Awesome CGI, Mediocre Plot, Bland Characters

Rating: 6/10 (31 March 2011)

Avatar was an unbelievable film in terms of it's CGI. The planet of Pandora looked truly amazing and are arguably the best of all time. Other than that though, the movie wasn't all that impressive. Typically I'm a big fan of Cameron, Terminator & Terminator 2 are a few of my favorite movies, Aliens is as well so I was rather let down by the storyline in this movie. It was your typical capitalism bad/native way of life good mixed with a clash of cultures romance. Essentially a crippled Marine named Jake Sully gets sent to a planet on the dime of some greedy corporation. The planet is populated by a bunch of space indians. He is then given control over a Na'vi(space Indian), which is a giant blue humanoid creature, via genetic engineering. He then comes to realize that, gasp, the corporation is greedy and wants to harvest unobtainium(and yes it's really hard to mine it's almost unobtainable) at whatever cost. The greedy corporation hires a bunch of former Marines as mercs to ensure that they are protected from these space indians. Well as the movie progresses Jake starts to feel bad about these indians and falls in love with one of them. After he discovers a plan in which the Na'vi are going to be attacked by the Mercs he decides to forsake his humanity and join them. I personally have a deep rooted hatred for Jake Sully. I am a Marine myself and think that he is the worst traitor in cinema history. I can understand if you don't agree with what your ordered to do, but firing on your brothers is the worst thing I can think of. And yes I know they were "Mercs" but the saying is "Once a Marine always a Marine" so in my book Jake Sully is one of the worst villains of all time. The rest of the characters are pretty bland though. You have your typical tough chick with Michelle Rodriguez, your bad ass military leader, warrior princess/love interest, and multiple other bland played out characters. All in all this wasn't a bad movie, I was just irked by the anti-capitalist and anti-military theme it took, and also rather bothered by the lackluster plot. 6/10