AVATAR: My thoughts (pretty much) exactly ;)

From Ben, commenting on a post at The Millions:

All your remarks about the film’s various failings seem accurate. You must be aware, though, that 95% of the human race–specifically the 95% with magic in their souls–will disagree with you. I think Avatar might better be described as a ride than a film. Our investment in the outcome of on-screen conflict and struggle derives less from identification with fleshed-out characters and politically nuanced themes (the classical tools) than from a very physical, embodied sense of placement in the action, which ends up yielding powerful emotional identification anyway. The sacrificed element, and the element on which you concentrate most of your review, is memorability. There is very little, afterward, to talk about. Narrative, dialogue, anything that persists in word-memory, which is mostly what we’ve got. This is a film of pure sensation. But it seems clear to me–it’s borne out both by the critical reception the film has received and its ongoing box-office success–that Avatar is extremely successful at imparting the sensation of elevated wonder it sets out to impart. And I have no problem with a juggernaut of wonder-creation like this promoting a simple message of environmentalism and anti-imperialism. I think the case could even be made that the utter schematic simplicity of the framing moral struggle, its reliance on comfortable archetypes of accepted mythic power, allows a kind of total submission to sensation hard to achieve when the critical faculty is more actively engaged. The tight correspondence of Pangea-creatures to Earth-creatures or myth-creatures (horse, bull, big red dragon) is probably deliberate. Our immersion in Avatar-as-embodied-experience relies on the presence of familiar anchor points–most obviously, we have to find the Na’vi super hot. The writing was shitty, no question, but mainly just in being so bland. It was never enough to throw me out of the story. In fact, I think dry cleverness of the kind that generated iconic lines in T2, Jurassic Park, etc would have been out of place here, just as it would have been out of place in Princess Mononoke, another environmental parable that traffics in elevated wonder (although with far more subtlety and ambiguity). If the writing were good, Avatar could have been much more enjoyable for the class of viewers who pay close attention to that. Future films that reach this level of visual imagination and accomplishment might actually be memorable, too, at which time Avatar might be recalled as a kitschy artifact of the early days of 3D. But this was seriously one of the best rides I’ve ever gone on, and I’m really glad I was able to suspend whatever needed suspending in order to get my $16 worth, because, damn, $16.
P.S. You have no magic in your soul, you crotchety bastard. When the giant spinning machines of industry are closing in on the heart of the forest, are you really thinking “poor strategic planning, should be dropping logs”???

From Ryan at Freshman Denial:

The Top 5 Reasons People Say Avatar Sucks (And Why They’re Wrong)

5. Unobtanium is a stupid name for that element.

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4. The characters are flat and one-dimensional.

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3. The dialogue is campy and corny and bad.

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2. The acting was bad.

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1. The plot is cliche and predictable.  

This is probably the most common piece of criticism I have heard regarding the film. I hear it over and over, and continually I repeat: a cliche story in an imaginative new universe with new characters, a new setting, and a plethora of mind-blowing intricacies ceases to be negatively cliche.  

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