Just saw 'Avatar' today and after all they hype and comparisons to 'Pocahontas' and 'Dances with Wolves', it struck me why people are avoiding the obvious: Jim Cameron plays 'World of Warcraft'!*
C'mon - the blue people are the Draenei from WoW. He is a warrior/hunter - fine. Level 10: you get an upgraded bow. Level 40: you get a flying mount, I mean c'mon people- he took a raid party to go find his first flying dragon. Level 60: made a special tribal member.
Level 70: you get an upgraded uber-mount. The total immersion in the CGI 'world' - all from WoW. In fact, there were so many parallels in this especially long movie - I expected to get home and find I had leveled in the game personally! Three hours is a long time to not gain any experience for the effort. (Other facets pulled from WoW: Machinegun toting Mechs, riding sabercats, fluorescent plant world)
It was a fine movie - and if I were 12, perhaps I would think of this as a seminole moment like 'Star Wars' was for me, but I doubt it. At least Star Wars had some story that I hadn't seen (not like I saw 'Hidden Fortress' before seeing Star Wars) and characters with which I could relate.
'Avatar' on the other hand was a regurgitated plot in the most simplest of methods but dressed up all very pretty. And I will give you that - outside of some physics problems I have with complete CG worlds (that aren't going to be fixed anytime soon WETA and ILM, no matter how much you spend) - it was very nice to look 'at', but it didn't show me anything new.
Over all - it's still an A- for me but with a note of caution: its only worth seeing if you don't mind 3 hours of a slow story line and you just want to skip to the finish line with your butt intact. (slow because you are three steps ahead the whole time - Jim doesn't mind fore-shadowing the hell out of the smallest of points and making it painfully obvious). But it is pretty - did I say that already?
Maybe next time I can send my avatar into the theater for me - I could use the leveling time...
*right before publishing I found this link that nails it down quite well (so there goes *my* original blog post :-(
