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Saw Avatar with The Dawn and my man. First let me be clear, I didn't hate it. I know everyone thinks I hate everything that's ever been put on celluloid or something. I don't. I just think that there is such a thing as a crappy movie. And I think a lot of the American film industry is geared to gigantic explosions rather than actual plot. There's also such a thing as bad editing. So, as various critics have referred to the movie as Dances With Smurfs and Ferngully In Space, (though my absolute favorite for sheer obscurity is Dances with Night Elves) it's apparently fairly obvious to most that the movie is not a brilliant piece of narrative fiction or anything. So I'm not even going to bother with some of the massive plot holes. I mean really, do ya care?
I will only say this, the movie is 2 hours and 40 minutes long. Which is hugely longer than it needs to be. It is pure spectacle and yet we have entire scenes of people walking. They're walking down tree roots, they're climbing up into robots and turning the robot on (I mean really, it's in space, we get it, there's a lot of switches to be had, why are we watching some muscle bound commander flip on the lights?). But my personal favorite is a scene where they're walking down a hallway, opening a door, walking down another hallway, and opening another door. That's it, they walk down two hallways, looking behind themselves occasionally, and it took almost two minutes. So it is way longer than is necessary.
But having that one reservation, the "evil" commander is AWSOME, and between him and Sigourney Weaver just completely chewing up the scenery, the lead characters are actually kinda, well, kinda blah. The whole plot is painfully simple, I mean seriously, you could outline the story on a napkin. But I doubt I'm surprising anyone by saying that. And we saw it in 3D which was actually kinda cool.
I think the best summary I've seen was a metaqoute response which said " Haven't seen it yet; if I go it'll be for the visuals and not for the delightful 2.5-hour romp in White Guilt Land." Yeah, that's about right.

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