How does James Cameron top a movie like Titanic? Most directors would have died happy following the unprecedented success of the Leonardo di Caprio and Kate Winslett partnership on the sinking ship.
Not Cameron.
He comes back with the even bigger Avatar.
Just as Titanic was the ultimate love story movie, with love conquering the divide between the haves and the have nots, so Avatar is the quintessential anti-war movie to end all war movies.
Not only is it cinematically a breakthrough movie, with its 3D effects and stunning graphics, but its treatment of colonialisation as a corollary of greed must put the seal for good on "war for profit" initiatives in the future.
Avatar is a brilliant evocation of the ethical dilemma that has plagued unscrupulous men in power for centuries: how to disguise war as a force for good, when more often than not it is a force for self-enrichment.
Whether the movie is seen as a metaphor for the European colonisation of native America, Vietnam or even the more recent war in Iraq, the question is the same; what right does one culture have to challenge another in the name of political or capital gain? Surely the Vatican has nothing to fear from this movie.
The tree-hugging is not the main point.
The divide here is not between God worship and nature worship, but between caring for our created world and not caring for it, respecting our neighbours and not respecting them.
Surely all right thinking Christians would align themselves with the former.
The ethical drive behind Avatar is not to promote some kind of New Age spiritualism, but to condemn the greed which destroys the goodness of creation.
Again love conquers all at the end, like Titanic, but in this movie love also becomes the driver that harnesses the positive energy of nature against the jarring modern technology of the invading earth people.
Happily, in movieland, nature can win, and we leave the theatre with a rosy glow.
Reality is not quite so comforting, I fear.
The paradise setting, the tree of life, the fall from grace as a result of alien corruption, the gathering for worship and prayer are all scriptural themes, and James Cameron has managed to turn profound and universal images into an edge of the seat adventure.
The more we can attack power-mongering through brilliant art like this, the greater will be the growth in consciousness among ordinary people, which in the end is the only defence we have.
Great directors like Cameron deserve credit not just for entertaining us, but for showing us how things really work in life.