Review Detail

While the film is still far from perfect in my eyes, the efforts of Ninja-Trix make for a far more watchable time than I anticipated, the lack of frequent narration (perhaps counter-intuitively) giving a more introspective feeling than what I remember from last watching the original theatrical version on TV over ten years ago.

Using the extended collector’s edition as a base with minimal deletions and more deleted scenes did concern me at first, but on watching I found that I didn’t feel the length as much as I expected, the extra material fleshing out the story rather than bloating it. The tale of Grace’s school fills a hole in the original regarding what the Avatar program was trying to achieve (outside of Selfridge’s brief speech), and I can definitely relate to the newly-restored scene of Jake having breakfast with the scientists and looking like he’d rather be anywhere else!

While I think that certain parts (present this edit and all the official versions) could be either trimmed further or removed completely, in the meantime this is the definitive cut for me. The additional editing is seamless, the image appears as good as that of my blu-ray copy (barring the unavoidable drop in quality with the deleted scenes) and the stereo-only audio doesn’t bother me at all since I don’t have a surround sound system!