Sorry for the thread necro here guys, but I saw Avatar on Blu Ray for the first time.
Back when it was in theaters in December, when I decided that yes, I wanted to see it -- it had moved out of the theaters which had rear-windowed captioning (I'm Deaf/Hard of Hearing); and So I had to wait for it to come out on home video.
Rear Windowed or Open Captioned theaters generally show a movie for only a few days or at best a week, and then they move to a different movie for that theater.
So my review of the biggest brainbugs:
Excellent first 30 minutes.
Great Spaceship design, a realistic looking SSTO orbital drop shuttle, with huge intakes for scramjets; even the ground vehicles or the various ornthicopters looked pretty good.
Small details like "everyone, put on your masks!", the digital pattern the Marines wore, the fact that aircraft have FOD covers put on them when not in use, etc.
But the first act was the best.
The Second and Third acts just kept getting worse, as all sides in the movie started to take increasingly larger stupid pills.
For example:
1.) We have a aircraft capable of lifting a pretty big load to orbit and it's shape suggests scramjets (the huge doors in the front).
So what do we use it for?
Why, we send it crawling towards the alien cultural site at 10 m/sec and a few thousand feet over ground level, letting aliens on lizard birds attack it!
If they had even gone in subsonic at 25,000 feet; then the Navi wouldn't even be able to attack it, because hypoxia would have set in and they'd have gone unconscious before reaching that altitude.
Also, general tactics and technology for the ground force was not that bright -- they should have spent the money shipping some light armored vehicles to Pandora instead of those mechs, along with some indirect fire artillery like mortars or howitzers.
2.) We know that this unobtanium is valuable enough to ship giant haulbots five years away from earth. And from the ground scans, we know that Pandora is full of the stuff. So why is that deposit under the tree so valuable? I know it's the biggest deposit within 200 klicks....but why do we have to specifically mine for that?
Even if we do have to mine for it; can't you dig a pit down several hundred feet, and then proceed to horizontally drill a mine shaft towards the deposit under the tree?
3.) They could have enlisted the help of the Navi themselves in their mining operations really simply.
Not EVERYONE in the tribes is going to be all "lets commute with the earth and nature"; there will be outcasts who instead of studying the intricate byplay of nature, actually instead look to the skies and study the orbital mechanics of their gas giant, it's moons, and the other stars in their constellation.
So why not identify those Navi and give them a ride to orbit?
4.) Why does everything glow in the dark? Even the Navi themselves glow in the dark (those spots)
On Earth, you only see bioluminescence in things which operate in the dark or at night -- and Pandora isn't THAT dark.
I can understand there being a valley that is shoruded in darkness 95% of the time, which is isolated from the rest of Pandora and is only reachable via flying lizard. There, you can have everything being bioluminescent...but not 100% of all life forms there.
5.) I find the entire concept of the Avatar very morally, ethically, and religiously dubious.
Creating something like that would have a fairly high failure rate.
What do you do with all the failed Avatars?
Do you flush them down the toilet or pureee them in a blender for more organic material for Avatar #221?
What do you do with the Avatars once you're done with them?
We know the Avatars have brains...we know that there is some sort of brain to brain linkage that works between the human brain and the avatar brain -- as shown on screen....
So why isn't there an imprinting of the person's neural network onto the avatar after the person has been using it heavily?
Jake had been using the Avatar continuously with only interruptions during the body's sleep cycle for months by the end of the movie. So why didn't his brain patterns get imprinted on the Avatar?
Why didn't the Avatar just wake up on it's own and walk around thinking that yes, it is Jake Sully?
Unless of course, the delinking procedure, both Emergency and Normal, wipe the brain after each use....in which essence, you kill yourself each time you jump into the avatar body.