Narm / Avatar

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• After first meeting Neytiri, when Jake Sulley is chasing after Neytiri across a fallen tree truck and asking her to teach him to "see", he nearly loses his balance and makes a very flat "whoa" like Sam Worthington was acting for a different scene.
• Dr. Grace Augustine, when explaining that Pandora, a moon, has more connections between its trees than the human brain has between neurons. Sure, the viewer is shown what she means, but it still sounds ridiculous when said out loud, let alone to people who haven't seen what she's talking about. No wonder everyone just stares at her.
• Another rather narmy moment in that film is in the scene where Eytukan is killed during the destruction of the Hometree. Neytiri sounds suspiciously like she's saying "wakey-wakey" at one point, which can rather ruin the dramatic mood once you hear it.
• Depends on the viewer, but there are several events and lines in the movie that don't come off quite as dramatic as intended. The destruction of Hometree, particularly because of Quaritch's Colonel Kilgore moment during it, the death of chief Eytukan, and the "Eywa has heard you, Jake!" speech in the final battle can actually be pretty narmtastic, coming across as a bit over-the-top if you weren't fully drawn into the story.
• Zoe Saldaña's entire performance as Neytiri can be this for some viewers. She goes highly overboard with the acting on occasion, including the "You are like a baby!" speech, and half the theater burst into groans and snorts when she cried during Eytukan's death. It doesn't help that she sounds exactly like Tia Dalma.
  • At least in the latter case, it may be a case of Values Dissonance. In some cultures that the Na'vi take inspiration from, such overly dramatic displays (from a Western standpoint) of mourning are entirely appropriate. The louder you cry, the bigger of a scene you make, the greater the mourning.
• The movie isn't exactly shy about its Green Aesop, but Jake's ham-fisted line "They killed their Mother!" regarding the humans and why they're on Pandora is where all remaining subtlety went out the window. It doesn't help that this is basically Jake trying to speak to the Na'vi in terms they can relate to.
• Lyle Wainfleet's over-excited cries of "GET SOME!!!" have become pretty notorious amongst the Avatar fandom.
• Ridiculous slo-mo when Quaritch terminates the link-ups and arrests Jake, Grace and Norm: Grace's "YOU BASTAAAARD!!" and Norm's silent shouting and aggressive pointing.
• After Trudy and Max the scientist guy break Grace, Jake and Norm out of jail and they dash off down some corridors to steal a chopper and escape, Max does a hilarious spin to check for pursuers.
• A frequent source of snark about this film is that despite being the highest grossing movie of all time, the poster title and the subtitles use a variant of the infamously tacky font Papyrus. Saturday Night Live even did a skit with Ryan Gosling flipping out over it.
  • Sure enough, the sequel changed the font. Papyrus is still used for subtitles and location titles though.
• The unobtainable material needed to solve the human energy crisis and make interplanetary travel economical is called...Unobtanium. You would think that a film that invested so much into creating an artificial language and construct one of the most realistic spaceships, aircraft and mechs, would have thought a little bit harder than something that even a 5-year-old would call as lame. There is a line that explains the characters chose that name deliberately out of irony, but most people miss it.
  • To be fair, unobtanium is actually a term used for hard to gain materials in the real world.

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