Quark's

When Avatar first came out, a friend of mine described it as "Pocahontas with a tech demo" and I've had a hard time enjoying it since. The story is really similar.

I disliked Avatar in theaters, but chalked it up to wearing glasses and seeing it in 3D. I figured with the colors desaturated and the uncomfortable double glasses set up that I just made a poor choice of format.

About 4 years ago I decided to rewatch Avatar at home without the 3D gimmick.

It was worse. Everyone acts in ways that seem to serve the plot not their motivations. The heroes were all devoid of personality and a rigid unsmiling caricature of duty and honor that there was nothing likeable about them. Jake Sully has no personality other than being mystified by the world. The tall smurfs just stare longingly, tell Jake he's dumb and sigh about the importance of the Earth.

The villains were so over the top on their moustache twirling I liked their bravado so much more than the heroes. After an hour of Smurfs telling us trees are very important in a condescending way, I wasn't against blowing up a tree.

The battle at the end made no sense. Why the space faring race didn't just drop a some rocks on the site is baffling to me. Why didn't they use their range and technology advantage? They just ran as close as possible to people with spears.

I think it's just a little too heavy handed for me, and feels like many aspects of the plot weren't thought out.

The only good thing about this Avatar was a decent videogame tie-in.

It's pretty clear what's going on here - they deliberately made the blandest, most derivative story they could, so you can turn off your brain. I guess that might work for porn films and to some degree for normal movies too, but I can't get behind using blandness so excessively.

The CGI ain't saving that. (I don't even like those aliens personally.) I find that this thing and the sequel being the most grossing films of all time, to be an insult to filmmaking and especially storytelling.