Speaking for myself, I started expecting to like the movie as soon as I say a starship with radiators on its engine block; I can't remember ever seeing anyone get that right before in visual media.
On the review Junghalli cited, a few random comments and a bit about the "white guy turns out to be a better native than the natives" aspect.
And of course, as I’m sure I’m not the first to point out, there’s the whole problem of the Helpless Natives Who Need To Be Rescued By The Noble White Guy. Given the story’s premise, I certainly don’t deny that ol’ Jake would be an extremely valuable resource, with his inside knowledge of how the “sky people” operate. There’s nothing patronizing or condescending about giving him a vital role in the insurgency, the most valuable source of tactical wisdom available. A consultant. An advisor.
But a messiah? This guy who has spent a grand total of three months living with the natives, leading an assault with local implements, across terrain on which every other member of the tribe has spent their entire lives? This guy, this innocent, figures out the trick to taming the planet’s Top Predator all by himself, a trick that only five real Na’vi have figured out during their entire recorded history? (It’s actually a not-bad trick, if you don’t think about it too much. If you do, though, you start thinking about those spinal USB jacks again, and the vulnerability of even the most fearsome predator to sneak neural hacks…) The tale would have been better told if Jake had told them all he knew, and then been shunted off to the side and kept safe— an invaluable source of intel, too vital to risk in battle— while the native warriors took the lead.
This is, to my way of thinking, the sign of a man who cannot get his mind into the frame of reference used by pastoral or hunter-gatherer societies. On Earth, most societies like that are big on personal leadership, establishing the right to rule through heroic achievement, that sort of thing. They don't have carefully organized bureaucracies that say "OK, we'll send these guys out to fight and keep these guys at home to work on the intelligence staff;" they have warriors that say "well, if you know so much about fighting this enemy, why don't you
show us how well it works, Mr. Big Man?" and laugh you out of the tribal council if you don't do it. If Jake wanted to accomplish anything with the Na'Vi he was going to have to establish himself as someone impressive enough to follow.
As for his managing to tame the big red dragon-monster, it's made pretty clear that he does this by looking at the problem from an external context. Look at how the Na'Vi normally approach banshees. If they tried to tame a toruk that way they'd get torn to pieces, because while banshees are small enough that you can break them rodeo-style, the toruks aren't. Figuring out how to capture one would require either an
enormous amount of physical skill (the sort of thing that you only see once every few generations)... or a kind of meta-analysis that Stone Age societies may not be very good at, because while they know everything about their own environment they're not accustomed to taking a step back and thinking about that environment in the abstract. They don't think "the toruk is an apex predator" and exploit the gaps that will leave in its defensive behavior, because there's no category "apex predator" in their minds. They think "holy shit that thing is dangerous," and rightly so.
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Aand the random stuff:
The technology, for example. Anachronistic in that way it absolutely has to be, to convey a sense of verisimilitude to the modern gut. The critic in you insists that all these manual controls and B-52 cockpits— the very presence of on-site human pilots in a world of teleoperated meat puppets, generations beyond a time in which the skies already seethe with autonomous flying robots— make about as much sense as an F-16 with reins and a buggy-whip for a control interface. And yet the scratched paint and the scuffed windscreens feel so right, viscerally, that just this once I do not have the heart to complain.
The use of on-site human pilots may be an adaptation to local conditions, too. They've got the Designated Magic Rocks putting out some kind of interference field that makes radar and guided missiles unreliable; the same effect could also make it tricky to fly aircraft remotely like Predator drones. In which case the first wave of colonist-miners on Pandora would try to fly their teleoperated aircraft around, crash whenever they got too close to a flying mountain or inconveniently placed natural ore deposit, and eventually groan and decide to retrofit their aircraft with Stone Age manual controls.
And while I have no problem in principle with the concept of planetary-ecosystem-as-integrated-network, did anybody give any thought at all as to the ramifications of hanging extra USB-equipped spinal cords off the heads of every piece of megafauna on the planet? Pandora is rife with obvious predator-prey interactions; how would those even evolve in a world where prey could forge a direct neural interface with their predators, force them to feel the pain of being consumed? Wouldn’t that pretty much have to result in completely different trophodynamic networks than the Wild-Kingdom stuff that we saw in the film?
The prey would have to be able to plug their USB cords into the predator, which could be difficult to do without hands and humanoid-level brains. Trying to set up a neural link as a predator defense isn't a very safe plan in Pandora, as demonstrated by what happens when Na'Vi hunters try to plug into and adopt the banshees- it's dangerous and some of them die trying. If an animal tried it (without tricks like throwing a bolo around the beast's mouth to keep it from biting), it would probably be in even worse shape.
Characters vs. caricatures. No corporate honcho is going to be caught dead talking about “savages” and “blue monkeys”, even if that’s the way they actually feel; these people are more than practiced in the smiling empty comment, the statement that encourages and reassures but commits to nothing. They would speak of relocating the “natives” for their own good, perhaps; who knows what damaging side-effects this unobtanium might have on the unprotected indigenous people?
Ooh. Good point.
