tedious battle scenes

Rating: 7/10 (19 March 2012)

From the reviews I read, I expected Avatar to be sleepy, something like watching beautiful sea dragons courting, but it is a typical Star Wars shoot 'em up, a somewhat tedious shoot 'em up. The villains are military, corporate bigots. There are references to the Viet Nam, the Afghan and Iraq wars, and the genocides of the first nations people. It is also about the way these villains take a satanic joy in destroying the natural world.
I suspect most of the people who panned the movie for lack of plot were Republicans irritated at seeing all their oxen gored.
The movie is a metaphor for the uncaring violence of the military, the rampant greed of the corporation and the mindless prejudice of the xenophobe. Oddly, the hero, who infiltrates the off worlders in a surrogate body (avatar), is a marine, doltish but handsome as the stereotypical marine. In the end he leads a romantic, violent, Custer's last stand revolt against the powers of evil.
Despite the fact much of the movie is battle scenes, there is little gore. The most shocking scene was a bleeding 6-legged horse.
The animation is so well done, often I figured it must be characters in makeup. There is all kinds of subtlety in the fine movement of face muscles. The extreme faces of the off worlders are fascinating to watch. You don't think of it as animation. It is just a unfamiliar world where you have no reference points on how things should look.
The thing I most enjoyed about the movie was the imagination that went into creating the off-world fantastic plants and animals, that were often impossible, but there you saw them clearly "real". The detail was so exquisite it compelled me to believe in their existence even though my science background was screaming TILT.
The joke of the movie is that technology allowed human actors to inhabit alien bodies, both in the process of making the movie, and inside the movie itself, though the technology was quite different.
The thing that bothered me most was how preposterously overpopulated the Pandora forest was. It looked like downtown Tokyo. Someone got carried away with the AI clone tool.