I see you.

Okay, so I was the last per­son on Earth to finally watch James Cameron’s lat­est ultra-hyped up sci-fi, Avatar.

And doesn’t get as clichéd as this — Avatar was indeed a spec­tac­u­lar mas­ter­piece. I walked out of the the­aters com­pletely blown away by the painstak­ingly CGI-ed planet of Pan­dora down to every lively leaf, twig, blade and feather of that breath­tak­ingly pic­turesque land­scape of a trop­i­cal planet.

When I ini­tially saw the trail­ers, Avatar gave me the impres­sion of yet another CGI-overloaded sci-fi filled with blue alien crea­tures in war with humans. But boy was I wrong. Avatar’s Pan­dora wasn’t a world that was cre­ated overnight, rather, every insect, crea­ture, plant and Na’vi syl­la­ble felt as real as it could fic­tion­ally be.

Granted, Avatar’s sto­ry­line might not be as orig­i­nal — the younger of us might be reminded of a hand­ful of white-turned-native-leader movies such as Disney’s Poc­a­hon­tas and even the Tom Cruise-starring The Last Samu­rai. But Avatar excels at tak­ing such a story to a whole new immer­sive expe­ri­ence. Which also explains why Avatar absolutely has to be watched in 3D.

Per­haps it was the lack­lus­ter CGI (and weak sto­ry­line) we’ve con­di­tioned our­selves to in 2012 that made Avatar so much more appeal­ing. Or not. Maybe the­ater is all about the expe­ri­ence. Throw us a famil­iar story (although to Cameron’s credit — greatly refined and scifi-ed) por­trayed on a visu­ally stun­ning can­vas like no other, everyone’s bound to enjoy it.

Nonethe­less, Avatar suc­ceeds as a tech­ni­cally impres­sive, breath­tak­ing and emo­tion­ally over­whelm­ing movie that does a good job at clos­ing the decade’s movie indus­try in a high note. Cou­pled with James Horner’s epic score that impec­ca­bly com­pli­ments the whole Pan­dorean expe­ri­ence, Avatar will be remem­bered along with The Dark Knight, as one of finest movies of the 2000’s.