avatar, how you sucked, let me count the ways..

i devoted three hours of my life yesterday to the james cameron movie avatar and i would like them back, please. my sister says it's because i'm a snob and just on general principle hate movies that the masses love, but that's not true - i liked the harry potter films and even liked the film of the davinci code much better than the book (which admittedly, may not be saying much).

putting aside the cinematography of the movie, which i understand is ground-breaking from a technological standpoint but which i'm in no position to judge, here's what i hated about the film:

1. the mineral that the humans were strip-mining from pandora was called unobtainium. how heavy-handed and obvious is that?
2. the animals depicted on pandora utterly lacked imagination - they were just strangeified versions of  our animals - reptilian horses, neon-lit dinosaurs, dragon-like flying pterodactyls, skeletal dogs - if you're going to dream up a new people and a new planet, have the imagination to come up with something truly new.
3. calling the range around the tree of voices where none of the advanced flight instruments work a "flux vortex" is trite and unoriginal. didn't we already see that in back to the future and/or 2001: a space odyssey (now THERE's a good film)?
4. the thin plot could be summed up as a cheesy version of Rousseau's noble savage vs. the terminator. but what else would we expect of james cameron?
5. the fiber-optic brain transfer thing is another example of how heavy-handed this film is. we are given NO credit for even a whisper of intelligence or ability to understand subtleties.
6. the final fight between noble, but underpowered savages and ignorant soldiers with all the kit is just trite beyond belief. it's rambo meets terminator meets transformers meets last of the mohicans with a little of dances with wolves thrown in for good measure. a pastiche of references that dissolves into utter unbelievability.
7. it's at least an hour too long.
8. after the battle, the humans just pack it up and go home, rather too easily and tidily. 
9. the theme of nature vs. technology is an interesting one, one which had tons of utterly unexploited possibilities due to the fact that apparently cameron doesn't care at all about story, but only about special effects.
10. apparently james cameron didn't want to pay ben affleck big bucks, so he found some unknown australian guy who looked and acted quite a lot like him and who he could pay lots less. but it's obvious he had ben affleck in mind.

there were a couple of things i liked about the film. the glowy night botanical world was very cool, even if it could have been plucked out of an 80s disco. and that they said "i see you" to mean "i love you" is powerful. but honestly, i cannot recommend that anyone use their hard-earned money to see this film. it will not enrich your life in the least to have seen it. unless maybe you're a cinematographer or interested in high quality CGI. but the preview i saw for sherlock holmes looked pretty good.