Engaging but crass collection of clichés and plagiarised ideas of others.

Rating: 3/10 (19 September 2013)

The rendering, of the arrival, base and mining operation is stupendous. Well conceived and executed. However, we are already in a world of cliché. The whole kaboodle is not a stones-throw from Starship Troopers thought bigger and better. And the entire Viet-Nam analogy is utterly so obvious that only the pace gets one beyond it.
After the clichés of briefing by a card-board stereotype of a movie colonel we are introduced to the technological conceit at the heart of the plot. There's a basic problem of logic with it. How is it that if some kind of spinning hardware like an MRI scanner is necessary at the "driver" end of each exchange of consciousness no such thing is required at the "Avatar" end? I mean, to send a radio message, or any other kind of exchange requiring a piece of hardware at the "sending" end its usually necessary to have a receiver at the other end?
Well there's really no answer to that, we just have to overlook it.To anyone watching this for the first time I recommend you just skip the middle hour and a half entirely.
Its worth seeing the end of the movie just to witness the shameless lie-merchandising mode into which Cameron et-als puerile mind-set defaults when their mask finally slips. As I say, nobody should be surprised, but what is surprising is that these "sky-people" from Planet Hollywood think they can colonise our minds with their air-headed ignorance. First up the Eco-lie stated quite clearly by the guy who describes Earth as a dead planet on which there is no foliage. Well, however far in the future its set, on present trends that's just simply a lie. Earth is experiencing, partly due to rising CO2 levels, an extraordinary greening. Desertification which had been threatening much of the world for decades is now very palpably reversing. The eco preach is not simply a cliché, it's a cliché stated in contradiction of simple facts. it's a lie.
The second lie is the stereotyped Imperialist Horror!. Yes there was and in some places still is an Imperialist Horror. Apocalypse Now ("The Horror") was based on Heart of Darkness and that story was based on fact. BUT, and that's a big but, whilst Imperialists have desecrated the sites and communities of cultures they have oppressed, for example the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamelan, or burning down of churches that has become an epidemic in much of the Conflicted World, the scale of destruction envisaged here is quit literally exorbitant. You do have to watch it, I'm afraid, to grasp that the Humans in this movie wreak a destruction on the indigenous people that is, one hundred or on thousand times as grievous as anything that ever happened in Western Imperialist history. To find anything similar we would need to look at the actions of the Inca Empire or, indeed, the Third Reich. What Belgium did in the Congo chills the heart, but it pales into insignificance compared to the destruction of the arboreal heart of the Navi. This isn't about numbers killed (millions on Earth compared to hundreds in the movie) but the profundity of the assault. Again, unfortunately, you have to sit through this movie to appreciate the way the analogy with Western Imperialism has been blown out of any Earthly comparison.
Finally we come to why I think the movie is ultimately disgusting. It comes when the renegade pilot says that she had hoped that there would b a tactical plan that did not involve "martyrdom".
Now who talks of "martyrdom" as a tactic? And how many times have "martyrdom missions" been conducted? Where and against whom? In the decade after 2001 there were in excess of 20,000 such "martyrdom" missions and the overwhelming body of victims were civilians, non-combatant men, women, children, across the Middle East, Africa, South East Asia, South-West Asia, China, Eastern Europe and yes, western Europe and the USA. However, the overwhelming abundance of targets were not even arguably Western Imperialists as Cameron et al undoubtedly want us to think, they were not even "Westerners", but people of many cultures who happened to be of the wrong tribe, sect, religion, in conflicts that for the most part date back long before the USA even existed. This movie, by cueing us with the word "martyrdom" in that specific context, attempts to justify such acts, romanticising them as the self-sacrificing actions of underdogs against oppressors. Sometimes they have been. Overwhelmingly they are not. Cameron must really have good yoga skills to insert his head where it must be for him not to have noticed this.
We must not forget the sheer arrogance of Cameron et al in ripping off without credit the source artists for this "vision", particularly the Russian Noon Universe novels of the Strugatsky brothers (about the Nave people of arboreal planet Pandorakind of similar eh) and Ursula Leguins "The Word for World is Forest". Most blatantly of all, the floating mountains from the work of Roger Deana favourite of my teen yearsalthough here they tend ultimately to remind one more of the Flash Gordon movie. The scene with thousands of Navi riding winged creatures to battle almost absurdly reminiscent of Brian Blessed and his winged sky-warriors in that earlier (vastly superior) movie.
Cameron et al attempt to beguile us, weave a web of fairy-tale fancies and pass off upon us two howling lies and an ethical equivocation that is utterly disgusting. The bottom line is the irony that the shallow, morally simplistic dufus character at the heart of the movie pretty neatly sums up the kind of air-heads these Hollyood sky People themselves are. No doubt this commentary will antagonise many who read it: people who cannot process long sentences with multiple sub-clauses and people with the same superficial mind-set as Cameron and his mates.