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Avatar (Original Theatrical Edition) It didn't blow me away. I did develop a real hatred for the stereotyped military/establishment/colonialists, which indicates good filming, but doesn't at all veer from the norm, or show any depth or nuance.

The way in which this film immerses the viewer in a whole different world/eco system seems to have garnered all the attention for this film (along with the ground-breaking special effects, which honestly, kinda did blow me away), but it's all aimed at creating Utopia, where most fantasy realms are dystopic.

I speculate that the reasons for this common dystopia include a prevalent belief that any Utopia is either behind us or never existed, and anything we could create/discover in the future would be as flawed as we are. The optimistic-to-the-point-of-delusion belief that we might someday meet a culture/world who did it correctly, or who have some essential evolutionary advantage that makes them successful in a way we will never achieve faces down and ultimately loses to the continuous disillusionment we provide each other, and as any closely examined society reveals essential flaws. Star Trek admits it; why doesn't James Cameron?

Cameron thoroughly mapped out his fantasy utopia, and the threat - our materiality and military - that reality faces. It was a very structuralist enterprise, and seems to have been successful, but as a post-modernist, I can't help wondering why we didn't see other sides to the issue. The script only made it worse, dividing things much too neatly between the good and the evil, although I do think that was the better choice than most of the quasi-moral muddles most postmodern scripts spew out regularly.

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