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Golden Globes 2010 – Best Motion Picture -Drama. RELEASE DATE: December 18, 2009. MOVIE TITLE: Avatar. STUDIO: 20th Century Fox. PLOT: In the future, Jake, a paraplegic war veteran, is brought to another planet, Pandora, which is inhabited by the Na’vi, a humanoid race with their own language and culture. Those from Earth find themselves at odds with each other and the local culture. PICTURED: A Na’vi warrior races into battle on a Thanator, a fearsome panther-like creature native to Pandora (Newscom TagID: zumawireworldphotostwo886176) [Photo via Newscom]

It might be against your will and better judgment, you might deny it in public, act all dismissive, downplay the whole thing, or lie, but when you take off those 3D glasses and walk out of that movie theater, you’ll know in your heart that you love Avatar.

Avatar, in a way, is like the porn industry. It has something for everybody. Clocking in at two hours and 40 minutes, it has enough time to accommodate every moviegoer’s personal taste and dabble in most movie genres known to mankind. There’s a love story that evolves along the same lines as any romantic comedy, and action sequences, explosions and other special effects that outperform and one-up anything that came before. Then there’s the built-in, scathing social commentary with direct parallels to our own reality paired with enough science fiction twists to satisfy the hungriest of enthusiasts. The stunning visuals and happy ending top it all off, making this movie an all-encompassing crowd pleaser.

There are no award worthy performances from the actors here, though they all certainly look fabulous throughout the entire thing. The characters fit snugly in the old, familiar cookie cutters. There is the unlikely hero, a couple of greedy villains, a scientist realizing that lowbrow fellows can be quite intelligent, a smoking hot girl with brains, too, and a magical native population with a weird language and a better concept of what life’s truly all about.

Sure, the plot manages to borrow, echo and poach ideas from Dances with Wolves, Last of the Mohicans, Pocahontas, Lawrence of Arabia, Wizard of Oz and a million other movies. And yes, the message is old, the lesson is tired, and Avatar really doesn’t have anything original to say. But you won’t notice any of this until you leave the theater because the 3D technology is so mind-blowing, you might temporarily lose your natural cynicism and forget your general dislike for anything favored by the masses.

Despite of its countless flaws, this movie is not just another story of man versus nature versus machine. It is not another cautionary tale about colonialism, or the same old saga of an unlikely love conquering all odds. Rather, Avatar is the ultimate culmination of all of these things put together. It’s a mash-up of every epic movie from this century and the last one. Almost every notion that ever made a human heart quiver is present in this movie. It is a meal made with well-worn clichés for ingredients, and, although you might resist at first, you are going to eat it up like ice cream and ask for more.

To sum up, Avatar has so much going for it in the visual department that even for the biggest skeptic and the most jaded of movie buffs, nothing else matters. This movie would probably be just as successful if it had the plot of a Teletubbies episode. Go ahead and let you expectations skyrocket. You will not be disappointed.