Ended up seeing Avatar (due to familial obligations, I swear!).
I can see why some people liked it, though I was far too annoyed by the middle to be able to stomach the guns-and-dragons-for-forty-five-minutes climax. This is what white people do, they eradicate populations then overidealize them afterwards in order to make themselves feel better. This movie, like some reviewer said, is entirely Ferngully meets Dances With Wolves — and Dances With Wolves is probably the most demeaning two-and-a-half hours ever set to cinema. District 9, though not a great movie (it couldn't decide where allegory ended and action movie began) at least treated culture clash more realistically than Avatar, which ends up being your basic white male fantasy.
In terms of biology the movie was fascinating and detailed, though they don't even make an effort to make Pandora seem like an actual alien world. The template is an oversized, primordial earth. Notice how the dragon-things all have four wings — just like the first flying lizards on earth.
Anthropologically it was less than interesting. The Na'vi both facially and phonetically resemble indigenous post-slave-trade Caribbean Indians, so Pandora is basically Hispanola with flying mountains. Like in all white-man-goes-native movies, the male tribesmen are stubborn, strong and ugly (though easily bested by the hero in combat) and the women are fierce, oversexualized and all for a little miscegenation.
Movies like this tend to forget that native americans didn't have horses until Europeans brought them over, and the supposed natural connection between man and beast that Native Americans exemplify depended entirely on beasts being previously domesticated. People forget that a successfully culture must reshape the landscape around it, must subjugate the beasts of the field and the plants of the earth, this is how a species escapes extinction. It's the whole reason we have things like language and culture and bad movies. Humans are the dominant species in their ecosystem, the fantasy would be a humanoid society that is not the dominant species, in a society that exists symbiotically with other large creatures. Which sounds almost romantic if it weren't so unrealistic. In nature, you're on the top or you're food. And if you're food you're not going to be concerned with luxuries like love or morality. But human society, or at least the human society that makes movies like this, has been on the top so long I bet it just longs to be submissive to something. This is part of the reason why man is never the master of his own fate, we long to be controlled by something, be it god or nature or in this case some weird tree-based melding of the two.
Sigourney Weaver seemed like she was having a good time but became less and less interesting as the story got more and more predictable (though she was still given the best lines). The temple scenes were laughable reminders of the hilarious Zion rave party. And the climactic fight, for all its ecological ballyhoo, was all machismo and patriotism, designed to inspire way more recruitments for the marines corps than for Green Peace.
The 3d was fantastic though.
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