering intel for the badass general (Stephen Lang) who'd like to lay waste to the planet and its inhabitants, Jake naturally begins to take a liking to the Na'vi, especially the feisty Neytiri (Zoë Saldana, whose entire performance, recorded by Cameron's complicated motion-capture system, exists as a digitally rendered Na'vi). The movie uses state-of-the-art 3D technology to plunge the viewer deep into Cameron's crazy toy box of planetary ecosystems and high-tech machinery. Maybe it's the fact that Cameron seems torn between his two loves--awesome destructive gizmos and flower-power message mongering--that makes Avatar's pursuit of its point ultimately uncertain. That, and the fact that Cameron's dialogue continues to clunk badly. If you're won over by the movie's trippy new world, the characters will be forgivable as broad, useful archetypes rather than standard-issue stereotypes, and you might be able to overlook the unsurprising central plot. (The overextended "take that, Michael Bay" final battle sequences could tax even Cameron enthusiasts, however.) It doesn't measure up to the hype (what could?) yet Avatar frequently hits a giddy delirium all its own. The film itself is our Pandora, a sensation-saturated universe only the movies could create.

Avatar is the story of ex-Marine Jake, a paraplegic war veteran, who finds himself thrust into hostilities on a distant planet filled with exotic life forms, Pandora. As an Avatar, a human consciousness in an alien body, he finds himself torn between two worlds in a desperate fight for his own survival and that of the indigenous people. Those from Earth find themselves at odds with each other and the local culture.

An Activist Survival Guide to Pandora (203 pages) is a confidential report from the Resources Development Adminstration (RDA) on the biological and social history of Pandora. The report details Pandora’s alien ecosystem; its mining opportunities and topography; its flora & fauna; and the culture, language, and physiology of the indigenous hunter-gatherer race, the Na’vi. Exceedingly profitable, Pandora provides challenges to successful exploration and extraction. From its gravity defying Hallelujah Mountains to the gigantic carnivorous thanator, Pandora poses continual dangers to RDA personnel. Included in this resource are highly confidential and detailed descriptions of RDA technology and weapons systems deployed to suppress the Na’vi and defend employees against the dangerous Pandoran environment.