Just got back from seeing Avatar with Chris, and wanted to share my thoughts on this movie that seems to be taking america by storm. I give it 5 out of 10 stars, for its impressive visuals. And they are impressive. James Cameron did a great job in that area. Chris and I saw it in 3D, which was...okay. It was my first 3D movie, and while at first the effect startled me a few times, it quickly became amost unnoticable and/or annoying. Also, there was some kind of artifact in the center of the screen, like a cloud of insects, that was visible whenever that part of the screen was light.
It was too long, the characters were one dimensional, the plot was predictable, and said plot had gaping holes.
On the characters, the bad guys were so obviously bad that I never even suspected that they might have changes of heart; while the good guys were so obviously good that I never really doubted they would lose. Even the nominally bad guy chick pilot was set up from the get go as a sheep in wolf's clothing.
As for plot predictability, there were no real surprises. Not a one. Oh, there were some visual surprises, but no plot plot surprises. Head Badass proves Too Tough To Die before The Final Duel; check. Scientists side with the natives, check. Lone outsider becomes part of the tribe, check. And so on and so forth.
Plot holes. James Cameron has a very broad imagination, but not a deep one. If he did he would have realized... Well, it was said in the movie that "The aliens were sent back to their dying world." The implication was that Humans had wrecked the Earth (natch). The thing is, a race capable of rapid interstellar travel (six year journey from Earth to Pandora, where there is an economically viable mining operation that exports back to Earth) would have no trouble at all engineering their world into a garden paradise. Terraforming the Earth, Mars and Venus would be trivial compared to travelling to even the nearest star. And any race capable of genetically engineering something like Human/Na'vi avatars could probably create from scratch any lifeform they needed back home. That's the biggest plot hole.
Others include: ever hear of shaft and drift mining? No need to bulldoze the native village, we'll just tunnel under it, and they'll never know we were there.
That deposit of unobtainium (that's what they actually called it) under the native village is the biggest within two hundred klicks, but is it the biggest on the whole planet?
Gotta destroy a native village or a secret sacred place? Send in the atmospheric flyers (so the natives have a chance). Or, how about a nuke, or maybe a kinetic strike (drop a rock on 'em from orbit)?
When telling a story, if a character or side is capable of doing something, either by explict description or by implication from other explict capabilities, then when it is appropriate or logical for the to do that thing, they'd better do or at least try it, or you better have a good explanation why they don't. James Cameron didn't.
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