Avatar - Old Ideas Combined

Rating: 8/10 (12 April 2010)

My thoughts on Avatar are that it is "Ferngully" combined with "Dances With Wolves" (DWW). It's still mostly a comic book though. I found quite a number of faulty plot elements, the "flux vortex" is just bizarre, I have no idea what that is or why it would lead to "floating mountains." I even found some ideas from the old "Barsoom" series (John Carter - Warlord of Mars) by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Not that I didn't like it, visually, it was a treat, but I'm not going to let "Bling" overpower my sense that there were some faulty plot elements, and some silly dialog.
I liked the idea of telling the story from Jake's point of view. As he learned what was happening, so did we. There's not much sense of transition from human to alien though, just one video log he announces "I don't know who I am anymore." Probably a lot of film got cut to make it to 2.75 hrs running time, so I guess that some of the missing stuff is on the editor's floor (so to speak).
I found so much of the plot and so forth came from an animated flick of the last generation - Ferngully - that I just kept expecting Batty-Koda to come flying out with Robin William's voice to announce that "We're DOOMED!" Silly, I know, but much of the visual imagery derives directly from Ferngully. The John Dunbar parallels of the film (DWW) are so obvious as to be monotone. We've seen this theme before, evil corporate empire desires to exploit and displace natives to get at "Unobtainium." Was that name for real? Who the heck thought that up? Did they hold a 2nd grade challenge to come up with that one? Overall, Avatar's just one step ahead of a comic book in my opinion. Cheap Sci-Fi stuff of the 1930's, redone with some modern technology. Thus, it gets just ahead of a "B" movie with an 8/10 rating.