Bay 12 Games Forum

I thought it was rather good myself, although I will allow that it used a perfectly standard plot.  But I thought it executed the plot quite well, and seriously, archetypical plots make up some of my favorite stories.  And it was gorgeous, even on a normal screen.

Interestingly, I nosed around and found quite a bit of cannon backstory at the avatar wiki (or they called it something like that...it wasn't really a wiki though, being small and linear)  Anyway, there was a fair amound of backstory gems that actually made the movie make more sense...
A) Apparently, the Navi don't use actual DNA, some sort of translation process was required to translate human genes into native ones, and splice them in.  The DNA mention in the movie was just nontechnical shorthand
B) Unobtanium (I think the name is great lampshade hanging) is some sort of superconducting/antigrav material.  It's used on earth for transportation purposes, also plays a big role in spaceship travel (cough....oil/melange spice).  Still, it's use (making things float) ties in well with it sitting under the tallest trees (weight reduction) and making up the floating mountains....which I thought were ridiculous but stunning enough for me not to care.
C) The corporation in charge of mining was prohibited by treaty from bringing WMD's into space, and was under pressure from the governments of earth to avoid outright genocidal disasters.  Though they were also able to bribe enough to do some smaller scale exploitation.  And, has been stated before, really mechs and gunships and whatnot are pretty heavy duty against bows and arrows (and defeated them repeatedly).  And the exec on the ground was clearly too weak willed to push for an all out "nuke from orbit" strategy, and had to be coaxed into a military option for just knocking down one tree. The corporation can no more get away with an outright nuclear or biotech slaughter of the Navi than Exxon can get away with carpet bombing a section of the rainforest before putting up oil wells.

they probably wrote all that after the film was made, just to cover their tracks

i stand by cthulhu, in my opinion avatar just lacks the fur to be a furrry movie. it's not only doesn't appeal to me, but it also makes me a little sick, i'd rather watch the entire harry potter series, it's like power rangers in space coolerified to 21st century standarts, much like what they did with transformers, batman, james bond, sherlock holmes, etc. it may be unoriginal in everything, but that's not what bothers me, what bothers-me is it's absolutelly mainstream.
also, it is not a science fiction film, its a futuristic action film, there's no science in it, science fiction pursues original premisses as the excuse for the narrative, science fiction storys are fundamented on a speculative technology and it's possible repercusions, in avatar, it's only there for flavour, like the inerent environamentalism, the main object in the story is action, romance, pretty blue skins and feline faces, meh, etc.

well, i'm ready to admit that they are some generic magic monsters acting as placeholder for when magic monsters are a fruit of religion or spheres, or forces, then firemen will be replaced by angel-like manifestations of the deity blarbzug uzbudoskus the fiery death of lambs, in the shape of a male dwarf with eagle legs, permanentlly engulfed in flames with a golden dog skull in place of it's head

if we're havin unicorn poo and rat poo i want dwarven poo also

Well Pigs make sense... you either have boars or those mutant hybrid farming pigs.

i guess we have pigs, but dwarves burry them face down on muddy caves and leave their tails sprouting out

yeah, it bothers me a little that dwarves have rubber trees on their doorstep

yeah, and the chinese had gunpowder and stuff, but i'm a bit of an europocentrist when it comes to fantasy based on european mithology and folklore, and i allways thought that the technological level sought by toady was late medieval ages, and although meso-americans weren't at the middle ages, they were on early space age or late stone age, opinions vary

i don't think they pull levers anymore, i think thats just a legend from that time when there was no above nor bellow