<P> Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun - Times called the film "extraordinary" and gave it four stars out of four . "Watching Avatar, I felt sort of the same as when I saw Star Wars in 1977," he said, adding that like Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, the film "employs a new generation of special effects" and it "is not simply a sensational entertainment, although it is that . It's a technical breakthrough . It has a flat - out Green and anti-war message". A.O. Scott of At The Movies also compared his viewing of the film to the first time he viewed Star Wars and he said "although the script is a little bit...obvious," it was "part of what made it work". Todd McCarthy of Variety praised the film, saying "The King of the World sets his sights on creating another world entirely in Avatar, and it's very much a place worth visiting ." Kirk Honeycutt of The Hollywood Reporter gave the film a positive review . "The screen is alive with more action and the soundtrack pops with more robust music than any dozen sci - fi shoot -' em - ups you care to mention," he stated . Peter Travers of Rolling Stone awarded Avatar a three - and - a-half out of four star rating and wrote in his print review "It extends the possibilities of what movies can do . Cameron's talent may just be as big as his dreams ." Richard Corliss of Time magazine thought that the film was "the most vivid and convincing creation of a fantasy world ever seen in the history of moving pictures ." Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times thought the film has "powerful" visual accomplishments but "flat dialogue" and "obvious characterization". James Berardinelli of ReelViews praised the film and its story, giving it four out of four stars; he wrote "In 3 - D, it's immersive--but the traditional film elements--story, character, editing, theme, emotional resonance, etc.--are presented with sufficient expertise to make even the 2 - D version an engrossing 21⁄2 - hour experience ." </P> <P> Avatar's underlying social and political themes attracted attention . Armond White of the New York Press wrote that Cameron used "villainous American characters" to "misrepresent facets of militarism, capitalism, and imperialism". Russell D. Moore of The Christian Post concluded that "propaganda exists in the film" and stated "If you can get a theater full of people in Kentucky to stand and applaud the defeat of their country in war, then you've got some amazing special effects ." Some commentators sympathetic to anarcho - primitivism have even praised the film as a manifesto for their cause . Adam Cohen of The New York Times was more positive about the film, calling its anti-imperialist message "a 22nd - century version of the American colonists vs. the British, India vs. the Raj, or Latin America vs. United Fruit". Ross Douthat of The New York Times opined that the film is "Cameron's long apologia for pantheism...Hollywood's religion of choice for a generation now", while Saritha Prabhu of The Tennessean called the film a "misportrayal of pantheism and Eastern spirituality in general", and Maxim Osipov of The Hindustan Times, on the contrary, commended the film's message for its overall consistency with the teachings of Hinduism in the Bhagavad Gita . Annalee Newitz of io9 concluded that Avatar is another film that has the recurring "fantasy about race" whereby "some white guy" becomes the "most awesome" member of a non-white culture . Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune called Avatar "the season's ideological Rorschach blot", while Miranda Devine of The Sydney Morning Herald thought that "It (was) impossible to watch Avatar without being banged over the head with the director's ideological hammer ." Nidesh Lawtoo believed that an essential, yet less visible social theme that contributed to Avatar's success concerns contemporary fascinations with virtual avatars and "the transition from the world of reality to that of virtual reality .". </P> <P> Critics and audiences have cited similarities with other films, literature or media, describing the perceived connections in ways ranging from simple "borrowing" to outright plagiarism . Ty Burr of The Boston Globe called it "the same movie" as Dances with Wolves . Like Dances with Wolves, Avatar has been characterized as being a "white savior" movie, in which a "backwards" native people is impotent without the leadership of a member of the invading white culture . Parallels to the concept and use of an avatar are in Poul Anderson's 1957 novelette "Call Me Joe", in which a paralyzed man uses his mind from orbit to control an artificial body on Jupiter . Cinema audiences in Russia have noted that Avatar has elements in common with the 1960s Noon Universe novels by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, which are set in the 22nd century on a forested world called Pandora with a sentient indigenous species called the Nave . Various reviews have compared Avatar to the films FernGully: The Last Rainforest, Pocahontas and The Last Samurai . NPR's Morning Edition has compared the film to a montage of tropes, with one commentator stating that Avatar was made by "mixing a bunch of film scripts in a blender". Gary Westfahl wrote that "the science fiction story that most closely resembles Avatar has to be Ursula Le Guin's novella The Word for World Is Forest (1972), another epic about a benevolent race of alien beings who happily inhabit dense forests while living in harmony with nature until they are attacked and slaughtered by invading human soldiers who believe that the only good gook is a dead gook ." The science fiction writer and editor Gardner Dozois said that along with the Anderson and Le Guin stories, the "mash - up" included Alan Dean Foster's 1975 novel, Midworld . Some sources saw similarities to the artwork of Roger Dean, which featured fantastic images of floating rock formations and dragons . In 2013, Dean sued Cameron and Fox, claiming that Pandora was inspired by 14 of his images . Dean sought damages of $50 m . Dean's case was dismissed in 2014, and The Hollywood Reporter noted that Cameron has won multiple Avatar idea theft cases . </P> <P> Avatar received compliments from filmmakers, with Steven Spielberg praising it as "the most evocative and amazing science - fiction movie since Star Wars" and others calling it "audacious and awe inspiring", "master class", and "brilliant". Noted art director - turned - filmmaker Roger Christian is also a noted fan of the film . On the other hand, Duncan Jones said: "It's not in my top three James Cameron films...(A) t what point in the film did you have any doubt what was going to happen next?". For French filmmaker Luc Besson, Avatar opened the doors for him to now create an adaptation of the graphic novel series Valérian and Laureline that technologically supports the scope of its source material, with Besson even throwing his original script in the trash and redoing it after seeing the film . TIME ranked Avatar number 3 in their list of "The 10 Greatest Movies of the Millennium (Thus Far)" also earning it a spot on the magazine's All - TIME 100 list, and IGN listed Avatar as number 22 on their list of the top 25 Sci - Fi movies of all time . </P>

Who guides the entire process of making a movie from its initial planning to its release