Worth seeing for the visuals alone. Absolutely stunning effects, cinematography and use of color. Some of the scenes depicting Na'vi as angelic get a bit on the nose, though.

Story itself is pretty thin. Don't get me wrong, Cameron gets a lot of points for making an explicitly anti-colonial big budget blockbuster, but even good politics can't obfuscate how cliché and predictable the plot is. Think Ferngully meets Neverending Story meets an episode of Full House.

The way the anti-colonial conflict is framed plays on tropes of Evil Technology vs. Virtuous Nature, with the Na'vi playing the role of the noble savages who protect Virtous Nature. It rubbed me the wrong way a bit, the way all such stories do, as I'm a person who would not be able to survive without the benefit of modern medicine and technology. The absolute benevolence of Pandora's biosphere elides equally "natural" things like infectious disease, elder infirmity, infant mortality, starvation and lifelong disability, and the idealized portrayal of hunter-gatherer societies - complete with only "healthy" people and no queer relationships in sight - gives me slight eco-fascist vibes.

Shout out to the one lib scientist working for the human colonziers who knows he's a parasitic piece of shit and deserves death. He is my Mood Kindred.