Why "Avatar "wasn't all that good.

Summary: Not worth the hyperbolic praise I keep hearing about.

Story: Set in the future where mankind invades a alien planet for a very valuable mineral worth millions. Our main hero Jake Sully is sent out to use an "avatar" of a native alien of a planet so that he must learn how it is like to be a "Na'vi" so that one day he will tell them that they are going to be invaded. Jake then becomes attached to his avatar life and then has to decide whether or not to care for the Na'vi.

Is the storyline good?

Not quite, to me it seemed like an "Americans are bastards but everyone else are good guys" type of movies. It is quite comparable to Pocahontas when the Invaders think they are the good guys and that the natives are savages. The movie also has blatant environmentalist concerns, come on, save the land rather than let them gather/destroy natural resources? please, I don't need any more tree huger movie.

You can tell this movie has some serious racist issues, if you made the "Na'vi" any other color than blue, then you would have the whole African community up on you.

The antagonists in this movie are your stereotypical testosterone fueled knucklehead who doesn't know how to get what they want without using deadly force. Sure, they had to get the materials from under the tree, but did they have to blow up the mother tree? Have fun cleaning up that mess to get what's under it. It seems like they're solution to every problem is to blow it up. I mean people like the antagonist of Avatar just don't exist. If they did, then the middle east would be a giant crater by now. You would have to be incredibly retarded to be like the bad guy of this movie.

How about the character/environment design?

The na'vi like I mentioned earlier are pretty much a minority race made blue and in CG, mostly resembling Africans. The language of the na'vi also greatly resembles Swahili.

As for the creature designs, most of them resembled prehistoric creatures such as triceratops, pterodactyls, etc. Others look like animals we have today but more retarded/ferocious (savage) like dogs, horses, etc. One creature that always bugged me was the one that looked like a big lizard and then when a predator (presumably) would go near it, it would turn into a mini helicopter and just float around, in hopes to scare the predator away. Of course they designed it just to look pretty, but for functioning purpose, I feel sorry for the creature, I really doubt the predators of that forest would be stopped by that display.

The whole planet, pretty much looks like Africa and that's about it, oh but wait, all in CG.

Sure the movie was pretty but if you think about it, the whole movie was most likely all done through green screens and computers.

How about the orchestral score?

It was pretty decent, but came on way too often. I mean in Left for Dead, the orchestral music comes in at the right time but in Avatar, some intense orchestral score would start playing even when something small happened (see first horse training scene for example). To be outdone musically by a videogame is downright ridiculous.

Was 3D worth it?

Okay, so I was pretty impressed with the 3D for the first 10 minutes of the movie cause some things actually did look like it was coming out realistically. After that, things seriously meshed and I could have sworn my glasses were broken.

tl;dr

I must admit that this movie was really pretty but the hamfisted storyline makes it unbelievably average. Trust me, if I would want to watch a movie with environmentalist undertones I would much rather watch "Princess Mononoke" again, at least that had intelligent antagonists with a darn good reason with what they're doing and a much more gripping storyline. The storyline of Avatar felt way to forced and made you ask yourself, "why?" 2/5 (poor)

Pros
Graphics

Cons
Forced storyline (darn you Al Gore)
Racist
Bad music score
too much hyperbolic praise
Darn 3D cashcow movie