^^ Darn...I'll have to check it out at on IMAX the next time I'm on travel...hopefully, it is still showing.

BTW...Avatar pulled in a MONSTER number for Christmas Day...

Sherlock Holmes - $24,860,000
Avatar - $23,500,000

That is a stunning number, given what it posted last week....there is going to be a 10-15% drop for the weekend frame. I don't think that's ever been done for a blockbuster film of this magnitude before. I think the movie can touch $350-400 million domestically, and yes...$1 billion WW. It looks like Fox's gamble will pay off in a big way.

I was rooting for the humans. I wanted them to wipe out the tribals. The spiritualism pissed me off as did the fact that they thought the humans were stupid. Not advisable considering they were smart enough to travel to another planet. But then again supiriority via mysticism always pisses me off.

Let alone the Deus Ex Machina at the end. How pradictable, the humans lose and "they go back to their dying planet". I highly doubt that, the humans would be back in a month and own all the aliens from orbit. Actually thats reminds we, why didn't they bomb the navi from orbit again?

BTW I actually really enjoyed the movie. But the plot was very much predictable and safe. The film functions as a visual feast, but as a narrative it didn't make any impact on me.

...It takes us six years to make that trip to Pandora, so it'd be a dozen years, bare minimum, before humans came back. But they won't be coming back, because it has already proven itself a bad investment, and there's no reson to come back when the cost outweighs the benefit.

Why didn't they bomb them from orbit? This group may have some military ordinance but it's not the military. Whether or not they had the equipment for military bombardment and whether or not tht would have harmed he material they were seeking out is never made clear but it's safe to assume no for the former or yes for the latter, or just tht there's a degree of subhuman barbarism to which the people of this corporation won't sink. I can't imagine rooting for the colonials, here, much less rooting for them to commit genocide.

And.... superiority via mysticism wasn't really the point. The true threat (the outfitted shuttle that had been turned into a giant bomb) was taken out by a Marine using two grenades and a missile. Remember?

People fight wars over resourves all the time. If the unobtanium is that valuable humans will be back. Especially if their planet is dying as it was said at the end.

I was talking about the attitude of the aliens not the actual fight. A race that was essentially tribal would have been far more caustious when dealing with such a technological threat.

The bomb ship was taken out by grenades yes it was the deus ex machine that gave the na'vi the victory. And that was triggered by their God in the machine (oh not machine trees).

Dues Ex Machina gets a free pass if a large part of the film is about how there actually is a God that exists in the form of a biological machine. That also means it's not really spiritualism, since it's more of a biological symbiotic arrangement on a grand scale.

Anyways, I'm not the only one that thought the Navi were hot, right?

James Cameron actualy made a field guide for Avatar, you're free to give it a read: the unobtainium seems to be primarily useful for making war. Since a private corporation already failed (possibly went bankrupt) searching for this stuff, it's probably goig to be written off. There's nothing in the movie that suggests humanity will be back, and everything that suggests they won't. That's all there is. And there's definitely nothing suggsting that the unobtainium will somehow help humanity survive o the war-torn world of Earth.

Why would they be more cautious if they had o idea what they were fighting? After hometree burned they were basically ready to give up because they had no way to fight, until the Na'vi version of Jesus showed up. I think that they were pretty realistic about the whole thing, given their ability to understand what they were fighting. I don't think any aboriginal peoples in the history of the planet have been "more cautious" sut because the enemy was more technologically advanced, at least not until an enormous show of force. You will recall that the Battle of Isandlwana was essentially a direct parallel to Avatar: an enormous indigenous force with far inferior weaponry overcomes a smaller but much more technologically advanced colonial army. There was nothing "cautious" about it, though it was pretty awesome.

"Deus ex machina" is literally correct here, but that's not actually what the term means. If they've spent the whole movie establish Eywa as this god who communicates with the creatures of the planet through the trees, then an act by hr is not deus ex machina according to our understanding of storytelling, especially in that she's not the one who resolved the conflict: Jake was.

oh yeah. Unobtanium... stupid name or awesome name?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unobtainium

You tell me

*reads wikipage* Yeah, it's a comical name for something incredible, which is why I'm asking - So was using the term unobtanium for the mined substance on Pandora stupid or awesome?