Effects are like Transformers. Godzilla, etc - Story and characters are also just as shallow

Rating: 4/10 (11 January 2010)

To me, the only difference between this movie and the likes of Transformers, Godzilla, Independence Day, etc. is that for some reason critics are heaping a lot of praise on it.
Best movie of the decade?! Ha! For all the hype and praise that Avatar got, I was expecting a deeper story and complex characters. Nope. Instead I got a special effect fest with very little story and little character depth. In other words, a movie cut from the very same cloth as the movies mentioned above, movies that were panned by many of the same critics who now are hailing Avatar as the best movie of the year/decade, etc.
Again, looking beyond the special effects, Avatar's story and character are no deeper than Godzilla's, Transformer's, etc. You could see the whole storyline based on the trailers. There were no surprises, no twists, no shades of gray in any of the characters. There was no compelling, thought provoking dialogue between any of the characters - and given the premise, that the humans were trying to get the natives to movie to get this mineral that was needed, there was potential to have a lot of intelligent dialogue between characters to explore the ethics/morality, etc. of the situation. But there was none. The good guys were good, the bad guys were Snidely Whiplash and it all played out like a 1980s cartoon, with no elements one would usually associate with a movie given as much praise as Avatar has received.
There was no fleshing out of the premise. The reason why the humans needed the mineral so bad isn't really explored. Again, the movie's story is as complex as an '80s cartoon.
The effects were good. Stephen Lang chewed the scenery as the villain. But this movie suffers from its own unjustifiable hype. I found another way to spell overrated recently and its A-V-A-T-A-R