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[flippyshark]

I'm divided on this one.

On the upside:

- This was a superior example of other-world imagining, the kind of visionary creativity that makes me love movies.
- The Na'avi worked splendidly as living, breathing characters. They were even kind of sexy.
- James Cameron knows how to stage an action sequence so that it's always clear exactly what is happening, and he realizes that the best way to make you feel you are there is to stage things with clear compositions, careful staging, judiciously varied time-length of shots, and no gratuitous shaky cam. Up and coming movie-makers, please study these techniques!

On the downside:

Spoiler:

- The major characters were mostly cut from the cliche cookie sheet. Would it kill writers to inject some unpredictability, some nuance, maybe even some well-earned divided loyalties, into these paper-thin characters? Case in point - early on, I wanted to like the hard-ass Colonel. What if he had a little more substance instead of being just plain evil? What if Jake Sully actually had good reason to trust and respect him, and it ended up being an actual tragedy that they end up on different sides? What if both had good reasons to make the choices they did, and both lost something by choosing sides? Instead, our bad guy was a ludicrous stereotype, not worth giving a damn about. Boring.

- Jake had his moment of moral clarity WAY too late in the story - it was very artificial, and clearly timed so that we could follow a drearily familiar plot device. ("I'm an outcast now, but I have to convince them I'm on their side, even though I pretty much destroyed their lives.") And forgiveness came much too easily as well.

- I knew exactly who was going to die and at what point along the narrative arc. For f**k's sake, H'wood - try to surprise me sometime, okay?

- Even though I thought the big blue people worked visually, for some reason, Sigourney was a little bit "uncanny valley" in her avatar form.

- I love the earth, but this movie's tree-huggery and hyper-pantheism got heavy-handed and ridiculous for me.

My (perhaps predictable) criticisms aside, I highly recommend the experience, especially in a good theater, and certainly in 3D. i'm very glad I went, and may even go back for seconds - especially because I don't think this is going to be nearly as compelling on home video.

Just an aside - It would have been interesting if there had been inter-clan strife among the Na'avi. It occurred to me that since this was a race of warriors, and obviously had been for a very long time, there must naturally have been tribal conflicts and wars - but this is never mentioned. One sensed that there was nothing but widespread peace and Eden-like perfection until the Earthies had shown up, but, this can't have been the case. Anyway, this is an interesting enough world, endless other stories about the Na'avi could spring from it. So, I guess I'd like to see their history, and I don't want it to be all glowy flowers and swaying kum-ba-ya around the tree.

So, that's my immediate response.