I think it is a good movie with or without 3D. It takes an old story and recycles it with a pretty new setting. The special effects are obviously where it shines and the telling of the story is well done, albeit predictable once you realize that you've seen this plot before.

The movie certainly doesn't deserve the slobbering that James Cameron does over it with regards to its social implications. Avatar delivered the action while keeping a broad appeal. I think late comers might be disappointed because they expected it to be the best movie ever because of how well it has done.

I give this thread a 9.5.

I'm always suprised at how snobbish people act about movies. But it's ok to dislike a movie once in a while.
I'm just still shocked about the Spider-Man threads I made. Still shocked.

Honestly i was pretty offended just watching the movie. It did not think I could make my own opinions about anything at all. It was like you are supposed to hate this guy with the scars, ok these people really fell in love, the world is beautiful and its wrong to destroy it, Aliens= good, they lost this one battle so they will leave peacfully now,etc etc.

It was so tame and everything felt forced. I didn't give a crap about the characters, I couldn't care less what happened to Pandora, and I can't remember a single line from the script- that is the mark of a forgettable film.

A movie made just for 3D? A movie should hold itself wherever it be.

I'm sorry, but Avatar is just an average movie.

District 9 >>>>>>>> Avatar

What I actually found funny was that this mineral is so valuable it's worth it to have a gigantic milatary force present at all times but they just leave?

I'm sorry, but James Cameron doesn't know how to write an evil inhuman corporation.

It's pretty obvious they don't give a crap about the planet so just say the natives attacked (which they did), they defended.  Fly your fancy ships higher than their mounts can fly and napalm the planet.  Movie over and my version would take less than an hour.

James Camaron problably believes the Native Americans could beat the modern American milatary, that's the real problem with hippies trying to villainize giant corporations.  That corporation wouldn't build a mech with a giant knife, they would build a mech with a mini-nuke or just have ballistic missiles they fire from the other side of the planet, or missiles they just rain down from orbit.

Now this isn't true. The one thing that Cameron did was figure out the logistics of the military-industrial operation.

It costs an enormous amount of money to transport anything from Earth to Pandora - I think it's in the rannge of hundreds of thousand of dollars per pound. All the machinery you see outside of the drop ship is manufactured on-site using ra materials mined from Pandora. The oly things they bring are stuff they absolutely have to, like microchips that can't be produced in that environment, or explosives that would be necessary for mining.

They didn't use orbital bombardment because they didn't bing the necessary weapons payload for i, because doing so would have been prohibitively expensive. That part made perfect sense.

That makes sense except in the final battle they have that giant flying ship and like 100 little ships.  They could have built 10 tiny ships and 1 medium ship that can all fly high and then used the rest of that space for weapon materials.

They make it painfully obvious during the movie that the mineral is worth the cost so, again, evil corporation would do everything they could to protect their investment.  They would not fight fair therefore they would make weapons the Navi would never see coming.

It's much cheaper in every sense to make 10 missiles that fire from a remote location than 100 of those little flying machines.  Hell, instead of paying to transport and sustain those 100's of military personal, they could have used all those resources to transport weapons and weapon materials.  I think it's a safe assumption to assume that 1 missle costs less to transport than 1 human.

Even sniper rifles and turrets would do better than what they had.  I mean really, how cost effective is it to build a giant mech with a giant knife?  How many materials and weight limits did that waste?

The ships were manufactured on site except for the big one! And they didn't have facilities to produce the chemicals necessary for making weapons!

And actually, it's pretty clar by the end that mining the unobtainium is no longer cost-effective.

And no, it's not a safe assumptin at all - how much do you think one of those missiles weighs? As a guess.

-edit-

Yeah, lets say all that stuff is too heavy, just go with covering the area in pesticide or other bio weapons. It's infinetely lighter than all of that other stuff and cheaper.

What does it matter if I destroy the local flora and fauna with machinery or chemicals?

You're forgetting that this corporation doesn't operate in a vacuum.

1. That Pandorans are intelligent has already gotten back to Earth, and there's a sympathy movement amongst company stockholders. Publically traded companies don't get to commit genocide all willy-nilly!

2. What coporation in the world is able to produce chemical weapons without being sanctioned by a government (which these guys were not)? Much less transport them!

3. All of the recruits were ex-military, with the body of them apparently being Marines.

4. Where are they supposed to get chemical refineries to make more explosives?

5. Did you not notice that they already bombed the shit out of the Na'vi? Did you miss the part where that tree the size of the Empire State Building caught fire and collapsed?

6. They do not have the necessary materials to carry out the operaiton yu're talking about!

7. They do not have the financial backing of stockholders to commit genocide!

8. They do not having the financial backing necessary to bring an armored division with them! There was one ship in the whole movie capable of achieving escape velocity!

9. There have been two flights to Pandora - two - because round trip as I recall takes more than a decade and they've only got the one ship capable of interstellar travel.

10. I looked it up in the scriptment - transporting anything to Pandora costs ONE MILLION DOLLARS A POUND