I haven’t seen the DVD and don’t plan to buy it. I saw it in the theater. It was awesome.
Avatar isn’t the sort of thing you’re going to enjoy if you pick at it a lot, but the I found many of the criticisms raised in this thread weak. The knife was on the mech because the major likes knives. He’s a knife person. Stabbing things is his way of blowing off steam, especially when the things he’s stabbing have faces that he can stab.
The Navi didn’t accept the avatars, they knew what they were-- if not how they worked-- and never let any in the tribe until the hero was anointed as the chosen one. There was a whole subplot (made up of about three lines of dialogue and a snooty look) where one of the science nerds was jealous of the hero.
The girl turns out to be a princess because it’s an epic. That’s why it’s never a farmer’s daughter. Farmers’ daughters in epics are called scenery.
While I haven’t seen Ferngully, I have seen Dances With Wolves, but I wasn’t referencing other movies while I watched Avatar. When I thought about anything other than the story and images, it was mainly two things.
First, and what sucked me into the movie is that finally I was watching a movie that was acquainted with the basic science fiction tropes. There’s a lot of science fiction shows I’ve skipped, so I may have missed some good ones, but whenever I try watching one I end up being annoyed at, say, wooshing noises in a vacuum. Man, that does it every time for me. Or big yellow gasoline explosions in a vacuum. Also stupid.
Avatar hit a lot of what I consider high quality tropes early on. Like how the air and food was poisonous. That’s actually what you’d expect, right? Humans are evolved for a particular ecosystem, they shouldn’t be able to just happy asshole around on every planet they come across without so much as a dust mask, but that’s what you saw every. single. week. on Star Trek. The hardware in Avatar looked like it was designed to work, not put together to look as cool as possible given a particular budget. (I can’t actually remember what particular piece of hardware I was looking at here, probably the landing craft.) Oh, yeah, suspended animation, that’s a bit of a chestnut, but if it’s possible, yes, you’d want to be asleep during your multi-year voyage. Unlike in, say, Star Wars, where Luke hops in his freaking tiny fighter and jaunts over to another system like he’s taking the highway to the next town over.
And then they use an injoke calling unobtainium “Unobtainium”! Man, that was genius. They won me over and I was totally willing to swallow whatever baloney they were serving for the rest of the film. Human DNA + Alien DNA = A-OK? Sure! Planetary organic internet with hair USB ports? Why not! Human-like aliens that happen to have titties and the same nudity taboos as us? OK, my eyes rolled a trifle. But the point is, they tried, and when they tried, and showed that they tried, they won this bitter, burnt, and easily bored ex-science fiction fan over and I had a good time watching the pretty pictures.
The other thing I was thinking about was how the hero’s life was sort of similar to being addicted to some sort of escapism, like games or fiction. His life was pretty crap and he was living vicariously. His hygiene appeared to be suffering, he would rather go online than eat. I could identify.
I’d still enjoy at least all that above, even on the small screen. Admittedly, most people wouldn’t give a tin fart. Still, so many science fiction movies are these boring atmospheric jobs where the film makers act like they have a mission to be weird for the sake of being weird OR they just make a western or buddy movie or war movie and put it in space and don’t even bother running the script past a high school science teacher. As far as I know (and IMHO, natch), Avatar is the first big action/adventure movie marketed as science fiction that actually meets science fiction criteria, ever, and should get some credit as such. Again, You * Give < 1*Tin Fart.