I too cringed at “unobtainium,” and in a faint echo of Bill, I remarked to my mom on the walk to the car, “They may as well have called it Kryptonite.” That and the occasional line of hackneyed cartoon dialogue (“Noooooo…!”, “Git it done,” etc.) were my second and third biggest problems with the film, and when they occurred it temporarily severed my suspension of disbelief, snapping me back to the harsh, dark, sticky-floored reality of Majestic Ten Cinemas.

My biggest problem was the glaring plot hole of the humans’ tactics. I mean, really: _Aliens_ was the film that put “I say we nuke the site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure” into the popular lexicon; has Cameron ever seen that film? Even assuming the forward base had no big armaments, the thrilling conclusion has bought the Blueskins six years, maybe twelve at the most, before the Company sends a fleet in to annihilate the entire ecosystem from 100,000 klicks away and build a radiation-shielded mining base in the glowing crater. I would have appreciated a bit of throwaway closing dialogue about how the Gaiacomputer is working on evolving an orbital defense grid or something along those lines.

I really liked the technological continuity. Many sci-fi films will take a mechanism like Avatar’s mind control and then plaster on some implausible side effects to make it more consistent with the author’s mystical idea of astral projection. (Cf. The Matrix: “The body cannot live without the mind.” Uh, yeah, what medical school did *you* go to, Dr. Morpheus? Ever heard of a vegetative state? Well, just watch the Matrix sequels and you’ll enter one.) But Cameron actually took the stipulated technical details and used them to emphasize a dramatic moment (the bulldozer scene; the colonel grabbing a deep breath or a mask before combat) rather than treating them as an inconvenience. And evolutionary implausibility aside, Cameron’s Gaia-As-Supercomputer conceit worked *so* much better than Lucas’ Force-As-Mitochondria one.

Along those lines there was a missed scifi opportunity with the tech of the Gaia version of mind transfer: after someone’s consciousness is copied, why would the original body die? Or rather, why wouldn’t it stay alive? Maybe just for long enough to see the New Blue You wake up and stride away, leaving you behind with a dwindling air supply and gimp legs…

Oh, and just in case nobody else has made this joke, let me rechristen Avatar:

Dances With Elves (3D)