Now, a little back-story on the Navi. We are told in the movie that humans have tried unsuccessfully to get these tree-dwelling, mud-eating (they probably don’t eat mud but you know how Americans…er humans feel about ‘natives’ who live backwards lives, I mean, we white Christian European descendants didn’t spend half a millennium killing any natives that wouldn’t wear western-style clothing and pray to our western God for nothing, right?) loincloth wearing savages to go to a human school, learn English, and stop being so goddamned….SAVAGE! But of course, the Navi resisted, and relations broke down (what a surprise…we should have maybe given them a Pandoran version of smallpox blankets or maybe even whiskey, that worked pretty well against Native Americans).

At least there's no Kevin Costner...

Another thing about the Navi…they seem to be straight out of frontier America. Indians I think is the politically incorrect term, aka Native Americans. They believe in sacred life, nature-as-a-deity, being one with the earth, all that shit that settlers and even modern Americans hate. They yelp like the Indians did in old western black-and-white movies, they ride ‘horses’, use bows and arrows, and have no use for clothing or modern conveniences like microwave ovens and satellite television. They must be destroyed if they can’t be converted. The only thing really missing here was a backstory where Mormon or Christian missionaries tried to convert them (though again, it is hinted at in the movie).

Ok…still with me? The movie gets even worse…and I’m still only talking about the first 15-30 minutes of a 3-hour agonizing nightmare that I sat through.

Jake is given three months to convince the Navi to get the fuck out of Dodge by Colonel Jarhead and his corporate lackey Parker. You already know this isn’t going to happen, because you saw the trailer for this movie and saw a huge battle taking place so there’s not going to be any surprises here. Why bother spending hundreds of millions of dollars making this travesty if it didn’t have a huge battle with missiles, airships, flying dragons, etc happening at some point? Yeah, exactly.

Jake, aka Moron (as the Navi nickname him), works hard at learning the ‘way of the Navi’ over the three months. He evolves from a stupid, gun-toting, shoot-first-ask-questions-later-to-the-cold-dead-corpse marine into somewhat of a touchy-feely hippie. He becomes ‘one’ with the land, the flora, the fauna, the Navi themselves. It wouldn’t be a good cliche if he didn’t earn the respect of the Navi by passing all their tests, so we know that shit happens as well. And another cliche happens of course…he falls in love with Neytiri, the beautiful Navi that rescued him and brought him before the tribe. This is obvious before even watching the movie as well, since you saw the trailer. I mean, it is like James Cameron tried to mash-up Terminator with Titanic and put it on an alien planet. Ok, so he more than tried, he did it. And it is simply, staggeringly fucking RIDICULOUSLY AWFUL. There. I said it. And I’ll probably say it again about 9,000 more times before I’m finished.