Avatar review

So, I just saw Avatar. It was a fine movie, with a high level of thought put into it, spoiled only by a bit of copout (and a lot of unnecessary violence) at the end. In the hour or two walking home afterwards, my friends and I took it apart to an atomic scale, saw a lot of well-done fine detail we initially missed, and realized that most of its flaws could be removed with a little fine-tuning of the concept (and all of them with a lot).

Summary next - obviously, what follows will be full of 10 kilo Bouncing Betty anti-personnel spoilers. Read at own risk.

So, the plot. In the future*, Earth is undergoing unspecified but vaguely grim environmental concerns. The planet Pandora contains a resource - unobtanium, God help me - which is, if not necessary, at least extraordinarily valuable. So a company - not Weyand-Yutani but "RDA" - come in to extract it from the lush jungle via open-pit mine. The problem is that there are locals (the "Na'vi", the stone-age blue-skinned locals on all the ads) who are vaguely-pantheistic peace-with-nature types and so obviously not impressed. Relations start out OK, at least, with some efforts at diplomacy, but as it becomes clear that the company's interests and the Na'vi's intersect nowhere, things have degenerated into essentially open war, with the anthropologist-scientist types increasingly outweighed by the aggressive and ever-more numerous PMC troops defending the company installations.

At this point enter our hero. Jake Sully, paraplegic USMarine vet, get a free job offer from the company. His twin brother was signed up to go do science on Pandora, but died shortly before the boat left. His brother's DNA had been used to build an "Avatar" - a Na'vi body with some human brain parts that can be remotely meat-puppeted for exploration of the (unbreathable) planet and diplomacy with the Na'vi. Since this was hideously expensive, and since, as his brother's twin, he is the only one who can run the (DNA-specific) Avatar, and the company gives him the chance to join in. He does, delighting the Colonel, the head of the PMC, who now has a man in the science team, even if the scientists hate him for the same reason.

Jake gets enrolled as bodyguard for Grace Augustine, head of the science team, but on his first real trip outside the compound is cut off from the group and nearly killed by a local, Neytiri. She stops when probably about a hundred blooms from their sacred tree land on him, which convinces her to instead take him back to their giant home-tree-village. There she turns out to be the chief's daughter and convinces everyone else to take him in as well**. Grace is ecstatic when he comes out of the Matrix - er, Avatar - and so is the Colonel, who now has the intel source he couldn't even plausibly fantasize about a year before.

Jake acclimatizes. He gets into, if not the good graces of the Na'vi, at least their toleration, and starts picking up Na'vi skills. The Na'vi - and the Avatars - have this funky thing where they splice this nerve-bundle at the end of their hair-braids into a similar bundle on various animals, and can ride horses (or, occasionally, birds) with preternatural skill, since they're not so much riding them as merging with them and hauling their bodies along for the ride. Everyone except Neytiri's intended ends up liking him, and he because he implausibly - if, somewhat squickeningly, accurately - is afraid Jake is stealing her from him.

Then Jake's day job interferes. The Company suit-on-the-ground, whose name I forget and so I will refer to as "Burke", after the identical character in Aliens, has decided the time has come to go after the motherlode, which lies (of course) under the Na'vi village. Jake tries to negotiate their withdrawal from the tree, which was probably going to fail even before he reveals he knew this day was coming from the beginning and turns them all against him. The marines slag the tree with napalm and the Na'vi flee to their sacred tree (the one with the blooms, not the one they live in). Grace, Jake, and a B-scientist and the speaking-role pilot freak at this and take off together to remote and mobile Avataring station from which they can get back to the Na'vi. Grace is shot in the escape. The Na'vi, understandably, want nothing to do with Jake, so he links with an untamable giant bird and rides it in to convince them all he is special***. He rouses the tribe, and their neighbours, to attack the human base camp; he also convinces them to try and use the tree to move Grace's consciousness from her dying human body to her Avatar, which fails, but leads to (the completion of) the movie's big reveal. The whole planet is quasi-linked through the trees; the linking the Na'vi do with the horses and birds is an expression of the fact that the whole planet shares a consciousness (sort of, not really, but a bit). The Na'vi aren't just pissed because the company is blowing up their sacred forest; they're pissed because by blowing up the forest, the company is (in a nebulous but demonstrably real sense) hurting them.

And so but anyways. Here the plot flies off the rails. The Colonel decides to blow the sacred tree and Jake's assembling army off the map before the do it to him; there follows half-an hour of essentially plotless explosions. The marines, to my quasi-amazement, actually massacre most of the Na'vi army, including Neytiri's intended, with their massively superior firepower, but then an enormous frickin' horde of animals, directed to the army by the Planetmind****, arrive and more or less literally stomp them into the dirt. The Colonel, because he is a stupendous Batman-grade badass, is of course the last to go down, fights Jake mano-e-mano (well, mech-e-Avatar) and dies. Jake uses the tree to transfer himself to the Avatar for good, and the surviving humans at the camp are forced offplanet. (In a bit that shows how much Jake has gone native, but also manages to be a bit disturbing as well, Jake v.o.s that "they" are going back to "their dying planet", which implies some rather sketchy inferred holocaust back on Earth when the resource tap from Pandora runs out. Uh, nice job, Jake?)

So that's Avatar. As you can see the plot isn't half bad, but the last half hour cops out on the ideas of the first half for a solve-all-woes-with-fireballs ending. How to fix this? Well, I have some ideas.

*The exact date is understandably hidden, but judging from their relatively low-grade improvements in military design, I would guess it's the "near future", in the science fiction sense - maybe 2050s or 70s. About all they have that's not plausible in the distant soon is (possible) FTL and cryo, both of which are inevitable sf concessions to the plot, and the Avatar system itself, more on which later.

**This is where my friends began whispering "Pocahantas" at each other. This turned out to be largely accurate, only less the truce at the end.

***Yes, it's the "Native tribe, at one with the land, defeats imperialist industrialist white folk. Because of the white guy who leads them." Sigh. The movie isn't as formulaic as those two sentences would indicate, but the trope at its heart is a little dirty.

****Term unashamedly cribbed from Sid Meyer's Alpha Centauri which admittedly greatly resembles this "character".

(4/5 stars; 5 for the first three quarters but the climax drags it down a lot.)