Updated!
Avatar stunk to high-hell. If it weren't for Cameron's Abyss, Aliens and T2, this movie would be derided, lampooned and called out for the pile of festering caramelized feculent slime that it is.
This movie is rife with terrible acting, horrific dialogue, and its 'message' is delivered through constant abuse of moral hazards. We have moral relativism, betrayal and treason being perpetrated for the greater good. The greater good of course being subjective so a movie like this promulgates the idea that all crimes against any state or authoritative entity are justifiable.
This was a 3D wrapped celluloid that without the stunning (yet stupid looking, e.g., blue-cat-deer-women with human breasts) visuals would, especially in novel form, be a bloody laughing stock.
The aliens stunk horribly. What's with the talking bi-peds with two eyes, a nose and a mouth. Has it ever occurred to these so called "creative" people that new life might be a colony of nano-bots, a slime mold with group intelligence, life that aspirates with copper based blood, non-DNA self replicating life forms? Why is everything a blue monkey with breasts? At least in 1969 when Star Trek was populated with "old-form" Klingons that looked like a bronzed human they were on a near-zero budget, but at least they were totally re-defining sci-fi and giving a window into the future. Also of note in this mediocrity contests, gravity on Pandora is for everything but the floating rocks? The physics, weaponry, strategy of the military and the plausibility of the whole thing is beyond fantasy, its moronic and so implausible that its distracting and ridiculous. No, this isn't Blade Runner, Terminator, BSG, Star Trek. This is like getting crystal-skull-raped.
Crap like Avatar, especially after T2, Star Trek, Star Wars (Ep 4,5 only), is shocking. Its showing that Cameron is a master of marketing mass subscribed explosion fests laced with politically motivated parables and drivel and sub-themed with nothing intellectual because there is nothing beyond the visual veneer, it is fundamentally puerile trash that's been hussied up to look like way more than it actually is. It is trash which is the opiates of the McDonald's eating masses.
Anyone who defends this movie is simply a below average or nearly average mind that can't see past visuals that are no more complex of a stimulus than a piece of string is as a cat toy. They are incapable of rational or critical thought and are very likely a wage slave heavily in debt working towards no particular end, lost in life, and movies like this are a form of escapism where they "want to believe" and become immersed in something because their own lives are basically mundane, insignificant and unimportant.
Moral hazards. Identity politics. Thinly veiled political positions. Preaching to the customer/consumer/viewer. Moral relativism. Severe lack of plot, dialogue and finally acting capability.
This is a turning point for the world. It is showing how things that stimulate basal sensory centers in the simplistic human mind lead the herd into mindless oblivion.
The Navi are flawless, they have no strata in their society or any inter-tribal strife. This in and of itself is unrealistic. The bad guys here are 100% bad, and have no capacity for rational thinking or empathy, except scientists in white coats, they have all the wisdom, empathy and intelligence and are always right. The characters were utterly simplistic, like toys and images made for pre-verbal children. Its like having tele-tubbies broadcast in massively expensive exquisite 3D where every frame is lovingly crafted to present to you some of the flattest, most uninspiring characters ever created.
This movie is clearly well below average, if you liked it you are the reason Hollywood is cranking out garbage these days. This man spent 10 times what District 9 costs and made a movie far worse, (not that District9 was any benchmark or the cat's meow), and this huge budget could have given 10 directors a shot at making something good. No wonder Linda Hamilton divorced this drunken train wreck of a truck driver idiot Cameron.
