What's wrong with Avatar

I saw Avatar the weekend it came out. In 3D, of course. And it was good. Maybe even really good. Certainly the effects were amazing. As a UI designer, I was really impressed at his vision of 3D projected user interfaces. And the level of detail of everything on the alien planet was staggering. Sigourney Weaver was fantastic in her role. I loved her last line. Totally fitting of a research scientist.

But. There were problems. He nailed the design. He created his own alien language, with grammar, writing, and accent. James Cameron is known for nailing all the details. Which makes it an immense travesty that he chose the Papyrus font for the subtitles. OK, maybe it's a custom version, but the overwhelming similarity makes the origin clear. This is the best he could do? I mean, papyrus is right down there with Comic Sans as an overused, inelegant font whose use says I am a lazy, unimaginative designer who slapped this together in 20 minutes." James Cameron, you wound me, and all of the other typophiles worldwide.

The plot was a mess. Maybe not at the Star Wars prequel level, but certainly not even close to the quality of the original Star Wars movies. The bad guys are so one dimensional, that the irony of them appearing in a 3D movie did not escape me. The physics of the floating mountains was a bit too much for my suspension of disbelief. But the thing that just made me laugh out loud at the sheer lunacy was that a mechanized cyber-suit would have a proportionally sized knife attached for hand-to-hand combat. I could maybe see a blade attachment somewhere on the suit for cutting, but why require the suit to wield it in a hand just like a human? There are so many drawbacks to that design, I can't believe it made it into the movie.

Sure, it was entertaining, but I'm not rushing out to see it again.