Thoughts on James Cameron’s Avatar

Sorry, but the last Bourne movie I saw had no plot, same goes for the second transformers movie. And LOTR wasn't exactly a cheap movie to make either... And the Terminator series has a nice deep story about AI.

It is an action movie that was fun to go see. It was visually rich. It had an actual plot (that wasn't half bad!). While Transformers2 was written over a few weeks, it produced a movie that was stupid and confusing. Avatar has been in the making for the past sixteen years. There are a ton of details that were created and even if they were not shown in the final film. A full language, foliage, planetary physics, not to mention questions like am I a murderer if I kill your avatar when you are in it? And then of course is the technical aspect of the movie from being in 3D (and cameron's history of that), to the amount of CGI in the movie. Sounds like a pretty good movie to geek out on to me.

The most interesting thing as far as I'm concerned is the evolution we can see in Cameron's approach to the military industrial complex. In Aliens it is the corporation that is the malevolent organization. It manipulates the military to do its will, and while the military is dehumanizing and anti-feminist, at least the individual soldiers are morally neutral and somewhat sympathetic characters.

In Avatar we see a much more coercive and malevolent military organization which is inseparable from the corporation itself. Cameron has become much more cynical in his view of politics. And that is interesting on its own, even without going into all of the strange parallels the script draws between the two sides which imo undermine the claims that this is an unthinking film.

My generic answer tends to be, "If we expected more, we'd get better action movies."

My specific answer WRT Avatar is that the movie obviously aspires to be more: an eco-parable, opposing large organizations, whatever. Therefore it deserves at least some of the analysis it gets.

I disagree with you though if someone is pointing out how people might watch Avatar and get the wrong impression. Not that the movie shouldn't have been made or should not be watched, etc... but just that its interesting to note how people watching the movie might be thinking.

My wife and I have lots of friends who rave about Avatar. We know some people who called it "the best movie [they'd] ever seen". We saw it and were thoroughly disappointed as such.

As an action movie, it's fine and cool. As "the best movie ever", not even close.

Great link, btw.

Seriously, I really found it, if I "found" it, it would be on Scribd.

The movie could have been longer: afterwards, I misread the time, and literally thought it was only 1:42 long (not 2:42). I'd see a longer version, that setup motivations properly.

A conflict for me was that destroying the tree was a terrible act, but looked really cool.

Maybe it's because I was reading Xenocide (3rd in the Ender trilogy), but many of the ideas in the film seem to be in that book.