Great special effects but...could have been much better

Rating: 6/10 (3 January 2010)

I've seen this movie twice now; both times in 3D.
The visuals are spectacular without a doubt. James Cameron has always been on the leading edge of breaking new ground in special effects. You are really immersed in the world of Pandora.
The plot though leaves something to be desired. Basically, you have the hero with a tragic past who goes on a mission for the bad guys. He meets up with the locals and realizes that he was working for the bad guys and changes sides and all the clichéd characters are there from the evil gung-ho Marine colonel to the jealous but noble native warrior.
If you've seen Dances with Wolves or Last Samurai, or The Mission or any of a dozen of movies with a plot line like that, then you've seen this and you know exactly what is going to happen.
Then we come to the plot holes.
1. It took the ship 5 years to get to Pandora. Sully's brother had trained for 3 years prior to this for the "mission." So they had a mission almost 10 years in the making? The situation on the ground in Pandora wouldn't have changed in that 10 years? Really? I mean it looked like the operation on Pandora was relatively new...I'm pretty sure the evil corporation would have gone ahead and knocked down the tree long before Sully got to the planet. 8 years is a long time.
2. Unobtainium....really? That was the best James Cameron could come up with? So it's a rare material but what does it do? Surely, Cameron could have come up with something better than that.
3. If arrows couldn't penetrate the cockpit windshields in the scene where they destroy the hometree, then how could they do so in the final battle? 4. Speaking of the military equipment...wow, pretty flimsy. The heavy machineguns are obviously just M-60's with a few pieces of metal (or rubber) slapped on the sides. But the transports were pretty vulnerable to...just about everything. In 150 years, that's the best we've come up with? The mech-warrior things were cool but again...pretty vulnerable. I have to wonder if this was the part of the movie that James Cameron came up with 15 years ago and just didn't notice that the trend is unmanned.
5. If the vortex cause all sorts of complications with the instruments in the transports...why were communications unaffected and why wasn't the Avatar program disrupted in there as well? 6. So the master plan to defeat the Navi was to fly a slow-moving transport aircraft as a makeshift bomber to bomb the tree? They couldn't bomb the place from orbit? And before someone jumps on me for the gravitational flux or whatever...no. They were able to get orbital imagery so they could have easily just fired some cruise missiles or whatever the future evil corporation has and carpet bombed that whole region. The first rule of combat is to kill your enemy from as far away as possible and a former (or current) Marine Recon Lt Col would know that.
8. As for the end battle...what was the ground assault for? The main effort was to bomb the tree into oblivion, right? So...why send in your ground troops who were already outnumbered? Why not just send in your fast attack ships to just fire incendiary rockets at the tree and call it a day? 7. The Avatar Navi bodies were genetically engineered to reach full maturity in a short amount of time...you gotta think that such engineering would also cause a short lifespan for such a creature. After all, Sully and his brother before him were supposed to be on a 6 year mission so why create something to last longer? Not a big point but it'd be interesting to see in Avatar 2 that Jake Sully's avatar begins a rapid decline in health, haha.
8. So the evil corporation just left before they got punched in the nose? Yeah, they wouldn't just come back with more firepower or anything and just blast like a 1,000 square kilometer area into smoldering ruin from where they would build a new base.
I suppose the message Cameron is sending is "hey, don't pay attention to the flimsy plot line, look how beautiful this world is that I created!" The other messages were just lame. Hey James Cameron, Bush isn't in office any more and hopefully you weren't saying that Saddam Hussein was like the Navi...because yeah, you can bet that Hussein would have been 10 times as worse as the evil mercenaries were.
And the irony of this film which cost upwards of 400 million to make and took the cutting edge of technology and probably had quite a carbon footprint...yet technology is evil and we should all go back to nature where there will be complete harmony......yeah.....