Finally saw Avatar in IMAX 3D last night. I’m glad I did. If I’d watched it as a regular movie, I’d be so pissed right now I couldn’t type.

I L-O-V-E-D the technological achievements. I literally reached out my hand to see if I could affect the trendril that seemed to hang over my seat. The 3D achievement knocked me out.

As a movie, meh. In fact, if this were just a sci-fi movie, we’d all be laughing at it.

The stand-out acting performance? Eh, was there one?

Take the Sigorney Weaver character, for example. A biolabs chief from the future that still smokes filtered cigarets? IN THE LAB??? I think I call bullshit. What’s the throw weight of her cases of cartons of smokes?

This movie was definitely not about acting chops. In fact, I wish to God someone would grab Mel Gibson and Sigorney and sit them down in front of a screening of The Year of Living Dangerously and remind them that before they were C-List Hollywood celebs, they used to know how to act. What they didn’t know about acting in that movie, they could have learned from Linda Green, who won a Best Supporting Oscar for her role in that film.

Does anyone buy a plotpoint of a gung-ho fighter pilot who calls it quits because she doesn’t like shooting rockets at a big tree? I mean, after all, only her atmosphere, food, water and TRANSPORT BACK HOME is at stake.

I recently posted what I thought was a funny comment by Air America’s Anna Marie Cox about the movie that Dances With Wolves wanted its plot back. That gives this movie way too much credit, although there’s enough truth in it to keep it wryly humorous.

I just can’t let go of some of the more stupid things in the movie. The head bad guy in a future world in which American militarism and capitalism still rules the roost (uh, really?), tells us the motivating factor in all this is the mineral “Unobtainium”. OK, that’s enough right there to make me taste a little vomit in the back of my mouth. Was there ever in the history of fiction a worse name for an element? Then, it’s that this mineral is millions of dollars a kilo back home. Uh, in the future, how much money is that? Is it a whole lot? ‘Cause I can’t really tell.

And, how did a prissy Gen-Xer get to be in charge of such a large enterprise? That guy wouldn’t be allowed to bring in the coffee for grownups in such a large enterprise as the looting of an entire planet. He was an obvious goober.

Was there ever a more two-dimensional military bad guy as the character of the Colonel?

Don’t even get me started on the biology of a cat’s tail that mind melds. It does sort of amuse me to think that everybody on Pandora has most of their minds in their butts. That’s a pretty straight-on view of cats, as I often discuss with Sinatra.

Yeah, this Cameron guy is a really great director. I think there may have been a good reason why I remain the only man in western civilization who never saw Titanic. It’s the stoopid. It burns.