I finally saw it and was thoroughly entertained.
It's a naive, seventies-style puristic eco fairytale, noble savages and all, and the similarities to Pochahontas (the Disney version) are in places to the point of plagiarism. But it does captivate you by sucking you into this lovingly created rainforest paradise. In places, watching the film is like looking at a very detailed huge painting and finding new things to marvel about with every new glance. Edith hates animation and is bored by any kind of SciFi or Fantasy film (unless her favorite hunk Keanu Reeves is in it!), I had to drag her to go, but she marvelled at the rainforest world throughout and whispered how beautiful it was.
With very few exceptions the 3D effects are used - dare I say it - tastefully and more to create an image of depth for the rainforest than for sheer surprise (Disney's Christman Carol was much more guilty of that). It didn't bother me, but I don't think it is what makes the film special, it's the work that has gone into the forest and animal animation. I liken the film to the first Jurassic Park which set standards at the time how dinosaurs have to look on the screen - the story was dumb, the T. Rex amazing.
There are cineastic nods to the past aplenty - the bad army grunt has a mug of coffee while the rainforest is napalmed to ashes, but he doesn't wear a cowboy hat like Robert Duval did in Apocalypse Now and doesn't comment on "the smell of napalm in the morning". Sigourney Weaver does her lesbian role model Ripley acting again with a good dose of her portrayal of Dian Fossey in Gorillas in the Mist thrown in. The robots and battleships quote Terminator and Star Wars, the rainforest predators the Alien monster or the Predator one, the planteaters the hammerhead shark pirate in Pirates of the Carribean etc. And anybody who saw Abyss will notice that Cameron's concept of underwater worlds isn't so much different from how he envisages a rainforest.
The plot? Utterly predictable with no surprise twists whatsoever, you can easily pick out the good, the bad and the not quite so bad ones which turn good after all. But it never turns so offensively bad to get in the way of the beauty of the pictures. In a way, this is a nature flic like Disney's classic The Living Desert.
Now all I need is a 10 foot woman with blue skin and a guttural accent! And a tail. (That was a big letdown, how neither their tail ends - his child audience in mind, Cameron obviously shunned away from using these for "neural connecting" because of the overtly sexual connotation - nor their plaited pigtails were used in the one and only very light sex scene - very similar to the one in Pochahontas - for some of that kinky neural networking they would otherwise do with trees, horses or their flight dragons!)
