"Every living thing that crawls, flies, or squats in the mud wants to kill you and eat your eyes for jujubes." - Col. Quaritch
Avatar is estimated to have pulled in about $73M domestically over the weekend. That's not bad, but considering how much it cost, anywhere from 300M to 500M, it's not exactly great. That's probably partly to do with how uninspired it seems to be. Admittedly, the CGI is pretty damn great and the 3D is incredible. I mean that in a technical sense, as its used in a more subtle fashion than the usual poke things out at you.
But, one of the main criticisms is that it ultimately tells an incredibly slight and cliched tale. Which isn't altogether untrue. It's FernGully with some Dances with Wolves mixed in. It's rather unsophisticated and everyone's playing an archetype rather than a character. So you basically have the evil human corporations and para-military killfuckers that need to mine a mineral to either earn a profit or power the human empire. In order to accomplish this they decide to killfuck the hell out of the Native American/African Na'vi (which is native with ET taken out). The Na'vi of course are alien hippies with a literal connection to nature in their USB port tipped braids. They jam it into the same in animals and trees and shit to command or communicate with them.
Side note, one of the tests of manhood/hunterhood is to claim an ikran (dragon) as a mount. To do this, you wrestle it to the ground and USB-rape it in order to get it to do what you want. Yeah, I had that reaction too. Also, Jake does this twice. He's a serial dragon USB-rapist.
Back on point, you can throw around White Guilt and shit, but it's mainly humans suck and the native alien hippies are awesome. Which, it has been argued, is simplistic and bad because it's such a weak conflict. Here's the thing though, there's not an insignificant amount of people that can't figure out why the humans didn't just bomb the fuck out of the aliens and steal their shit and stuff. So that's why I think for how simplistic the story was, it pretty much had to. The audience is composed of a large percentage of sociopathic morons. If they can't even understand that it's bad to killfuck a population in order to steal their land, then fuck, no wonder movies are so unsophisticated.
