Oh, very well. Here's why I'm going to go out of my way to avoid Avatar:

It's well documented that Cameron almost drowned several of his actors and crew filming The Abyss. What was most shocking was his lack of contrition or remorse about it. I remember reading an interview with an extremely pissed off Ed Harris about it. The crew boycotted the set and there were lawsuits. It was a real mess.

Cameron is the worst kind of Hollywood hack director. He's always been very willing to crush and ruin the career of anyone in the way. Again, very well documented if you care to look for it. Where most great directors develop a rapport with crews and actors, using them over and over again on all their productions, Cameron goes thru people like kleenex. Nobody wants to work with the guy twice.

Lets look at his movies. Does anyone even care that The Abyss exists at this point? Glacial pace and virtually no payoff at the end of almost 3 hours. What a bloated stiff. Aliens was the best thing he ever did hands down, but when you get down to it, this was nothing more than a coke and popcorn, bug-hunt, sci-fi flick. There's really nothing else there. The Terminator movies started out as a quicky low-budget action hack-job that looks embarrassingly dated now. And the series devolved into bloated mess with bigger budgets, more CGI and explosions with even less character or logic driving the story. Titanic was excessive, cheesy and overwrought in virtually every way. Really, a terrible movie who's CGI effects already look dated (the problem with every CGI-driven film, but that's another post). Far as I'm concerned, winning the best picture oscar® is usually a bad thing. The bad movie, the one that will be embarrassing when you look back at it 10 years later, almost always wins.

This Avatar flick looks like no exception to his parade of infantile crap. I can't tell you the last time I've seen such an overhyped advertising campaign! Man, you cannot avoid hearing about how "this movie will change moviegoing, forever!" There's been an all out blitz in every form of media and even a 60 Minutes story for old people. It's been my experience that the more a movie is advertised, the more it's going to suck. If that's true, then Avatar will be a monumental turd. Face it, any movie where the ad campaign uses an ancient cornball line like "We're not in Kansas anymore" has got to be written for a 9 year olds level of understanding. I bet someone says "Lock and Load" at some point too. Pathetic. Inexcusable in a movie hails itself as a total industry changer.

And let me get this straight, the lead character has lost his legs in battle and you see him in a wheel chair and they tell him he can walk again by putting his consciousness in this alien body they made from alien DNA. Well if they can do that, why can't they just cook up some new human legs for him from his own DNA? What an incredibly STUPID idea on such a basic, fundamental level! Typical, half-baked Cameron BS. I can hear the back room talk: "We'll just dazzle 'em with shiny stuff and they'll forget that it doesn't make any sense."

Does Roger Dean get an art direction credit? So much of the look of this movie is a outright rip off of many of RD's paintings. I googled "Roger Dean Avatar" and while many reviewers echo my sentiments, Cameron has been entirely silent on the subject. I just looked at the entire on-screen-credit-list at imdb.com and Dean's name is nowhere, not even the special thanks list. Just another example of the typical Cameron business ethic.

Other than that I can't wait to see it . . .