I guarantee that you’ve heard the hype.

I was going to warn about spoilers, but it’s not really possible to spoil this movie, for two reasons. First, the story is entirely predictable, from front to back, inside out, upside down and backward.  Second, this is a powerful film, and its power comes from the visual impact, not from the story, and so even if I were to lay the script out for you word for word, you would still be astonished by what you saw on the screen.

This is just as well, because here are no surprises here, no insights to be gained. This is both the movie’s strength, and its weakness. That you can not worry about the plot holes that appear, that you can let go of critical function and just enjoy the stunning visuals, these are strengths. After you leave the theatre, though, if you are a thinking person you may start to wonder about the message of the film, and this is the film’s failing.

I will start with the visuals. Director James Cameron has taken what Peter Jackson started with Lord of the Rings and Gollum, which is to take a digital creation and make it appear real, to its logical conclusion, which is to do the same with an entire digital world. In Avatar, this works. We have reached the point where it is possible to create an entire digital world that, onscreen anyway, cannot be distinguished from a real one. Oh, sure, if you wanted to get really picky there are parts of the Avatarian world of Pandora that betray its virtuality: shadows aren’t deep enough, for example. You can see too much detail in them. And there are one or two spots where the virtual pseudo-humans stand out a little too strongly from the background, the better to make a perfect photographic composition.

Such little tatters are not easily seen, though, particularly because the visuals are so goddam rich and overwhelming. Cameron pulled out all the stops: giant trees (I estimate 1500-2000 feet), floating mountains, giant carnivores, crystal waters, impossible waterfalls, dragons and dinosaurs.

And elves. Part of the beauty of Avatar is the physical beauty of the Navi themselves. That they somehow wind up looking like elven supermodels in blue paint should not escape our attention. The Navi are human, or rather wish-fulfilment superhumans, taller, thinner, wiser, with less body hair. They have enormous eyes without cosmetics. They have even white teeth with pronounced canines without dental surgery. They are hairless without plucking, except for long, luxuriant crown hair, some of which contains a sort of natural ethernet cable, and not a $500, 8-hour weave in sight. They are liberated, emancipated, uplifted… and no one is marginalized. All have a right to speak. They are, in short, the modern western female’s ideal society.

They live, like Keebler elves, in a giant tree. They worship at other trees which glow with soft whiteness in the night. You might be forgiven for thinking that you had landed in Lothlorien, Galadriel’s domain in Lord of the Rings. This illusion would not last long, though, for against the richness and power of the story in Lord of the Rings, and the mystery and complex malice of its great Evil, the mundane and stupid Evil in Avatar will not stand.

Every character in Avatar is at least a bit shallow – the only interesting ones are Grace, the chief scientist (Sigourney Weaver) and Jake, the protagonist. Even Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) is less interesting than she should be. But the Evil ones are the least interesting of all, cardboard cartoons, broad slapstick caricatures of stereotypes. And yes, that isn’t a redundant statement. The main baddie, known only as ‘The Colonel’, would be right at home in one of those godawful GI Joe cartoons that used to pollute the Saturday morning airwaves.

There is visual contrast, as well, to the Navi. The human actors in the movie are, almost without exception, not the standard Hollywood beauties. The marines look like real marines, not like the usual film collection of cleancut, handsome soldiers. The Colonel, played with scene-chewing maniacal vigor by Stephen Lang, is not so much goodlooking as he is relentlessly powerful.

I said you couldn’t spoil this movie. Everything that is supposed to happen does. The people who are supposed to fall in love do, the people who are supposed to be saved are, the tragically beautiful people who must die do, the world is saved, and a man is redeemed.

That his crime was not really a crime because of the way Cameron set up the opposing sides, because the script was such that it was obvious from the first that this is what he would do and it wouldn’t be out of any sort of personal volition but rather out of service to the script, well, the stunning visual impact of the film covers all that up.

Until you sit and think about it for a bit.

Nevertheless, I think you should see this movie. I don’t think this movie will be a Great Movie – I think, like Dances With Wolves, time will reveal its shallow pretensions, its feelgood new romanticism, but it is the future of moviemaking. It is a visual feast that is not to be missed. See it in the theatre in 3D. It is worth the money.

I used to play a lot of computer games, but in the last ten years I haven’t played much. The

• I haven’t been willing to invest the money in a gaming-class machine. We live in a smallish townhouse and I use a laptop, both for portability reasons and for reasons of easy storage. A cutting edge gaming class laptop runs into serious money.
• I don’t have time. I have other things that are more important, such as work, which has been cutting a swath through my disposable time the last four years, and writing.
• The games I have tried have not held my interest. I bought Civilization IV a while ago, played it, but it never really caught on with me. I played Perfect World for a while, but it got repetitive and dull when I reached and I was still killing the same odd-shaped blobs, just with different names and colours. I played Evony for a while, but that game pretty much requires being online 24/7, which isn’t an option. The little flash games on BubbleBox are fun for an hour or two, but they are too shallow.

I enjoy the MMORG format, or at least I did in the past. I started playing MMORGs when they were known as MUDs. My first MUD was Rivers of Mud, one of the legendary Merc MUDs. It was text-based and fun.

As previously mentioned, I tried World of Warcraft but gave up due to two serious crashes in a week.

So then the other morning I did some research looking for an MMORG that was interesting, but whose hardware requirements weren’t too high. After a while I came to the conclusion that such a thing doesn’t exist. Then I remembered reading about a new game that was due for release… T something. Torch something…

Torchlight.

It is not an MMORG. Not yet. But it was $20, and the press and lineage of the game seemed interesting, so I bought it.

I haven’t had so much fun playing a game in at least 10 years. Torchlight is probably the hackiest and slashiest of any game I’ve ever played, but it is fun. Fun to wade into a room filled with baddies and have them all fall to your mighty blade.

The game is visually beautiful. Rather than attempt to make it photorealistic, with the attendant hardware strain, Relic chose to use stylized cartoony sorts of characters. The bottleneck for my laptop is the video, and this new game actually runs fairly smoothly on my machine, which is two years old using Intel onboard video.

The world is a fantasy one with intriguing steampunk overtones. There are zillions of baddies and tons of loot, and mayhem is serious fun.

Did I mention that Torchlight is fun? The interface is simple. You can get active and killing without pressing any keys other than to type in the character name.

Very well done, Relic. There is an MMORG coming, and I can’t wait. Torchlight is the best $20 I’ve ever spent.