Problems I Had With The Movie "Avatar"

First Disclaimer: I watched this movie last night and came away not regretting spending 8$. Overall, I enjoyed the movie, and I'm not here to nitpick away the goodness of the movie, which is the work of 10 years of James Cameron's life. I point out the problems I had here because I feel as if many of them are problems that many similar (or dissimilar) movies share, and that the general viewing audience perhaps ought to be thinking about in order to improve the general quality of movies. I am in no way an anthropologist.

Second Disclaimer: Don't read this if you have yet to see the movie and are interested in not having the (paper-thin) story spoiled for you. In fact, these points probably wont' make sense to you. Otherwise, feel free to continue.

- The natives were essentially based on the stereotype of "African Tribal". A long list of things is next.
- They are taller, and stronger physically, and are referred to as "savages".
- They have different colored skin. (This is actually in my opinion the distinguishing difference between humans and the Na'vi aka the natives.)
- Clothing, or what passed as clothing. It is notable that the avatars (and Jake's avatar at first) wear human clothing. Additionally, the various head adornments, the earrings, and the nose adornments.
- The Na'vi spoke with what amounts to an imitation of some sort of African accent.
- The Na'vi are obsessed with nature and being one with nature and protecting trees and animals. They thank animals they kill for providing. I gagged at this.
- Their weaponry consisted of bows and arrows, and riding various animals. Not to say that people ride animals; this point actually may belong under a different category of problems I had.

- Creativity was highly highly lacking. This may be more related to my own picky-ness than with actual creativity, but there were many aspects of set design, character design, scripting, and just overall atmospheric components that could have broken much ground but instead rehashed new ideas from previous movies.
- Most obvious lack of creativity lay in the design of the human weaponry/equipment. We've seen walking mechas in every movie since the release of the mech warrior game. Is it a good idea to rehash a concept from The Matrix Revolutions? Absolutely not. The "shuttle" used to bring people from space onto Pandora was a variation on the dead and tired black and white futuristic space shuttle idea.
- The Pandoran animals all failed to surprise. Sure, everything looked pretty, but when every animal easily fits a preexisting stereotypical mythical animal or even stereotypical real animal, there is a massive lack of creativity. Honestly, there was a horse.
- The flora of Pandora was reasonably creative, yet the majority of the flora consisted of trees. Small trees, big trees, really big trees, blue trees, pink trees, yet trees. There were ferns and giant ferns, mushrooms and giant mushrooms, vines and giant vines. There's a theme forming here... which is a lack of creativity. One creative flora was what amounted to a giant coral on land (the one that shrunk down into the ground). Finally, the entire planet looked like Earth from orbit, but featured mostly steaming jungle. Near the end short shots of plains (I almost call it the Serengeti) and high cliffs come up, which leave me with the overall sense that the movie took place in Africa.
- Story. For the first hour and a half I felt like I was in "Pocahontas: Future Version". Honestly the lead warrior of the Na'vi looked like he was modeled after Kocoum (who is the lead warrior of the native American tribe in Pocahontas).
- The Na'vi. They are essentially big blue humans with four fingers. Here, I cut slack, for if the focus of the movie was on an alien race that had absolutely no similarity to humans, the audience would have a hard time sympathizing with them over the actual humans. This is more related to my final point of contention, as described below.
- The sky looked straight out of bad/cheesey sci-fi desktop backgrounds.

- The Na'vi, again, are essentially big blue humans with four fingers. I specify that they have four fingers because this is about as significant a difference between the two species as can be had. The Na'vi seem to embody human innocence/naivety, while the humans (not related to the protagonist) act out human ignorance and brashness. This relationship of opposing forces is an age-old struggle between unquestioned good guys and unquestioned bad guys.
- For the record, this idea was done in District 9, which is sad for Avatar. This is because the concept of getting the audience to sympathize with aliens that are more "human" than humans was likely conceived sometime within the last 10 years of development, aka after District 9 was conceived.

(I lost my fantasy football semi-final match while typing this. Lame. I took massive risks this week, and now I'm paying the consequences. I think I had more problems with Avatar, but right now I'm having more problems with football, so I'll leave it at that.)