I'm glad to see not everyone else loved this movie. I do plan to see it again, hopefully in 3D someday, but here was my review of it:
Spectacular graphics, inventive creatures, aliens, and plants. The alien environment reminded me of Earth's deep ocean.
The plot, however, if you take away a basic SF set-up and setting, is a well-used western. Cowboys taking over Indian (native American) territory. They even used Indian whoops, bows and arrows! I personally got bored with the second half of the movie, which was a huge, non-stop battle. Old-fashioned machismo, "we he men, will fight off enemy with bare hands!" Plus the bad guys, "white man" who were totally bad and wouldn't listen to reason or have any morals. So over-all I wasn't that impressed. It was a bit depressing, what with the huge amounts of destruction of beautiful nature, and deaths of the gathered native force. There was no great plan, just savage cries of "we can't let them do this to us, we'll all band together and let many die to fight them off." Not very smart, wasteful of precious life. The movie almost glorified the savagery of battles.
The native culture was fairly predictable, closely copying mostly native Americans, with a bit of African thrown in. They even broke bucking broncos, dominated them and gained possession. "You're mine now." Were the hair-braids natural, or did the natives/aliens develop hair-braiding s a method of gathering the hair together to concentrate the ends which could be used to bond with creatures?
The movie was enjoyable in it's own way, my kids were much more enthusiastic (11 and 13). My husband gave it a 5/6 for first viewing, repeat was 6/10. It had it's points, but not enough of the originality was put into the plot and character interactions, which were predictable and cliched. Man comes to native group to do mission, falls in love, turns around...I think I've seen this one a few times!
Re the article about Cameron being traitorous - . I’m not sure if it’s arrogance or the result of guilty conscious for some Americans to assume the army were American. It’s actually quite possible that the writers had the American military in mind when they made the fictional characters, so they’re somewhat justified in feeling it’s a stab at the American military.
I’m not worried about the political implications, but I do object to the writers making the bad guys so one-dimensionally evil instead of making them realistically complex characters with good and bad elements in them like real people are. Not even Darth Vadar is totally evil, he’s quite conflicted....