In something hearkening back to my ancient tradition of reviewing bad movies on LJ, here's my review of Avatar.

Call Me Joe? Dances with Wolves? Ferngully? If you've read or seen one of these, you've seen Avatar -- albeit now it has a Cameron-esque over-the-top suite of visual effects brought by an inflated budget.
Sam Worthington turns in a strong performance of the empty-brained jarhead going native when personality-transferred into an alien body and culture. Sigourney Weaver, as always, delivers with her strong acting chops. Perhaps the alien anatomy keeps the computer-generated characters from looking uncanny, because they're not supposed to be human. Dramatically, the film hits all of the expected notes: Scenery-chewing evil corporate magnates, ignorant military assholes itching for conflict, and the usual pacifistic, animistic indigenous people who live in harmony with an interconnected world consciousness. Naturally, the scientists (Sigourney Weaver and Stephen Lang) are sympathetic but useless, and only an uneducated, action-oriented, tormented man can release his inner spirit and take on the White Man's Burden of saving the childlike indigenous people. (Perhaps the scientists are useless and helpless because the movie itself falls down on any level of scientific scrutiny -- the native life all use secondary breathing siphons on their abdomens, except of course for the humanoids, because they naturally have to have noses and mouths like us. And the humans of this future have the technology to grow hybridized human-alien bodies and transfer consciousness into them, yet lack the ability to recognize that an interconnected world electrochemical network is essentially a giant living computer-brain more powerful than the entire Internet.)
For a family outing, it's a bit fast and noisy, especially at the culminating fight, where of course ignorant military asshole gets his comeuppance and technologically primitive "savages" rout orbital bombardments, missile strikes and chain guns by using their harmonious bond with the animals of the natural world. (The Ghost Dance didn't work out so well historically.) The subtitling is generally unobtrusive, and the characters slip into English enough to keep the audience from having to read. The scenery is gorgeously computer-generated, up to and including floating mountains with no explanation given, perfect for a jumping-puzzle level in an XBox 360 game translation.
Watchable film? Certainly. Great cinema? By no stretch of the imagination -- and there's little to imagine in a computer-rendered world of pseudo-acting and vistas in which everything lights up and glows because that's the only way to show people that the natural world is beautiful.

(2 out of 5 stars.)