The opening montage seemed pointless to me. I suspect it was designed to provide the audience with knowledge of the main character's motivations for embarking on the mission, but with the general tone and direction of the movie it ended up being completely irrelevant anyway, and at the time seemed to me as if it should have come at the end of another movie detailing the story of this young ex-marine and what caused him to become so compelled to finish his deceased brother's 'duties'—and speaking of which, I found myself struck by the stark resemblance to the typical "I must carry on in my father's/brother's footsteps" crapola that's served as the motivator for almost every do-gooder inept adventurer kid in animated works or kids books I've ever seen. So that started me off on a great note. (I mean, even with the clarifying line where the unnamed businessman tells Sully that the pay will be very good, the line of reasoning behind the decision is still set heavily with the blood-relative deal, what since the corporal actually didn't indicate that the remark registered at all.)
Incidentally, the opening line of the movie—"You don't dream in cryo"—instantly reminded me of the opening line to Pitch Black: "They say you don't dream in cryo," whereupon Riddick elaborates on how that statement is basically hogwash. The frick is wrong with you, James Cameron, you directed fracking Aliens for cryin' into your malted milk.
Which is why Ms. Weaver showed up in the cast list, I guess. Hi there, Ripley. (Her character was named "Shipley" before "Augustine", by the way. Hunh.)
Then we get to this scientific outpost thingamajig, and it's under total military lockdown, and Sully is actually being shipped along with an entire detachment of Marines. Also we find out that he's a paraplegic. Oh har har, we already know he's going to be running around as one of the indigenous. I'm sure you can guess what's coming up first.
Tour of the facility, actually. And here we meet the standard-issue member of the Geek Squad (probably card-carrying, too), who introduces himself in the classic yet so so cliché method of "*remark designed to completely unsubtly announce my presence*; oh, sorry, I'm Jeff Bobson." (not his actual name) I hate this. In reality the only people who use this approach are the people who wait specifically for every opportunity they can get to use this approach, and it's designed to imply that your experience and wisdom outweigh who you even are, and most certainly are more important than the identity of whom you are addressing since obviously you already know such trivial information. Real people worth anything say "hello" first. I mean heck, even when I'm being creepy to someone I greet them before saying jack crap. Letting someone turn around and bump into your chest because they didn't know you were there is made all the more easier to bear if you say "well hi there!" right afterwards.
And then we meet Ripley Shipley Dr. Grace Augustine just as she's coming out of a cryopod Avatar control unit thing. Augustine starts out being cast as sort of a hardnosed bitchy woman and throughout the movie is made into a more gentle person, which I found completely aggravating. People don't change that much in three months, especially when three months is condensed to forty-five minutes.
Anyway. Griping about Sully being a marine ensues (expected), and we're off to see the Wizard, who in this case is Col. Miles Quaritch, and who came up with that last name I'll never know. (Which is a good thing, too. If I knew, I'd perform illegal surgery on their reproductive organs without the use of anesthesia.) Just name him Quarrel and be done with it. Man is immediately broadcast as a know-it-all shoot-em-up jarhead with a grudge, and I didn't appreciate being told exactly who I'm supposed to dislike over an hour before I'm even supposed to need to dislike them at all. And then naturally we spent the next hour pretending I wasn't told anything and I'm still supposed to like them kinda even though I know I'm not.
And speaking of instantly-profiled villains, how about the Mouth of the Corporate World running Ops up there? Giovanni Ribisi, I believe. (Hello, someone played Pokémon too much.) You throw lines like "I don't make the rules, kid" about business stuff in a movie billed as a planet-saver, and that means I pretty much know exactly what the entire rest of the movie will end up being. Spoil your own damn movie, why don'tcha. Thanks a crapload.
So we go on with things, and the avatar-control deal with Sully is processed (I refuse to call him Jake; makes me think of American Dragon), and we get the first merger. And here's where I first rolled my head back and stared at the ceiling, because what does the orderly, environment-conscious, procedure-aware corporal do?
Jump off the table and, after wobbling a bit (because we are impersonating reality here, wouldn't want to make it seem too cliché), takes off and runs a mile. Because anyone who's lost the use of their legs, when asked what they'd do if they got their legs back again, will say "I'd run a mile," and not only is that totally crap (they'd keel over from exhaustion due to a complete and total lack of stamina from being forced to be sedentary for God knows how long), but naturally this avatar has the stamina to run that mile because he was grown in a tank.
