The top-grossing film of all time — earning twice at the worldwide box office as any movie but Titanic — was also the first picture to justify the 3-D trend. For James Cameron’s film does what fantasy is supposed to do: create a total environmental experience. Viewers don’t just visit the Pandora rain forest; like the movie’s paraplegic hero Jake, they find their legs and are quickly at home there. And then they fly, like Peter Pan’s lost boys, through a luscious landscape guided by a Pandoran princess. (Some saw Avatar as a free-form remake of Pocahontas, though its real source was A Princess of Mars, the same Edgar Rice Burroughs novel that Andrew Stanton officially remade as John Carter.) Conservatives may have decried the tree-hugger sentiments in a war movie where U.S. soldiers are the enemy, and liberals may have wondered why the white American Jake should be the savior of the physically and ethically superior blue Pandorans. But for a sensational, seductive movie immersion, Avatar has it all over Cameron’s previous blockbuster. This one really is titanic.