(A review of James Cameron's latest)

Maybe we should expect spiritual outrageousness from Hollywood by now. After all, they hardly seem to be able to make a spiritual statement in their movies without alienating every Christian in the audience. They have been warned about this before. Michael Medved has stated that Hollywood loses billions of dollars simply by offending Christians and church-goers, who number in the hundreds of millions in America. They often don't seem to care.

But Avatar takes this to a new extreme. Many critics have commented that it has a deeply pro-environmentalist message, and indeed, it seems almost loaded with every touchy-feely New Age environmentalist theme that you can imagine....

It always strikes me as sad when these great breakthroughs in the arts fail to glorify the One who gave us creativity in the first place. Sadly, this is one of those times, and I understand that is why, even after the awe and wonder of seeing one of the greatest visual spectacles of our age, my friend left the theatre feeling pretty flat. I wonder how many others felt the same - even non-Christians. I wonder how many left sensing there was something very wrong at the core of this story. I would guess there might be quite a few.

There have been a lot of complaints about the storyline. Even many non-Christians may not like seeing the "Earth mother goddess" getting all the glory, which is why I gather that this movie will never take top spot as the most-watched film in history, despite all the money spent on it.

Will Hollywood learn its lesson? I strongly doubt it. Hollywood has a very unique agenda and thousands are taken in and deceived.

Will I go and see it for myself? Probably not!