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Matt Yglesias

I’ve heard it analogized to Dances With Wolves, but it’s more like Dune meets Fern Gully. Technically very impressive, and the plodding dialogue didn’t really bother me, but the whole story is really staggeringly unoriginal. The allegory to American imperialism was clear enough that we didn’t really need to be hit over the head (”some kind of shock and awe campaign”) with it. I’d also add that the strategic thought behind the Na’vi counterattack is extremely unimpressive—they’re aiming for tactical victory with no real long-term plan—but that’s arguably realistic.

Tyler Cowan

Yes, it is showing already in Leon, Nicaragua, as Bryan Caplan had predicted. You should see it. Cameron has absorbed a lot from Princess Mononoke. The aliens don't seem to trade much or accumulate capital. Like the Olympics ceremony in Beijing, it raises the bar for a lot of subsequent efforts. The crowd seemed unmoved by the theme of "las indigenas." It has interesting themes on disability and also the diversity of intelligences. The three hours go by very quickly. It's not perfect. People who can reach other planets still fire bullets from machine guns. Dubbing makes all the dialogue sound corny and thus it limits the impact of the real clunkers, which do come every now and then. I'll see it again, in 3-D next time.

Alex Tabarrok

It was entertaining but I was expecting to be awed by at least one scene, as happened in Terminator, T2 and Titanic, and I was not. The plot is identical to that of Battle for Terra, right down to the "tree of life." Many scenes I felt like I had seen before. Here is the helicopter gunship scene from Apocalypse Now, here is the men in robot suits battle scene from Alien (and one of the Matrix movies), here are the sky islands from Castle in the Sky, here we have the Dances with Wolves scene(s). I am all for homage but this was pastiche.

The aliens were gorgeous, leggy, blue fashion models. Nice, but Star Trek did the green alien girl thing forty years ago. Personally, I like my aliens to be a little bit more well, alien. All the way to another planet just to find that the girls are blue and the horses have eight legs instead of four? Sad.

I insisted on seeing it in 3D but the effect was not revolutionary and there is still some eye strain. In the end I would have preferred 2D.

I was entertained but I was not enthralled.