The critics universally praise James Cameron's visual spectacle, but what do they think of the rest?

The third Friday in August was dubbed "Avatar Day," when director James Cameron unleashed 16
minutes of 3-D-infused footage from his sci-fi opus in theaters across the globe for free. So what do you call December 18, the day that Cameron's alien love story actually opens in theaters?

It's D-Day for Cameron, that's for certain, as he'll finally get to see if the public will, in fact, fork over tens of millions of dollars to see the CGI film he's been planning since the mid-'90s. The critics certainly seem to be in favor of it. When we checked in on the reviews last week, "Avatar" had received near-unanimous praise. On Friday, we again scoured the critical responses to find out what everyone's saying.

The Visual Effects

You'd be hard-pressed to find someone unimpressed by the computer-generated coolness of the film. "An extraordinary act of visual imagination, 'Avatar' is not the first of the new generation of 3-D films, just as 'Jazz Singer' was not the first time people had spoken on screen," the Los Angeles Times' Kenneth Turan wrote. "But like the Al Jolson vehicle, it's the one that's going to energize audiences about the full potential of this medium. That's because to see 'Avatar' is to feel like you understand filmmaking in three dimensions for the first time. In Cameron's hands, 3-D is not the forced gimmick it's often been, but a way to create an alternate reality and insert us so completely and seamlessly into it that we feel like we've actually been there, not watched it on a screen."

The Story

What many critics can agree on is that…

More of the reviews,
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