Here's my take as someone who has never seen Avatar and still has no desire to see it after exploring the land.
If you're a skeptic of the claims that Flight is the best ride in Orlando, my advice is to keep your expectations low. I know I was wishing for more, but it’s Soarin’ 2.0, plain and simple. The diehard fans may dispute that, but I guarantee that’s the way average guests will describe it: “It’s like Soarin’ with 3D.”
The Flight queue is well done but overhyped. It’s got elements of the woodsy E.T. queue with additional black light painting. Nice atmosphere, but not much else in this part. This area is quite static; adding animatronics of some sort to the forest area would have given this section more interest.
The lab section is surprisingly compact; there are basically two (maybe three) displays in here. I really expected this to be a more sprawling area. The upper story of the room is hardly themed; this diminishes the feeling of a real work space. UC did such a good job making Diagon feel like a place that had depth (the scene over the ordering area in the Leaky Cauldron, e.g.). I never sensed that spatial depth anywhere in this land., most especially in this room where something like that would have added more mystery.
The preshows are dry and already tiresome by the second ride. If you like rolling your eyes at the fake Avatar language, you're gonna love the preshows. If Disney wants to push the envelope, they should figure out a way to improve on the staging areas in their E-ticket attractions. There's so little effort in these two rooms that it's mindboggling. Think how effectively and creatively Tower sets the mood with the library preshow. There's nothing like that here. Hands down, the two Gringott preshows are more impressive than these.
The loading process is the most tedious of any E-ticket in Orlando. It makes Mission: Space's loading look like poetry in motion. The ride vehicles aren’t terribly comfortable while you wait for the restraints to move into place, and the glasses aren’t a snug fit making it feel like they could fly off during the ride.
The 3D is fine, but to my eyes it doesn’t look better than the 3D in Gringotts. In fact, in motion, the 3D of FoP had noticeable blur. I think the 3D in Star Tours looks as good as (maybe better than) the 3D in FoP.
The ride motion is fun, but it’s not intense. Nothing like the drops on Tower. I get why we don’t see the winged critter's head/neck in front during the film (it would look odd to have a row of those things side by side), but this also takes away from the experience. At least with the hang-gliding conceit, you believe that the glider is above you. They make this big to-do about the creature being important in the ecosystem, connecting with it, blah blah blah, and then you never sense that you're riding the thing.
It would’ve been a maintenance nightmare, but it’s really too bad they couldn’t figure out a way to add the creature to the ride vehicle. The row of vehicles also lack any kind of grandeur. If you're aiming for something cinematic or dramatic, this is just not an ideal way to start an E-ticket.
I guess I’d rate the whole experience a B, maybe lower if I had to wait more than 45 minutes. It’s certainly not worth a 2- or 3-hour wait, which it’ll probably maintain for this summer. I would take a dozen WDW attractions and at least a half dozen Universal attractions over it. I’m curious what average guests will think of it, because in many ways, I thought the ride itself was the most disappointing part of the entire land.
The food was good, probably the best part of the land all things considered. The blueberry dessert was nice. The fried tofu bowl was pretty good, or at least unique for a theme park.
I actually think the land looks better in photographs than in person. As someone who has no interest in Avatar, I thought it just looked like DAK-ish rockwork. In person, the mountains don't remotely look like they're floating. You approach the land at a weird angle, which doesn't provide for a scripted dramatic reveal, either. I'm sure Rohde would claim that's by design, but you know, I think theme parks work best when they realize they're designed as controlled environments to dramatically manipulate the guests' perceptions. There's no dramatic focal point like Hogwarts or the dragon on Gringotts or the Splash Mountain flume to draw you in. I walked into the land and actually forgot there was supposed to be a dramatic reveal, because all the greenery waterfally rocky stuff just blends together.
Final thought. Nothing in the land has the heart and charm of the Hogwarts Express. Perhaps that's a result of the movie property not having much warmth. But judged strictly on what's in the land, it feels like a very odd, unemotional place to find at WDW. Sort of like a deserted civilization where all the indigenous people have died off or otherwise disappeared. Post-apocalyptic nature park, if you will. Not exactly a place I'm eager to spend a lot of time.
I'm left wondering what lessons Disney has learned from Potter (is it that they think people are willing to buy embarrassing Avatar merch?), because overall, this feels like a land that learned all the wrong lessons from the two Potter lands.
Long story short, Diagon remains the best land/experience in Orlando by a comfortable distance. Pandora doesn't come close.
