OK, I'll give it to you straight, James Cameron's long-awaited 3D Sci-Fi epic isn't the cinematic second coming so many were hoping for, but it was still a damn beautiful and awe-inspiring experience. Pandora is easily one of the most convincingly alien worlds ever depicted on film with the blue-skinned Na'vi, the glowing neon foliage, the almost jurassic-looking beasts that inhabit the forrests and the floating mountains every fine detail creates a literally out-of-this-world experience.

But, that's just the problem, beyond the eye-popping visuals (Which simply must be seen in 3D) there's hardly anything else to recommend. The story about a soldier falling in with a tribe of noble savages has been done to death, and Cameron does barely anything new with the material. Worse yet, his skill at strong characterisation seems to have deserted him here, as the cast is filled with hackneyed, cliched characters, particulary the gung-ho General Ripper villain played by Stephen Lang. The only character I actually warmed to was the brassy Dr. Augustine, although I'm sure that was mostly down to another great performance from the ever-reliable Sigourney Weaver. The whole relationship between Jake and Neytiri just confirms my suspicion that romance is not one of Cameron's strong points.

Anyway, enough gabbing from me. If you want a good light show, some brilliantly-directed action sequences and can stomach a 161 minute runtime, then see see this film by all means. Just don't go expecting anything more.

This also will be one for the home TV. Preferably HBO On-Demand, where I can start and stop it at will; my 55 year old bladder can't handle 161 minutes. Shit, it couldn't handle Star Trek's 127 minutes.
I've heard a lot about the film's pricetag; suposedly it was over $400 million. If it bombs, could Fox go under? Or, did they hedge their bets by taking on production partners? I remember when Titanic's costs escalated to $200 million, and Fox sold North American rights to Paramount. Bet they're sorry they did that now.

Fox is owned by Newscorp (and similarly the other major studios are all subsidiaries of huger corporations, though Disney is sort of the center of its conglomerate I think.) The worry with any flop isn't that it'll kill the studio itself, but that it'll kill the careers of one or more people involved in giving it the greenlight- which is why studio executives are sort of jumpy about giving go-aheads to risky projects.

That said, I don't know what deals are involved with Avatar. A lot of the money was probably to develop things like face-capture and 3-D tech and so on, and those are the sorts of costs that can be amortized by using those developments in later productions, depending on who owns the results.

I know it's spoilers and all, but do tell me - they do manage to kill all of the eeeeeeevil George W. Bush humans, right? Because that seems to be kind of the poijnt. Mocking a president a good year and a half too late.

I don't have a problem with the running time...I'm a veteran of watching the European cut of Once Apon A Time In America and Apocalypse Now: Redux at the theatres without bursting or losing concentration. But I do want a good story and interesting characters if I am going to watch a movie that long, not just lots of FX.

Thank you.



Hey they also thought Clone Wars and Revenge of the Sith were a commentary on Bush, so anything is possible.

Anyway I haven't seen a whole lot regarding this film, and what I have seen is mostly filtered through less than reputable eyes (i.e. 4chan's Mecha board which spends half the time deriding the mech designs and the other half going "OMG PLANET OF FURRIES", but I digress). The thing is I don't really feel anything towards this film in terms of wanting to see it or even saying "it sucks" based on just looking at trailers. It kinda feels like a movie that is just "there" more than anything else.

Human ends up in a culture that reveres nature and ends up fighting against his own kind alongside them... Where have i seen that before... Oh Gods! It's gorram FERN GULLY!

Leaving Bush parallels aside, the story is one that's been doing the rounds in cinemas since the late 60s where techologically advanced "progressive" humans (and let's be frank...it's not humans in general but the Western military/industrial complex and consumerism) exploit nature and opress natives in order to get what they want. My guess is that it's a comment on imperialism and the manifest destiny. So yeah, Dances With Wolves meets Soldier Blue meets The Last Samurai meets Fern Gully. And it looks like Dune meets Yessongs meets Aliens meets the Smurfs meets the Dragon Riders of Pern. But hey, it's got the best motion capture film technology ever devised and cost $250 million (not $400). And Sigourney Weaver is still hot.

It seems in Hollywood movies that the closer characters are to nature, the nicer and more noble the depiction is of them. However, the more advanced the technology employed to make the movie, the more triumphant Hollywood sounds. So they spend hundreds of millions and use the most advanced SFX software to tell the story that we need to be less dependent on money and technology and embrace nature.

Really? You have to go all the way back to the 1992 release of FernGully? How about May, 2009? That was when a science-fiction CGI fest was released, all about humans invading an alien planet with the express intention of annihilating the local ecology and local people for their own convenience, and how a human pilot (male) makes friends with one of the mer-eelishlike natives (female) and turns against his own people to try to prevent the oncoming destruction. It even had an oddly selective gravity involved, to give it that extra added open-air feeling. It was entitled Battle for Terra, and it was fully animated, no motion capture involved, and marketed for a younger audience than Avatar. That said, even that younger audience was probably kind of jaded to this theme through overexposure to things like FernGully.

I was able to handle Apocalypse Now: Redux in a theater as well. All 202 minutes of it, without a break. This was a couple of years before my prostate problems began. Which hit the fan when I went to see this year's Star Trek. I'm taking Avodart for that; yesterday, without thinking, I referred to the drug as "Avatar."


I got the $400 million figure from a recent 60 Minutes profile of James Cameron, done while he was working on Avatar. The thing I noticed most about Cameron is that he'd shaved the beard he's worn for what seemed like forever.