Great Visuals – Rehashed Plot line

Rating: 6/10 (21 December 2009)

There is no denying the truly awesome visual impact of this film. The action sequences and overall visual force of the film are stunning. The plot is something less. While I was impressed by a number of the individual ideas in the film (the avatar concept is interesting as is the communication of information, direction and emotion between species), the underlying plot line is, to say the least, played out. The big bad evil company is looking for an extremely valuable mineral "unobtainium" and will let nothing and no one, least of all the indigenous people, keep them from their profits. Please. All of this retelling of the cowboys (evil humanity) and Indians (the Na'vi) with a fair amount of love for the non-material, Gaia-based lifestyle presented by the Indians is a little hard to take. This is especially true coming from Cameron/Hollywood, a person and place based on materialism in the extreme. The IMDb Trivia Section on this film says it all: Cameron took the cast and crew to Hawaii to commune with nature. They "spent their days trekking through the forests and jungles and living like tribes (building campfires, eating fish, etc), in order to get a better sense of what it would be like to live and move around in the jungle on Pandora." That was only during the days. Their nights were spent at a Four Seasons Hotel.