"It's Pretty"

Rating: 2/10 (13 February 2018)

It's been nearly 10 years since I saw this movie and I still use it as a benchmark for an absolute pile of garbage that gets undeserved praise.
When it came out and I railed against it, some of my friends would talk about how good it was and how it was just a popcorn flick and this and that.
So I asked them to name something good about the movie that didn't mention how good the graphics were. None of them, at any point, answered me. Every time I omitted the caveat about not mentioning how pretty it was, the first and only answer I got was that it was pretty.
It's an incredible tech demo, to be sure. Everything else is some of the worst, trite, or overused garbage I've ever seen. In almost every single shot there's either poor writing, poor characterization, poor acting, poor plotting, or poor motivation.
Here's a thing you may not have caught: All the characters have sex with their horses. When Jake Sully goes into his new body and starts playing with his tendril, he is told to stop playing with it or he'll go blind. A clear masturbation joke. Later, he sticks that into a horse. Everyone sticks their genitals in horses.
But no one thought about it because it's a dumb popcorn film that inexplicably took 15 years to write. You don't take 15 years to write Transformers. You take 15 years to write a movie that has something to say and that you think is well thought out.
Also, unobtanium is a terrible name for an element you clearly have obtained and can obtain. Unobtanium is an actual word though. It's a word meaning a substance that doesn't exist, but would be the proper material for an application. It means the opposite of how it's used in the movie.
Fifteen years of planning and you ended up writing Pocahontas. People say it's Fern Gully, but think about it. Every plot point is lifted from Pocahontas. The natives even talk to a tree. Even accidental things, like the fact that the main white person in both movies have four letter first names and five letter last names and their initials are J.S. made me go "Even when you tried not to be Pocahontas, you ended up being Pocahontas."
Fifteen years and the poisonous atmosphere can sometimes be breathed in, so long as they're in a helicopter with an open door and not in danger because of plot. Fifteen years of writing and there's only one guard to protect against everyone in the military jail (and no one guarding the hangars... and no one on the way to the hangars).
Every aspect of the film outside of the animation is a baffling mess. Everything.