Oh wait.
But that's not the thing that got me. The thing that got me was the fact that this orderly, environment-conscious, procedure-aware corporal immediately trashes everything he knows, including patience, in favor of acting like a total seven year old the instant he's shifted bodies. You know, I know it's a tragedy when someone loses the use of their limbs, and I know it would be an unspeakable joy to suddenly get them back, but please please please can we be FRACKING REAL about it?
Oh yeah. And everyone else in the lab monitoring the avatar bodies is apparently incompetent. Right.
So we get outside and finish the run and oh hey there's Ripley and she's genial and completely out of character.
I mean Grace. Not Ripley. Silly me. (She does call him 'numbnuts', but come on, it was in good fun. She hated his guts last night for being a pawn of the corporation. What happened to that resentment?)
Moving on, got an expedition to the forest to gather samples, do some interesting testing with the tree roots, Sully wanders off like a good little marine on patrol (don't they teach you not to do that?), gets stuck between a rock and a hard place, jumps off a cliff into a pool at the base of a waterfall (boy is he fortunate that the pool wasn't the shallow rocky one or the movie'd be over right then), and is now lost and forced to spend the entire night in this forbidding forest because naturally with our advanced technology we weren't smart enough to put fracking tracking devices in the avatar bodies.
So. Sully loses his gun and immediately fashions himself a spear, which is useful for about ten seconds and then when we get back to him it's night and he's turning the spear into a torch. But during the daytime treck, he almost gets his ass sniped by a Na'Vi archer chick in the trees, except her hand is mysteriously stayed by a large sentient dandelion seed jellyfish. Again, Sully's the main character. He can't die yet. That would be dumb. (Seriously, she was just gonna shoot his ass. I thought there were diplomatic relations being established here?)
Anyway, it's night and Sully now has to fend off a huge pack of nightwolf panther things with armor plating stuff on them. And he's doing okay, kind of, but suddenly is assisted by the sniper chick from before, who drives off the entire pack by killing the exact same amount that Sully had taken down.
No wait, she hissed a little. That must have been it. (I'm calling team effort on this one.)
She also douses his light, and he's all like "bitch why you hatin'," and she's all like "you are baby," and things are progressing quite smoothly (not) when a flock of those dandelion jellyfish land all over Sully. I figured it was because the avatars were half-Na'Vi and half-human, so they tasted different and kinda exotic (butterflies taste through their feet; I was correlating), but no, Sully is now chosen and so he must be taken before the tribe.
Who react exactly as Sniper Chick did. Which is reasonable. Nothing to snipe at here.
inb4 i see wut u did thar
Long hostile meeting, lots of Lost In Translation going on (didn't help that the subtitles were in German, of all things, but I think it actually worked in the movie's favor because I knew as much as the other humans did), Old Mama comes out, bada bing bada boom Jake Sully you must now prove you are one of us.
Wait hang on hang on one second people now. That's the wrong order. Sully's supposed to be the one demanding that he get to prove he's trustworthy. Instead he's told he will now earn their trust like it or not? Like, if you're around people who don't trust you, that's not how it works. Granted, it's 'different' because Sully was touched by the Tree, but come on now. Show me a self-insertion fanfiction that doesn't have a Chosen One motif and I'll show you a romantic Mary Sue story, and ... well, I won't say this isn't one. We just haven't got there yet.
So Sully spends his first night among the Na'Vi, and he goes to sleep like they do, except that means he wakes up back in his body and damn does dude ever get any sleep at all? Also notice that they never showed a scene of the crew reentering their avatars at earlier than ten in the morning; tell me the Na'Vi would have been intelligent enough to figure something was weird about a body that just didn't wake up no matter what happened to it.
Setting that detail aside (there's a lot of that sort of thing going on, unfortunately), we're now presented with a series of scenes summarising the three months Sully spent with Omaticaya tribe (whose language sounded to be very similar to the dialect of various Cherokee and other Appalachian dialects I've heard, homm hmm) interspersed with some 'real life' stuff involving debriefs and intel-sharing and one scene where Sully comments he doesn't know who he is any longer which painfully foreshadowed the end of the movie (dammit I hate when foreshadowing is that blatant), and so on.
