After seeing Avatar 7 times, I believe that my view on the movie will be reliable. The film, in my mind, is still the best I’ve ever seen. Though this is a truth, I have realized a couple of things. Here is my journey to finding the reasoning behind my Avatar-loving.

When I went to see Avatar the 2-5 times, I thought the same thing o’er and o’er: That was amazing. I thought this simply because of the first time I saw it still rubbing its awesomeness off on me. Then I got to thinking: Is Avatar really that good that I would spend nearly three hours in a theater five times seeing it? I saw it another two times to determine this, and thought the same thing as I did about the first time.

Now, when people say that first impressions are everything, they’re not kidding. It makes a huge difference in the field of movies. For this same reason, I refuse to see Contact, a movie that I’ve been ridiculed for disliking, but I hated it the first time I saw it, and so I never saw it again with a strict point of view.

That being said, some movies grow on you. I didn’t like Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line or The New World until I saw them both multiple times, along with all of Terry Gilliam’s films, such as Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Twelve Monkeys.

But there was something different about Avatar; it was just too gnarley of a movie to rate lower than “the best.” I traced the steps of my love for this movie back to the first time I saw it , which was the midnight screening of it in Atlanta, December 18. Now, I attend school, which I get to at around 7:50, so I wake up around 6:30 to start my day. When I saw Avatar at the midnight screening, I had been awake for 20 hours, which made me have the feeling of a .08 blood alcohol level. That means that my brain was making me feel like I was legally drunk.

I went into the movie, which ended somewhere around 3:00 because of some malfunctions with the previews, which we apparently HAD to watch before we could see Avatar. By 3:00, I had been awake for 23 hours, which means that I had been in the “legally drunk” state of mind for three hours. When the movie was over, I went outside with my brother, who had come to see it with me, where I looked over at him and said “holy shit.” The reason: It was either between my mind being drunk or my personal opinion. I decided it was both, though it was a mutual choice.

I ended up staying up because the movie was too, as I like to put it, gnarley, and arrived at school with a 27 1/2 hour sleep deprivation. To say the least, I thought that the movie was amazing, and HAD to see it again.

I looked at this moment in a narrative perspective, and eventually found that if I hadn’t been legally drunk in the mind, I may not have been so amazed by Avatar. Though I admit this now, I still, to reiterate, think that Avatar is the best movie in history, be it a rip of Poul Johnson’s “Call Me Joe.”

So I bid the 2009 year in movies adieu, and hope for a great film season in 2010. Good hunting, movie fans.

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