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Plot: Humans come to the planet Pandora for a rare mineral, and need to displace the native forest people, the Na'vi. Grace (Sigorney Weaver) genetically engineers native bodies that humans can animate like The Matrix or maybe a predator drone. A paraplegic, Jake Sculley (Sam Worthington), becomes a native, and is accepted by the natives and falls in love with Neytiri (Zoe Saltana) a pretty native princess. Initially Jake feeds intelligence to the humans, but later his loyalty becomes divided. 

Review: Great movie entertainment that is simply spectacular with action, emotion, and movie-house morality. I really liked the realistic way the animated Na'vi moved so gracefully though the trees, and later through the air. The movie characters were evocative and emotional -- unlike most motion capture characters, and even better than Lord of the Ring's Gollum -- far better than Disney's A Christmas Carol.

A fast moving story rapidly sets up the conflict between the humans and the Na'vi. Jake and the audience spends a long time with the Na'vi, and the wonderful visual world they inhabit. The audience is won over by the time the bulldozers arrive.

Although the story is predictable, that is because it is archetypal. The story is like the European migration into North America and the displacement of the native Americans. Visually it is more like Europeans coming to tropical Africa -- perhaps like displacement of natives in Nigeria for petroleum. There is the more elemental conflict between the spiritual, grounded and connected natives with the mechanized and money-grubbing humans.

Cast: Sam Worthington, Zoe Saltana, Sigorney Weaver, Steven Lang

Crew: written and directed by James Cameron

Rating: 4.0 flasks


More: I want to see it again.

Even More: I liked the animated Sigorney.
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The Veridian Dynamics Coffee Cup

To celebrate the return of Better Off Ted, the great sitcom on ABC, I want to show off my Veridian Dynamics Coffee cup.

For more on Veridian Dynamics, see my first two posts. 

I decided that I needed a Veridian Dynamics coffee cup, and after searching the ABC fan store, and poking around on eBay, where I found nothing. I ended up at Zazzle. Zazzle is a very cool site where you can make shirts, hats and coffee cups with your own graphics.

There is this technicality that the Veridian Dynamics logo isn't really my graphics, but well, anyway. I made a coffee cup, actually two, and it turned out OK. [A defect is the blue line under the logo, which is actually in the image file. I should have photoshopped that out.]

At Zazzle you can put your items for sale, and collect a little royalty. I tried that, but savvy Disney attorney's made Zazzle take the item off for copyright violations.