Avatar

No surprises here, kids.  If you've heard or seen anything about Avatar you should already know what I'm going to say here.

It looked freaking awesome.  Giant blue dudes falling through the jungle, raptors with wings flying through floating mountains, a mech warrior suit Matrix 3 style in a knife fight with a giant panther, amazing lights at night, crazy good motion capture effects, explosions, giant planets bright in the night sky, etc.  Hells yeah.  It was coolicoolicoolio.  At 2 and a half hours it gets a little long, but it's still probably worth seeing just for the effects.

Good thing, too, since the rest of it is trash.  The plot is bad and predictable.  The science is BS - case and point, the valuable mineral being mined on the wonderful new planet is called unobtainium.  I shit you not.  The blue aliens are tribal, stereotypical, and otherwise offensive whether you interpret them as Africans or Native Americans.  It doesn't matter; they've got headdresses and a deep resounding connection with their nature god either way.  Then there's the half-hearted attempt at a typical mother nature theme.  Basically it goes:  people who like nature - good!  People who blow up giant trees - baaaad.  My sister said she left the theater "offended as a person and a scientist".  She tends to get worked up about these sorts of things, though.  I mean, after all, the point is that it looked really cool.

The story reminded me of Princess Mononoke much more than it should have.  Mononoke actually has substance to its plot, but I felt like the message (if there was one) was predominantly the same.  Also, there were moments when it felt a little like Dollhouse.  I kept waiting for the avatar body to develop a consciousness of its own and start calling itself Echo.  Of course that'd be way too interesting for an action flick like this, so instead we just watched Jake "learn the ways of The People".  There were definitely traces of Star Wars Episode 2 where you got the feeling that the director should be in charge of every visual effect you lay eyes on for the next decade but that he needed to be tied up out back while someone else wrote a half-way decent script.

That's a lot of other source materials that Avatar felt like.  Maybe I'm becoming more well versed in movies, but I find it much more likely that Hollywood is just recycling the same crap it always has and that I'm just starting to realize that it's visuals too, not just plots, actors, and scripts.

EDIT:  Oh man, 2 things I forgot.  First, the planet is named Pandora, prompting me to wonder where all the skaags were (and more importantly Danl).  Second, that tree network giant computer ecosystem thingy was pretty sweet until I remembered it was just that Myst 3 world, again prompting me to wonder where Danl was.