1. There doesn’t seem to be enough oxygen to breathe. But don’t worry, there’s more than enough for huge explosions.
2. The Avatars are supposedly created by combining Na’avi DNA with human DNA. And yet they look exactly like the blue Na’avi cat people.
3. People mention the fact that there is lower gravity on the planet but not once does it have an effect on anyone.
4. At this juncture, fans will point to the floating mountains. We will point to the fact that they aren’t mountains if they are fucking floating! And how to they float when all else around seems bound by gravity. And where did all that water come from? Okay, let’s concede that it’s Pandora. Normal rules do not apply. But the rules of our world still do.
5. They give Jake’s Avatar a gun but tell him not to shoot because it will only piss off the silly creatures that look like they leaped out of Goerge Lucas’s head. So why the fuck did they give him a gun then?
6. When Jake is left behind on the planet overnight, it seems they can’t track him. Of course they can put his brain into a giant smurf and fuse DNA but they can’t attach a tracking divice to him. Not even a GPS. I mean we have that technology now! Couldn’t they at least wake the real Jake up to try figure out where he is or give him advice on making it through the night.
7. Which brings us to this one: When the fuck does he sleep? Apparently, when he falls asleep as one of the cast of Fern Gully, he wakes up as the real Jake Sully. So we assume he is sleeping as the real Jake when he is awake as an Avatar. Wrong! Half way through the film, Sigourney Weaver puts him to bed with some milk and cookies. So we can only assume he is surviving on about 1 hour sleep a night. Talk about burning the candle at both ends. Zing! You can write that one down.
8. This whole planet (which by the way seems to be about the size of a city postal code for most of the film, but turns out to be huge and vast when they need to rally tribes to the cause) is being governed by Giovani Ri-fuckin-bisi! Maybe in the future corporations run the world and not nation states, but wouldn’t there be at least some bureaucracy. A board of directors for the corporation or something? Nobody wants a repeat of the Star Wars prequels but a line of dialogue to explain it away wouldn’t hurt.
9. The General who sounds like Superintendant Charlmers gives a lengthy de-briefing to suggest that there is a war going on. Or at least something very close to a guerrilla insurgency. For most of the movie, there is zero evidence of any conflict. In fact Jake seems to have a rare old time, frolicking around as a cat monkey.
10. Let’s lay this one out carefully. Jake’s Avatar becomes the demi-god of the blue Jar-Jar’s when he figures out how to ride the king of the flying dinosaurs. This happens after we are told that you are forever bound to the first flying dinosaur that you ride. There is some hippy nonsense about 'choosing' each other. Anyway, whatever nevermind. Jake just invented flying pterodactyl adultery. He’s a playa! So he jumps on board the king pterodactyl that nobody else could fly, by coming up with the crazy idea of…wait for it…coming at it from above. Apparently nobody else thought of that. They all thought the best way to get on top of this thing was to come at it from below.
12. According to all reports in the movie, unplugging an Avatar is extremely dangerous. No worries, let’s just do it without consequence about 10 times in the second half of the movie.
13. Our personal favourite because it just plain ruins the whole movie as a story and makes it the most incompetently written script we’ve come across in years: When Jake asks the fuzzy, fluffy nature gods that reside in the ether of the trees (or something) to help him and his band of giant monkey smurfs, Neytiri says the Gods cannot take sides. Fair enough. We totally get it… On second thoughts, Screw that!! When the chips are down in the big mega battle, , the goodies are dying and it looks like they are going to lose, we wonder how the hell they are gonna get out of this pickle. The answer? 3 words. Deus ex Machina (Look it up. It’s the closes thing to a scriptwriting sin that there is). Yes the nature god’s come to the rescue and turn all the animals of the jungle against the evil humans and they all live happily ever after. THE FUCKIN END BITCHES! DEAL WITH IT.
We could have gone on and done a top 50 reasons why the script sucked - hey Michelle Rodriguez. Thanks for laying your life on the line for no apparent reason and turning a key plot point. Maybe you can relate to the struggle of ethnic minorities - but let’s just keep it confined to basic lapses in logic. Remember these sins when it wins best film of the year at the Oscars.
* Let’s do that horrible thing of being fair for a moment. We could have listed the top 10 reasons why the 3D looked amazing enough to make this worth seeing (even if the design of the characters and the world was done by 10 year old kids on a sugar high) but is it too much to ask that a film that makes sense wins best film of the year.
