Reviews

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.

Jeff Bridges must have a massive substance abuse problem because that is the only reason on earth that I can think of as to why he would be in such a lame film. I started watching the movie while channel surfing and it was so bad that I decided to record it for my wife to watch with me, as she has always liked Jeff Bridges. While watching the movie, my wife commented at least 15 times, "I cannot believe that he (Bridges) is in this movie." I couldn't agree more.

The only redeeming feature of the film is its unintended humor. When the main character stands atop the vault and lifts both arms in the air for the "rock-on" salute, my wife and I laughed until we couldn't breath. 1 star out of 10.

I give this movie one star. I actually believe the movie to be well acted and filmed but the content is so poor that justice demands the single star rating. Guy Fawkes was a fanatical Catholic that wanted to blow up Parliament to reinstall a Catholic theocracy. Anyone that feels this is a proper analogy to the UK or USA of today (or tomorrow) is an ill informed idiot. The only regimes that have even approached the government portrayed here have been fascist (Nazi Germany, Iraq, etc.) or communist (USSR, Cambodia, PRC, etc.) not the USA or the UK. It sickens me that people actually believe that Blair and Bush are similar to the governmental characters in this film. The people that believe that have obviously never been in a truly totalitarian nation or spoken in depth with anyone from one.