Wait, what? Avatar is good?

We left so many things behind in 2009 – Meghan Trainor, Obama, hope. I thought Avatar (sorry, ‘‘James Cameron’s Avatar’’) should be one more. How wrong I was. I attended a 3-D preview screening of Avatar’s 4K HDR restoration in an Imax this week, with the same level of anticipation usually reserved for a root canal.

The idea of a ‘‘new and improved’’ Cameron film is slightly absurd – this is already the biggest man in motion pictures, the one willing to bankrupt his studio to achieve the pixel count he needs.

And yet there’s a saying in Hollywood that you should never bet against James Cameron.

Nonetheless, filing into the gargantuan Imax cinema, wearing my Elton John-like 3-D glasses, for what I had remembered as a vomit-inducing spectacle written by trigger-happy industry plants for the United States military, held little appeal.

As Cameron tools away on several Avatar sequels in Wellington, I have groaned at the thought of billionaires like him and Sir Peter Jackson divvying up the capital like their personal Monopoly board.

No fan of the film 13 years ago – the ‘‘Pocahontas in space’’ epic that it was – I cheered when Cameron’s ex-wife Kathryn Bigelow won Best Director at the Oscars for The Hurt Locker over him that year.

The film’s shallow critique of colonialism, with 2-D characters in 3-D settings, made me so uneasy.

The native’s love for the white man who arrives to fanfare, and, Messiah-like, delivers them to salvation – so far, so Dances with Wolves.

Before attending the special screening, I had watched the newly-restored Avatar trailer where the planet Pandora, with enough moons to keep Mercury permanently in retrograde, still looked like the Fraggle Rock-in-space episode I had remembered.

Then, 30 minutes into this screening, arriving onto Pandora again, something happened to me.

A most unexpected, unlikely thing. I started to love Avatar, in all its exquisite, HDR detail (I could even see which Na’vi were in need of microdermabrasion).

The devil works hard, but James Cameron works harder. Using every million of his budget and every We¯ ta¯ FX worker in the world, Cameron has crafted an altogether new film.

I was embarrassed the first time it made me gasp, not wanting to admit that a certain chase scene had duped me, had given me a shuddering sense of real danger.

The dialogue is still mostly execrable, sounding like the between-scenes in Call of Duty: Far-off Planet.

But the immersive depth of the screen, the pointillistic detailing of floating landscapes and birds in flight, approaches something close to splendour.

After an anaemic diet of Marvel re-quels, sequels, reboots, the world-building on display in Avatar had me awestruck, the character design and effects putting the ‘‘spectacle’’ in ‘‘spectacular’’.

As you peer through every Koru-shaped plant, or swan-dive between the warring spaceships, the new effects give a new sense of perspective; and with that perspective, a sense of wonder.

I wanted to file into the helicopter cockpit alongside Sigourney Weaver, the sunsets of Pandora’s moons shimmering above us in glorious 4K.

I wanted to hold my breath while leaping, Tarzan-style, between the spindly branches as the sound design prickles my ears with dinosaurs roaring beneath me.

I wanted, of course, to see Giovanni Ribisi play the corporate asshole-type that Giovanni Ribisi always plays, on a screen more vast than his own ego.

There is a new freewheeling feel to the film; we were all promised virtual reality in the 90s, and while that technology never materialised, James Cameron’s Avatar offers something quite close.

Zoe Saldana’s performance in particular is strong enough to break free from CGI – she allows you to forget that you are watching someone in motion-capture.

She creates a distance between the performance itself and the layers of CGI masking it, allowing you to perceive the heart of the character underneath.

The rest of the cast are not so lucky, especially Sigourney Weaver, who, every time she appeared as a blue Na’vi character, was about as convincing as the cover of an Animorphs book, and Sam Worthington, who appears to have studied at the same accent kindergarten as Nicole Kidman.

Watching the new Avatar 3-D, I was reminded of the Ship of Theseus paradox: the question posed by the Ancient Greeks that, if you gradually replaced the structure of a ship, piece by piece, during the voyage, at what part does it become a new ship?

This Avatar, replaced pixel-by-pixel, is new – and it might embed itself more deeply into public consciousness than the 2009 release ever managed to.

Unlike Cameron’s classic Titanic, Avatar is not a film that people re-watch, reference and revere to the same extent.

But from December, the world of Avatar is orbiting back into view. Thirteen years after Cameron stormed the Oscars, it’s the greatest show off-earth – and, with four sequels planned, it’s about to go on forever.

‘‘I was a little nervous before we started the process that it wouldn’t hold up, because there are so many big effects movies out there these days,’’ Cameron told film site IGN.

‘‘But I’m not nervous now. . . I was a bit shocked at how good it looks.’’

The restoration is impressive – but the question is whether it’s impressive enough to draw audiences back in (a 13-year delay is many moons in the Pandora calendar).

But for now, my struggle has finished. Cameron has won the victory over me. I loved Avatar.

Now, when is the 4K HDR restoration of Titanic due out? I need to see the sequel, where Jack flips Rose off of that bloody wooden float.

Jonny Mahon-heap is a culture writer based in Auckland and, previously, a lifelong cynic of all things James Cameron.

Avatar (M) is screening now for a limited time. Avatar: The Way of Water is scheduled for release in December.