[GerateWohl]

For me, it isn’t so much the story in AVATAR that’s important. That isn’t original at all, it’s basically just a riff on Pocahontas.

There are thousands of great movies with simple ridiculous ripped off stories. Avatar might have been if Cameron would have had a more original vision of extraterrestrial world building. For me it’s a far too obvious one-to-one transition.
Just make them blue, give them tails but keep the hairdo and weapons, but replace some of the horses by dragons.

No. That “paradise” did not captivate me. Maybe I am too much of a nerdy science fiction fan to let Cameron get away with such cheap world building. Or maybe I am too woke in the meantime to feel comfortable with such blunt caricatures of native people.

What made it probably extra problematic were my high expectations. As I said, I was a science fiction fan and a huge fan of Cameron’s previous movies.

Yes, a friend of mine said once, you see in Cameron’s movies that he is not the intellectual type. His scripts miss certain depths and psychological sophistication. But that never bothered me because his movies were full of great ideas and the staging of the action was perfect. At least until Avatar.
Like in all his previous movies there wasn’t much of a story and the characters were more or less just clichés. Fair enough. But for the first time the staging and world building ideas didn’t convince me at all.