I don’t have words.

The movie is just non-stop humans being absolute colonizer monsters and the people (and creatures) of Pandora, who want to live in peace, being forced to fight back (and kicking human ass).

The movie lives and dies by it’s visual effects and by god are they incredible. Pandora is just such a beautiful world, and Cameron lets you experience it in all its beauty and unity and peace before he shows the ugly human machines and weapons kill and destroy it. You feel the pain and the righteous anger when the Navi fight back. I was cheering for every human death of which there are many.

Is the story perfect? Nah. There are points where it’s cliche etc but I don’t mind that. There is a larger story about nature and colonisation and that’s what matters so much more. Pandora is a world that can fight back because the world itself is alive and connected and god just imagine if Earth was like that.

I’m definitely gonna see it again and I’m super pumped for the sequels.

  • ikeepforgettingmypw [comrade/them]
    ·
    2 years ago
    spoiler

    jake military dad bullshit

    on my first watch I thought "man that was a weird ass direction, aren't we supposed to like this guy, this was pretty corny, etc etc"

    Just watched it again tonight. I think the military-jargon was a very deliberate choice for a few reasons. First, we don't see jake use any of that lingo until the humans return to Earth. It's almost a PTSD/stress response. It's most obvious in the first quarter of the film and falls off towards the end (but still present). Second, something I noticed was that all the military phrases he uses like "what's your poz" and shit like that gets repeated almost verbatim by the blatantly evil human military counterparts within 2 minutes of each other. Like there's a 20 minute sequence at the start of the film where it goes back and forth between Edie Falcos' General Girlboss/Quaritch and Jake using identical phrases in a way that made me think it was deliberate comparisons. Specific examples elude my high ass right now but I remember several moments in the movie where I thought "wow that bit of jargon was JUST used in an identical fashion by some human ghoul". Third, Jake gets chastised by Neytiri repeatedly throughout the film for doing this.

    I think Jake unlearning old military habits and Earth-biases is going to be a huge point going forward in the next 3 films. I have it, allegedly on good authority, hypothetically in Minecraft, from someone who might potentially a few years ago at one point have had access to the scripts for 3 and 4 in a video game, that the third film will at least partially serve as an Earth origin story. Overcoming last vestiges of attachment to Jake the Human will be a big plot point.