This is not a review of James Cameron's Avatar. Rather, it is an acknowledgement that "Workers Leaving a Factory" is now showing at your local multiplex: the sticks have been moved, the torch has been passed, pick your metaphor, this is a game-changer for science fiction film. I saw it last night with my 10-year-old, and we were both totally engrossed for the entire 2:30 runtime.

The major tropes will be familiar to any Cameron fan: nature vs. technology, machines amplifying humans, love and death, big friendly weapons, image and reality, corporate greed, powerful women, re-inventing the "car" chase, exploring alien ecosystems, foregrounding bizarre mores (think of the Terminator learning to talk SoCal slang or Jack navigating the social world of the Titanic).

But at the same time, the approach is so audacious — if you see it in 3D, you will believe you are on another planet — that every other sf film will now feel like a 1960s Star Trek episode with a cyclorama and styrofoam rocks. The wholly CGI world of the fictional planet Pandora is immersive, persuasive, and so deeply actualized that the historical advantage of print sf writers (imagination is better than you can afford to make it look onscreen) is dead.

Most importantly, Avatar has a deep moral center. Anyone repulsed by the glib situational handiness of Aliens 3 or Terminator Salvation will recognize the genuine article here. The surface may be simple — it almost has to be, doesn't it, as a popular film — but the tendrils lead directly, insistently to the roots of the perpetual philosophy. While recognizing the ambiguity and conflictedness of human choice — sipping coffee while delivering death from above — Cameron pushes past to find a ground for ethical action in a post-mystical monism rooted in biochemistry (and not the half-assed handwave given to the Force). What if we truly behaved as if everything was connected?

Those who want to read the film as an allegory about America and Middle East (or the Cherokee nation) will not have to strain. But there are deft moves that subvert and add complexity. The Pandorans are not simply "the natives" up against the military-industrial complex; they are deeply us, America, situated where and when we are at this moment in our history. Without spoilers, this can clearly be read as a film about 9/11.

Also, without spoilers, I will say that those frame-by-framers who are familiar with the playground horses of the Apocalypse from T-2 will have a dark, dark chuckle.

Full disclosure: Anyone who thinks that was a Russian water tentacle, raise your hand.