Hehe, for all the hoopla surrounding LOTR, it was still very firmly a FANTASY movie that GEEKS like, so it was OKAY to love it and teach yourself to speak Quenya; that made you SOPHISTICATED.

Interesting how nobody accused LOTR of being too black-and-white... of having villains that are too villainy, and good guys who are too pretty. Nobody pontificated about how the plot was too linear. Nobody waxed academic about UNFORTUNATE IMPLICATIONS about the fantasy racism. All of these "flaws" are much more glaring in LOTR, and I say this as a huge Ringer myself.

(Okay, SOME people criticized LOTR on these points, but we're talking in relative terms here.)

Avatar is a movie seemingly tailor-made to stimulate all our geeky happy buttons simultaneously. What other movie lets you have elves and dragons and marines and power armor and earth motes and spaceships and Matrix-y psionic stuff all in the same story, in a setting straight out of fantasy role-playing?

But take one of the most geektastic movies of all time and make it simultaneously the highest-grossing movie of all time, and you get to sit back and watch the internet have a hilarious identity crisis.

I stumbled across a thread on a completely unrelated forum where the OP wrote something like "so I know the blue smurf hippie thundercats aren't very popular on this forum... but can anyone recommend any Avatar fanfiction that doesn't make you want to gouge your eyes out?" It's hard not to take pity on this guy... you want to love this movie, dude! You'll be much happier if you just give in.

Yesssss, join usssssss.

(Yay! First post here. Although I've been haunting avatar-forums.com for about a year.)

My own experience was much like Sothis'. In fact, I actually didn't see Avatar until mid-January 2010! The family was out of town and I was uncommonly bored. So I saw it. After all, the trailer looked ok. :) It could have been a total bust, though, and I wouldn't have cared. That was the kind of mood I was in. It wasn't until the next day, when I found myself inexplicably still thinking about Avatar, that I said to myself, "Wow, that was really quite awesome!"

The story did not come off as especially obvious to me. Not in bad way, anyway. I did definitely predict two moments in the movie: The first was that Jake would become Turok Makto. When Neytiri introduced the concept of Toruk Makto, I immediately thought, "There you go. That'll be Jake." Secondly, when Mo'at tried (and failed) to move Grace's consciousness into her Avatar, I immediately thought, "Well, it'll work with Jake."

So, there you go.

I then read the script and thought, "Wow, Toruk Makto would have been wayyyyyy more obviously if JC had stuck with the script and included the Dream Hunt sequence!" That sequence, IMO, is pretty redundant.

As for general criticisms of the story's being obvious, recycled, etc., I say: I don't think Avatar would have worked if not for a healthy measure of familiarity. If the story had been a real brain-twister, the world of Pandora would have taken a back seat, and I'm pretty sure JC wanted exactly the opposite to be true. He's a visual artist by nature (e.g., a painter), so what else for Avatar to be but a visual work of art.

Well said :)

Films with a ridiculously convoluted plot almost never work, it's the number one reason books do not translate well into films - LOTR is the ONLY exception out of every single 'film of the book' I've ever both seen the film and read the book of.

LotR possessed a lot of what we'd call "cliche" today, but no one could give a stink about Jackson's film series because it was based on novels written half a century beforehand. If the movie is based on a book, and you interpret the book well on screen, no one can say you were being "cliche". That's the difference between Avatar and LotR.

The premise of the movie itself may be simple and obvious but there are much deeper meanings.

Well said, Woodsprite.

I think the reason for it being obvious is so we DREAD what's coming. We know that the RDA is going to blow up Hometree, so we DON'T WANT IT TO HAPPEN. We know that the Na'vi are going to have a war with the RDA, so we WANT GOOD TO DEFEAT EVIL.

^One of the most excellent analysis' I've seen on Avatar's plot.