I saw this already...

Rating: 1/10 (23 July 2010)

I like James Cameron, I loved The Abyss and Terminator.
In terms, I'm not the biggest fan of Sigourney Weaver or Titanic.
I'm not going to go to the extreme of calling this movie crap. I think the movie clearly has its shining points and I was mesmerized by the IMAX 3D presentation.
The story, unfortunately, is rife with cliché and borrowed plot devices. The overall story of course hails from Kevin Costner's masterwork. to that, I'm not saying the movie is a ripoff. I think unfortunately for James Cameron, his story got done before he got to it. Original yes, waited too long and was already done well...absolutely. The overall tone seems to be a environmentally friendly Star Wars/Return of the Jedi setup. Unobtainium being a weird reference to "The Core" (Aaron Eckhart, Hilary Swank, Delroy Lindo) to Delroy Lindo's development of the key component to make the trip to the center of the Earth. This reference threw me through most of the movie. I was trying to connect the two and gave up at some point. The characters are hackneyed and tired dredged-up stock characters with the addition of an identical twin in a wheelchair.
The movie does a good job of setting a political tone, commenting on US hegemonic aims in the world, and in response to my own criticism, the military characters could have been intended to be flat and lacking in definition and development to accentuate a point that conquerers don't have personalities. Of course, the same point was made in Dances With Wolves. The environmental overtones seemed a little ham-handed relating to the destruction of the rain forests and natural diversity on our own planet to accommodate development of political and business interests that seem to have no satiety nor rationality (Unobtainium?). The point was heard and well-received, but poorly executed. If the political tone of the movie is to be a centerpiece of the overall work, couldn't it have been constructed better and with more science-fiction flair? Again, perhaps the point of unobtainium was that it really didn't matter what they were ostensibly on the planet for. I guess if they were there for Memnomnia Gum, I would have whining about something else...although I don't think the Martian Chronicles is as prominent a work to accidentally site as the Core.
The special effects were first-rate. The idea of the "surrogates" to blend in with the locals was quite good. I liked the interactive network in terms of the imagery of the interconnectedness of an ecosystem.