Got back from Avatar late last night and then pretty much crashed into bed because I'd been up for 20 hours straight or something ridiculous like that.

Overall, the story was predictable, but it was still lots of fun to watch. It was worth the money for the delicious eye candy, especially of Pandora, but the story was basically POCAHONTAS. IN. SPAAAACE.


- We saw the movie in 3D, which I'm really glad for. I fast realized why they artistically made 3D important for this movie, rather than just adding in 3D because "hey it's cool." If you're going to use a movie element like 3D, then it is something that you need to consider as a storytelling device, rather than a selling tickets device.
- Dayum but the design and animation for the alien world Pandora was so pretty. Those scenes were the most fun to watch, and made me a little jealous, just because I love inventing monsters and alien worlds like that, and I know I would've had a lot of fun trying to design stuff for a movie like this. That, and I'd like to know what sort of methods they used to get the mocap right, especially on facial animations. While I don't think mocap animation is ever going to surpass keyframe animation (just by the nature of keyframe having an element to it that mocap is not designed to replicate), this is probably as good as mocap can get. And even for the alien creatures like the black panther things, rhino things and dragon things, which wouldn't use mocap, they were all still very natural-looking and believable.
- On the flipside, all the scenes with the humans and their ships were a bit more of a yawn. The designs for that stuff I've seen a hundred times before, usually in Halo and Gears of War. The whole "grizzled space marine" genre really needs some kind of revamp anyway; it all looks the same to me. :\
- The characters were all fine, although I think Stephen Lang kinda overplayed his Grizzled Space Marine to the point where he was Grizzled Space Stereotype. I suppose the characters had about the same familiarity and complexity to them that they did in Titanic, so. And yeah, the story was familiar: HUMANS BAD, NATURE GOOD. White guys are horrible evil opportunists to native tribe, except for the one Really Nice White Guy who ends up joining the native tribe and saving them while also falling for the native princess. (Even his rival looked like a blue cat version of Kocoum!) Although about the main difference with this movie is that instead of the white guys and blue cats getting along, the blue cats pretty much go GTFO and kick out the humans.
- I'm kind of sad that Grace didn't survive as a Na'vi. Seriously, did they have to kill off every main character except for Jake and Neytiri?
- Heehee, Giovanni Ribisi.


So yeah, go see it, but it's probably best to go with the mindset of I WILL SEE TWO HOURS OF SHINY AND PRETTY instead of I WILL SEE TWO HOURS OF UNIQUE AND COMPELLING STORYTELLING.