Avatar: War of the Dunces

This post is full of spoilers, but you probably have already seen the movie, know that it cost about the same as a real brushfire war and that most people think that it is a good movie. Which it is. There is really a lot to see, the creatures and the forest are fantastic, the 3D works as advertised. It is a nice movie and a good time was had, but I am not going to talk about the goodness of the movie. I am going to talk about the suckiness of the warfare. Even General Custer would have done better. Just four things that came to me while watching the movie:

1. The Sky People are stupid
- So you are a spacefaring race, and you have a nice fat colony ship in orbit. There is a holy site on the ground which want to blow up badly (Ooooh, so badly).
Why not take the big fat orbital lifter, go into orbit and drop 50 tons of steel from 100 klicks up. Or dump one of the big yellow excavator/forest-murderer machines on the Na'vis' Holy of Holies, if you really want to make a point. Delivering explosives basically by hand on site is just asking for massive interference and blowed-up helicopters. At least drop the daisy cutter from a height were the natives can't breathe.
- The useless pretty-boy colonel. The stupid seeps from him like tasty, tasty molasses. He kicks open a door and opens his command center to the poisonous atmosphere of the planet, risking everyone inside, just to demonstrate his incompetence with the SMG. Instead, like, having two choppers on 24h standby, on a world that teems with aerial predators. Also, getting out of that exploding gunship was darn impressive, but the guy was basically jonesing for a knife fight all the damn movie, and that was probably the only way he was going to get one. A bowie knife on a mech? That shit would get you laughed out of even the more hand-to-hand inclined space marine chapters. Someone should have set up the colonel with a nice bar brawl or, you know, a roll in the hay. That would have nipped many problems in the bud. The guy might be able to bench-press half a ton, but the space beneath his steely hair is empty.

2. The Na'vi are useless
- Was nobody briefed about the Sky People's tremendous capability to concentrate fire on an approaching front? Or did Sully sleep in school? Was there a mistake in translation? "Just charge the firing line with your big blue horses. Just right at the three dozen goons who each have a machine gun or automatic cannon. The bad guys will turn and run. On earth, this tactic works. Every. Single. Time. History proves it, from about 1914 onwards." Of course they get their asses handed to them in a spray of blue mist. For me, it smacks of a political decision: Nobody liked the horse people that much, so they got set up in a big fat decoy/ martyr mission, and in the following massacre, they were weakened for generations, facilitating a push of the forest people into the plains. They probably do not whoop and hiss in the pure and proper way, like the good forest people do. I thought these guys were jungle fighters, bred from minute one to deal silent death in the bush. So were are the traps, the ambushes and the swift arrow into the coolant tubes?
- I know it's good for morale, but putting the leader on the big read bird, where even the useless pretty-boy colonel can identify him from three miles off is just stupid.
- So you have this chopper of the enemy and a sympathetic pilot. Why wait while all the clans make up their minds and come to the meeting place at about twenty miles a day. Stuff that sucker full of your most aggressive warriors right now and dump them in the Sky People's base. Tell them to target windows and air locks. Or hijack the orbital lifter, drive it to about 2000 meters high, turn it around and switch on the burners , transfer the infiltrators to butterfly dragons (or glorious martyrdom) and drop the ship on the station.

So, in conclusion, the two antagonistic parties flail around like toddlers in blindfolds, and sacrifice people and materiel for nothing while the mournful Horner-score blares in the background, until the planet itself gets sick of the commotion and throws the newcomers off. As I said, it is a nice movie, but if you want a film by Cameron where humans and aliens are fighting (relatively) smart, rent Aliens.