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The big James Cameron release, which was seen in 2D, isn't entirely awful, but isn't much of a movie either. The dialogue is predictable rather than bad, the action and plot just about help it to justify its 162 minute run time. The characters are it's-a-joke minimally "brought to life", Sigourney Weaver (she's not a quantam physicist, a molecular biolist, she's a SCIENTIST, just one big SCIENTIST, she likes SCIENCE) and her minions explaining the plot to the jock in the lead role. When did it become O.K. for boneheads to become heros again? Post Bush, I suppose. The characters merrily explain the plot to each other, before meeting some lanky smurfs, whose spiritual rituals look like the Lion King on Ice. The fact that we were treated to a scene where the spirituality was explained in scientific terms was a painful add on, and rather a unconconcious dismissal of the very anti-instrumental values it was trying to promote. Though that'll have to be more fully considered when we have our film based on the life of Habermas.
The attempts at political paralleling were pretty incoherent, the message at the end was basically that blowing shit up is bad, but if shit gets blown up, it's perfectly awesome to blow shit up in return. Fine, just don't make a big moral gesture about it.
The world created is oustanding in its detail, though whatever's wrong (apart from for enviromental/practical reasons) with shooting in an actual rainforest with actual spectacular wildlife is beyond me. This scape is though curiously badly shot, with no sense of scale or wonder ever really given. Might've been the 2D, might have been Cameron's inadequacy.
It's a stupid film, a little boring, and all in all, a bad film. It is not, however, an absolute disaster. They meant well.