idk about betray humanity. second movie made it pretty clear that the humans weren't there for the good of humanity - it was to profit off (and destroy in the process) Pandora's natural resources for the benefit of a few rich billionaires
Would’ve been interesting if the whale blubber they were harvesting in the second movie cured cancer instead of being some luxury, “it makes you look young” juice.
Anything organic like would be more efficient to synthesize after it's discovery. If the writers said it can't be synthesized, it would just be the writers pushing a false dichotomy. Very few things can't be synthesized and the things that can't, are harvested responsibly, like horseshoe crab blood.
I was goong to say it was more a tech demo since they made the insta-CGI machine for it. But then he went and made a second one about abandoning your home, getting your new one in the same trouble, and whales.
I say that Avatar is the cinematic equivalent of having one of those monstrous huge old keyboards with eight hundred different preloaded sounds and instruments and pressing the DEMO button and listening to five minutes of every ridiculous sound effect known to God and Giorgio Moroder, and with about the same artistic merit.
It rubbed me the wrong way because it's still the mighty whitey fantasy. White dude comes in and is better at all the native stuff than the natives. It's just using blue alien sexy placeholders for the aboriginals.
It's either that or people are salty these movies are so successful... But then again, I never see people complaining about how shallow the latest Transformers or Fast & Furious or Jurassic World movie is yet it's all I see whenever either Avatar movie is mentioned.
I very much enjoy the first movie. I have watched it several times and still enjoy going back to it. I absolutely agree the plot is puddle-deep, as you said, and it makes no attempt at all to disguise its analogies ("unobtanium"), but it's mastery is not in the story itself but the way in which it is told. It's almost operatic in the amount of time it spends within each story beat. The second film failed to do a lot of the things I loved about the first one and was very forgettable.