Beautiful but stupid

Rating: 3/10 (27 December 2009)

I did read up about comments here and external reviews, before I went to see the movie. I expected a bad story and stunning visual effects. I got to see a very bad and very predictable story and I thought the visual effects were not that good.
The panoramas were nice, certainly. The graphic world was nice, with the forests, the alien creatures, the huge machines and planes of the humans. But I thought it was very well visible that it all is CGI. It's animations. Why would people say that you can hardly see it's CGI... do they think we're stupid? I've seen computer games lately that look just as stunning. And in 5 years, we'll just remember this movie as "nice graphics for its time, but the story sucks".
I agree with the reviews of Avatar being a mixture / ripoff / remake of Dances with Wolves, Pocahontas, FernGully, Last Samurai, Enemy Mine, Lawrence of Arabia. Cameron did a much better job on Alien and Terminator. Did people finally convince him that his audience is stupid? I did quite a few face-palms while sitting in my chair. I started drinking a lot (thanks to our service cinema for providing this lovely feature), because I was bored. Predictable. As soon as I saw the main character sit in his wheelchair I knew: he is going to one of those Na'vi. Predictable. As soon as I saw the huge tree, I knew they were going to blow it up. Really. Barf.
I still don't understand why humanity of 2154 needs a whole fleet of airplanes to cut a high tree, since we already have neutron bombs now. You want to eradicate the aliens, get the tree out of the way, and not let the public at home know you did something terrible? Throw the neutron bomb and nobody will know. The area will be easily accessible with big digging machines, because there will hardly be any radioactive fallout. I know, it's evil, but that's the way these evil humans are in this movie. But that would be a short story, wouldn't it.
Go see Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Aliens, Terminator, Silence of the Lambs... or so many other films. Nice stories, some unpredictable plot changes and ditto character developments, grey (vs black&white) characters.
I happily would give it a 1 / 10, but I did like the graphics. I did not like the plot, the story, the characters, the character developments.