My criticism of Avatar
I thoroughly enjoyed Avatar, but it suffers from a pretty huge flaw.
In it, James Cameron lampshades the MacGuffin which basically means that the bad guys are bad for no reason other than, well, it’s fun to be a bad guy. Gratuitious evil is silly. And that made the movie flawed for me.
Otherwise, there was an amazing economy of storytelling. The movie was three hours long, but apart from the aforementioned lampshaded MacGuffin, no detail was wasted. And it’s a movie I’d enjoy watching again, just to notice what I missed the first time around.
And plus, when I watched it, it was subtitled in Japanese. Which meant that in the scenes with Na’vi-language dialogue, the subtitles were in Japanese only, which meant I had to read them very quickly to figure out what those people were talking about.
It was amazing eye-candy to me. Those giant giant trees were just amazing, plus they climb UP those and look down… just wow.
The story, well, it’s a trope, I suppose. A known thing, it’s been criticized for what it is in numerous other versions already, so you just accept that going in.
Aside from the nature scenes though I have to say those lab monitors were awesome.