The movie itself is a total sham. The message people walk away from is: down with the evil empire, down with the mercenaries, down with planet destroying mining and down with …. (list goes on)
So it takes a crippled jar head to save the Navi because they are too stupid or incompetent to do this for themselves? That seems rather insulting of the noble savage. Since when to bows and arrows bounce off of glass in one part and then start "working" in the next part? So Cameron exposes corporatism by marketing his movie with McDonalds? So people who have access to a neural network biological super computer are meant to be clueless idiots? Did anyone ever note that Jake Sully lead the Navi into a total disaster. They totally lost the fight. And just when the battle needed winning the biological computer (which was supposedly only interested in maintaining balance and not interfering) somehow sends in the rhino creatures for the win. Even though the rhino creatures arent linked in. So Jake Sully, without the pathetic plot device of God stepping in and saving the day, was going to completely destroy this noble savage society. And most of the efficacy of the attack was due to his detailed plans he fed to the mercenaries. It would seem this is an added insult to the noble savages they are too dumb to see an enemy in Jake Sully. Why do all the noble savage natives gyrate around the tree of glowing idiocy? Other noble savages in history have performed vivisection, human sacrifice, cannibalism, self mutilation and self flagellation - so are we to assume these blue fools are doing just gyration and none of the other reprehensible behavior or are these savages?
A large number of the scenes involve idiot level interaction with the planet flora and fauna. A large portion of this movie was dedicated to "getting to know Pandora," through clumsy interactions with the animals. Lots of grunting, snorting and idiot displays of animals that are identical to various living earth creatures and dinosaurs with an extra leg here, a hammer-head shark nose put on a rhino, and other totally idiotic modifications to existing earth creatures to make them aliens. An extra eye here or there, a nasal sail on the big red pterodactyl (sails were often used to help cool blood so a small nasal sail would not be effective, also, the sail was shown to be bone which would make the sail ineffective and add unnecessary weight to a flying creature). The ion-sail spaceship can't reach the speed of light, and even if it got to relativistic speeds (0.94c and up), it would require that as much of the journey is spent decelerating as accelerating. This rules out a 5 year journey to Alpha Centurai. Did you notice the Navi are basically double-sized humans (I hope they have a greatly improved vascular system or two hearts), with biceps, triceps gluts quadriceps like humans evolved on earth. But they have cat eyes, deer ears and a stupid nose. And they have 100% carbon copy human feet. I guess this is the most efficient foot design for bi-peds? Probably not, especially if they spent any significant time in trees, they would have feet that were better at gripping than transferring force across an area. Again, Cameron's juvenile imagination is pathetic. A magnetic field strong enough to levitate mountains would probably do a whole lot more than just mess with instruments. It would *certainly* prevent remote communication with an Avatar body. By the way, where is the bio-mechanical interface for receiving and transmitting input output from/to the Avatar from the control stations? Oh yeah, and latency isn't an issue here? Also, a planet wide brain would not function well as the latency (especially in terms of biological electrical signal propagation) would really make such a large single brain model impossible. More likely it would have multiple brains interlinked (there are jellyfish that have multiple shared brains). I would doubt that the large brain would function, or the distributed brain model would be very intelligent at all. I also wonder how a planet with an air atmosphere thick enough to allow helicopters to operate would likely not have a gravity substantially different from 9.8ms2. The magnetosphere and gravity required for an atmosphere requires a magnetic dynamo mechanism to keep the atmosphere from being blown away and smaller planets, like mars, lose atmosphere very quickly. Especially in the radiation-wind of a gas giant. Also, the proximity to a gas giant is likely to cause tidal locking and prevent rotation relative to the gas giant (which, given the solar system's gas giant and its distance from the star would cause massive changes in environment, and gas giants emit quite a bit of radiation, and using the sol model, this would likely make the bulk of the thermal inputs coming from the gas giant) and expose moons like Pandora to likely fatal cyclotron radiation. Also gas giants compress via the Kelvin–Helmholtz mechanism , and given the geological time scales required for live to evolve, they radiation output and thermal outputs of the gas giant would change too quickly. Also, the gas giant as depicted in the movie was rotating impossibly fast.
Cameron has one theme potentially right in his films. Until the humans are smart enough to stop paying for complete drivel like Avatar, the society will degrade into a dystopian idocracy. The only complaint I have with this vision is people dumb enough to keep putting up with this trash won't be capable of interstellar travel.
This block-bustering famous director / famous actor garbage has to stop.
