The humans are almost all over the top comicbook evil. The silly parallels to the current wars and issues with the rainforests are obvious and boring. The story… well.. what story? It’s so predictable.
I found the Na’vi pretty unlikeable with their silly religion constantly getting in the way, with a few forced nods at the end hinting that there’s something to it. The doctor’s deathbed admittance to its reality was pretty lame. It was only when the humans went all super evil destroying their massive tree that they start to be tolerable, if only because the humans are shitheads.
The 3D-ness was nice, mostly. The floating seeds were always blurred and royally messed with my eyes, a few other things like hands waving in front of the screen, and people in the foreground also got blurred like this. It kind of worked once you got used to it, but I didn’t feel like it added anything special to the film.
It’s imperialism, not “humans being super evil.” As a member of what was the largest empire during the years of traditional imperialism, I’d expect you to know more about it. Imperialism was led by corporations like the one in the movie. They did what the corporation in the movie did to the Na’vi and Pandora to the native people of wherever and that land. See: Seminole Wars, West/East India Companies, Colonial Africa, etc. It’s something that still goes on in less direct ways (i.e. Iraq, Vietnam, etc.), and it’s something that most of us seem to accept pretty easily. What a lot of the stuff in this genre (Avatar included) tries to do is get people to see how wrong what’s happening is.
Now, onto that Na’vi’s “silly religion.” That’s the most unsuitable name I could think of. If you bothered to read my post, you’d see it’s one of the few belief systems that actually relate to reality and how it works. Their whole “circle of life” and “interconnectedness” system of ideas isn’t just a way to approach living one’s life, it’s the way the world actually works. I’d hardly call that a few “forced nods” at the end. It’s a major theme throughout. The concept of a link between creatures is always present, whether it’s with a horse, a banshee, or a tree. The concept of the forest making up a “brain” of sorts was introduced early on with the scientist dude hypothesizing that there some electrochemical reaction going on in the trees, and it was developed throughout the movie, both on the Na’vi and human side. It sounds like what the movie was saying didn’t quite line up with your personal beliefs, and while there’s nothing wrong with that, attempting to ignore parts of it to suit your argument doesn’t really accomplish anything.
Oh, I forgot about the “comic book evil” comment. If you look at a lot of the stuff involving the corporation, it’s incredibly general. The thing they want is “unobtanium.” Both the leader and the security dude are complete caricatures. Why? It allows this story to make it’s focus imperialism in general, and not one specific case of it. Because of how generic that portion of the setting is, it allows references to various points in history and justifications used for things that were occurring then as well as allusions to countless pieces of film and literature with similar themes. If you look at other works such as Dances with Wolves and Heart of Darkness, it’s very easy to associate each piece with a specific conflict (with those two being associated with Native Americans and the Congo, respectively). This can limit the scope of the reader/viewer’s thinking, and undeniably limits the message the piece is making.