So I saw Avatar...

This isn't going to be a professional review at all, mostly because I'm sick and really tired, but I want to get this down anyways.

...in 3D.


The visuals and effects were awesome, like candy for your eyes. Very fun, brings you into the world of Avatar. This is the movies best attribute, and it's probably going to raise the bar for what we will all expect from special effects in the future.

However the rest of the movie wasn't that extraordinary. The plot was predictable and formulaic. The dialogue was not impressive at all, and the acting wasn't anything special. The characters were also nothing special.

Dialogue was unimaginative and cliche, though I wouldn't expect anything less from the flat stock characters that were used.

At the end of the day, I didn't care about any of them. None of them were compelling in any way, and the humans were the worst. Half of them I just wanted to slap so that they would shut up once in a while.

The message was a bit preachy and sort of annoying. Technology and western civilization are again evil and their human supporters are greedy and ignorant. The primitive earth-loving/in-tune-with-nature Na'vi are pure and good, and we should all be like them. Industrialization besmirches the earth, and is a curse. We know James, we know.

So Cameron spends billions of dollars on a movie to condemn capitalism an anti-industrialization. If the message is that a simpler, more in-tune with the environment time is more desirable, isn't it a little funny that he's used so much of the very technology and system, which he condemns in this film, to make it? It's not hurting anything, but it still is ironic.  

He also sure loves literalism. The Na'vi literally connect with nature through these little white tendrils growing from their hair. The precious and hard to come by mineral that the humans are trying to mine on Pandora is called "unobtainium." The final battle is resolved through a literal deus ex machina, but you know what, that's still better than "unobtainium."
         
One thing I want to give him credit for though is the Na'vi language. He hired an actual linguist (Paul Frommer) to create a viable language for them, and if you're interested in that, you can read about some of the features of Na'vi here. 

Basically, Cameron put a lot of heart and care into the CGI....shame he didn't do so for the script and the characters.