And then eventually it gets to the end, and right as the marine people are getting itchy about nothing to shoot at (great job stereotyping, I'm sure the boys overseas appreciate that; take the damned yellow ribbon off your car if you like this movie, by the way, it sure as hell don't mean anything to you and probably didn't in the first place), our boy Sully finally becomes a Man of the Omaticaya and naturally has won the heart of the princess, and so they're mated right there in the damned forest.
And here I'd like to take a moment to bring up that pissy guy who kept cropping up. You know, Tsu'tey, the aggressive snide one who seemed to go out of his way to hate Sully? That wasn't just prejudice against an outsider, there, as I originally thought. Oh no no no, apparently he was also fracking betrothed to the princess. I.e., this deal was set up long before Corporal Jake Sully touched down on Pandora? I.e., this was kind of an established thing. I.e., and I might be wrong on this, but I didn't get the feel the Na'Vi were that ready to break tradition and clan law like that.
So no, he weren't just a guy who woke up on the wrong side of the bed every mornin'. Tell you what. Let someone come in who you don't even know, let them steal your girl and go all the way, and you tell me if you don't get fracking pissy watching it happen. See how much you want to stay a happy camper.
Surprised they never showed him singing La donna e mobile. (Opera song. Means "the woman is fickle". Good job reinforcing that stereotype, too. Thanks, Hollywood.)
And then the next morning the bulldozers come. Only one comment here.
FernGully did it better.
The Evil Colonel has begun to move (oooh, big surprise there, who'ld'a thunk?), and the tribe is in an uproar. Also it's somehow Sully's fault. He gets attacked by the Jilted Lover, proves his dominance (because he's the hero, of course), and is jerked out by Quarrel. I mean Quaritch. Whatever. His avatar collapses, and it's defended by his new lover, making Tsu'Tey that much more P.O.'d at life. Sully and co. buy some time in the human zone, go back in, try to be honest (cue theme music) and now even princess girl is brokenhearted and mad and crap. (La donna e mobile, anyone?)
Of course it wasn't like the entire fracking tribe didn't know these people were humans in Na'Vi bodies already. 'Course not. The research team (by the way, how did they all get in there?) is now a pack of deceivers. Naturally. So they're tied up (very well, I might add) to watch the ensuing battle, which is of course a farce. Big tree go boom. Also stuff happened afterwards. And Sully is forcibly removed from the control unit and confined with the rest of the research team.
BUT WAIT. Michelle Rodriguez to the rescue? (Poor girl is so utterly typecast.) WE'RE FREE and escaping with a pod we stole which happens to contain control units, so back in we go! Oh yeah, and Sully tames the big sky beast because it's a long shot and the only way to earn the tribe's respect and the rejected hero always has to do something totally badass and screw it, it was really just a way to get back into whassername's loincloth.
And now we get to the action part of the movie. And it was action. Fairly predictable action—Na'Vi amass forces, humans see it and strike, informant gives tip, humans come flying in, Na'Vi counterattack, tide swings towards Na'Vi in the air, tide swings to humans everywhere, tide swings back when Mother Earth pitches in and the battle is won except HANG ON PEOPLE SHOW'S NOT OVER, we got front row seats to the final fight between Sully and his nemesis which is actually a metaphor for him dying as a human and what.
Oh right, and the Na'Vi win and the humans go back to Earth, "their dying planet" i see wut u dud thar, 'cause that's totally how it happened. Yep, the Indians won and the nasty Europeans were sent back to England and Spain.
Oh wait. That's right. We're humans, damn it all, we just come back with bigger guns and blow things to shit. But they don't show that in the movie because it would be a sad ending and also Sully wouldn't get the girl.
Which, might I remind you, would still cause tension down the road even if the evil planet-raping humans never came back BECAUSE no matter how much Tsu'tey would be forced to respect Sully for being THE ONE, there would come a time when he was a little bit tipsy and he'd forget all the crap that happened and remember all the crap that Sully stole from him and THEN we'd be in for it, oh ho ho yes.
So, what don't I like about the movie? Uh, lessee.
The movie.
Look, if you're going to write allegory, just write allegory. Pilgrim's Progress was a great book, but does it make for a good movie? Hell no. Same here.
And also can we stop with these instantly blossoming relationships, please? I mean damn.
