Yeah, I agree with gwahir. I just found the Navi incredibly uncompelling. Maybe I would have been able to take them a little more seriously if they weren't such an incredibly thinly veiled pastiche of Native American references and generic, shallow "noble savage"/"respect for nature" stereotypes. More effort should have been put into making them and their culture truly alien, and different from anything we've ever seen on Earth. Yeah, it would have been hard--it would have required a lot of intelligent, innovative conceptual design and writing. But if any movie had the capability to pull it off, this one did.
And yeah, it also made me roll my eyes that the Pandoran wildlife was all "space versions" of Earth wildlife. You had your space horses, space wolves, space panthers, space pterodactyls, a big space dragon, and so forth. With a guy like James Cameron, and such a huge budget and project development cycle, and such an imaginative vision behind it all, I was kind of hoping for some alien life that was a little more innovative and truly alien. Not taking Earth animals, adding an extra set of legs and some long tentacle-ears, making them blue with glow-in-the-dark spots, and calling it a day. But while the wildlife was fairly unimaginative, it was nothing compared to the Navi themselves--nearly identical to human beings except bigger, bluer, with tails and broad noses and elf ears. I guess Cameron felt he needed them to be so human-like so audiences could relate to them? I don't know.
EDIT:
I dunno, I guess different people have different standards for what makes a setting rich or engrossing. I mean yeah, they never acted so ridiculously that I was jolted out of the movies reality, and of course I agree that the setting was rich and engrossing in visual terms, but I couldn't really get into the film on a deep level because of the flat acting and crappy dialog. For me, real immersion requires that the human elements as well as the visual elements be compelling. The acting/dialog/characters don't have to be Oscar-worthy but they do have to be good enough to be convincing. That's what makes Aliens (for instance) a much better movie than Avatar, IMO. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed watching Avatar. I don't regret spending money on my ticket. It was fun. It looked great, the battles were cool, all that. But it would have been a much better movie if the characters (especially Sam Worthington) were more compelling. To me, an eye-rolling plot and unimpressive acting/dialog surrounded by really cool CGI environments isn't enough to create a world that's truly engrossing.Originally Posted by UnreasonablyReasonable
Frankly, I don't buy this. Since he couldn't produce compelling characters, dialog, etc., in the first movie, I doubt the sequels will be much better. I would love to be proven wrong on that point, but when a director shows so little concern for those aspects in one movie (especially one that he's apparently been working on for so long and cares about so much), I'm skeptical that it was because he was just "setting the scene" for sequels where he will do a better job. I don't expect much of an improvement in these areas in the sequels.
I don't think this analogy holds up; the characters in New Hope may have been fairly steretypical (farmboy who wants to see the wider world, self-interested rogue with a heart of gold, etc.), but their actors do a fairly good job and the dialog isn't cringe-inducing. The characters and plot in New Hope are a good bit more compelling than anything in Avatar; New Hope is a much better-executed even if it's built just as solidly on well-worn archetypes. And while New Hope's plot isn't anything special, I think it is still a good bit better than Avatar's in concept as well as execution.
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