Thank you this sums up my thoughts completely.
The family next to me (who did enjoy the film) where more interesting than the film itself.
It was very pretty to look at. It impossibly bland to listen to.
I agree with you on everything, except for one point. Miles Quatrich was not bland, he was a member of the Imperial Guard, and utterly badass.
"Whoa" Keanu Reeves
I found Quatrich bland in the early scenes on the base, but he was awesome in the last 15 minutes.
And therefore it makes him superior to anything else in that movie, BAM!!!
"Whoa" Keanu Reeves
This is very very true.
Does any one else that making all the animals such headache inducingly bright colors detracted from the film. Because it seems odd that the trees and the rocks would be what we consider earth tones, but nothing has any camouflage.
Um, magic? I have no fucking clue, maybe its because when all you have is graphics, you want to use them a lot and make them really noticeable.
"Whoa" Keanu ReevesLeave a Comment:
Caught me off-guard
I went into the movie completely expecting to be preached to. I expected to see the most generic natives-beat-whitey plot in the world working in tandem with a message I could have gotten from Captain Planet. I braced myself to try and ignore the simplistic environmental, anti-imperialist anviliciousness. As a result, those parts didn't bother me as much. I mean, I sighed audibly with the "they killed their mother" speech, but that was the worst of it.
I was not prepared to be bored to tears. The characters are so utterly bland, and the plot so completely trite, that it fails to be interesting in any regard beyond "it looks pretty." The world they constructed is presented with such a paucity of depth that it makes me ask, why even bother making Pandora so detailed if you're not even going to put that detail in the movie? The characters are so utterly generic that I was wondering the entire time if Cameron was being serious. I can't even remember their names. I just call them Jarhead, Tsuntsun, Angry military guy, Amoral corporate guy, Scientists 1, 2, and 3, and Sigourney Weaver. The Na'vi culture, similarly, seemed skeletal. They respect the wildlife, they are warriors, and they worship their tree-goddess that turns out to be sort of real in a manner strongly reminiscent of the native americans. This describes their entire culture. I realize a two-hour film isn't enough to deeply explore social norms, rituals, and the specifics of their religion, but did Cameron have to present it as the theme park version of native american culture?
That said, there were some parts of the movie I liked. For one, the bit of humor in the beginning. There wasn't much of it, but those little bits were genuinely funny. Also, it at least tried to be realistic. It failed, but at least it tried. The initial battle was a curb-stomp human victory as expected, and the Na'vi victory at the end was clearly pyrrhic. the various aspects of space travel and the ecosystem were well-presented, the "twist" where the ecosystem was sentient is at least a passable handwave, and of course the visuals were nice.
The thing that saddened me most about this movie was the wasted potential. Everything about this movie, from the characters to the setting, felt like it could have been improved massively with relatively little effort.