It was very pretty, but not all that memorable. I remember thinking it would make a good video game, which...didn't one just come out? [checks] Yes! Let's see..."Alien Far Cry." Not a fan of that series, unfortunately.
Supposedly it's actually pretty decent if you just turn off all of the quest markers and whatnot in the settings. Turns it into more of an immersive story driven exploration game instead of an Ubisoft clear the map checkbox game.
Compare to Star Trek, Star Wars, Harry Potter, or Lord of the Rings. I'm pretty sure you know what those were about, and usually they had multiple layers of meaning.
I cannot for the life of me tell you what specifically the Avatar team thinks about deforestation, genocide, etc. It feels like they just put objectivelt bad things in the movie for the bad guys to do.
I think the difference is world building. In the stories you listed there's a sense that you're only seeing a tiny fragment of everything notable going on. History is being made by everyone concurrently.
In Avatar, you see everything notable. We don't care what's going on on Earth (they never hint anything), we don't care what's going on outside this one tribe, the only thing happening right now is the conflict on screen.
First one was a generic story with some interesting ideas and world, just isn't much to discuss once you get past the visuals. I think with the sequels coming and the expanded lore there will be an uptick in fandom size, but Cameron needs to take bigger risks in the story telling. Avatar hasn't really had a Vader/Luke reveal or "avengers assemble" moment
Because it's a shallow prog-rock scribble with no faith in its audience. Two and a half hours of one-note characters yelling at one another to explain the blindingly obvious.
Cameron says he started writing this movie starting in the 70s, and I believe him. You can picture him sitting in his dorm room, listening to Tarkus and Olias of Sunhillow until the grooves wore out, doodling weird furry giantess smut, imagining all the claymation he was gonna do to make the bestest sci-fi film since Dark Star.
What the prequels were to George Lucas, Avatar is to James Cameron. This was his stupid childhood dream project. Somehow it made an entire billion dollars. Introspection will not occur.
The only reason it even made that much was because of the hue over the tech. God knows it's the only reason my mom bought 5 tickets for all of us to see the original. Now that all of us are adults non of us bothered to see the sequel because we saw what the original was in hindsight. There's just more people now than back then who fell for the new water tank hype plus new kids to pad those numbers even more.
I'm not saying people shouldn't enjoy it if they do, nor am k saying nobody should watch it. I'm just saying it's not for me.
I don't think that's the case. It's just that Europe was able get the upper hand. The ill behavior that comes with that power is an indictment of the human species. China, Japan and Russia were happy to crush and exploit Korea without a European in sight, leading to the current fractured state. (It's practically the setting of an RTS game.)
But maybe we'll figure out a sociological trick that allows us to maintain an egalitarian society, but that's for the survivors of the next few centuries to figure out. (And they may not be human.)