I'm such a minority here. I thought it was a big, dumb, ridiculously heavy handed movie. People say Avatar rips off Dances With Wolves, but I think saying that does a disservice to DWW. I have no problem if it liberally cribs from other sources, but I do have a problem when it does it in such a lazy uninspired way. I'm happy with retelling of universal or timeless stories. I'm not OK with crappy retellings. 3D is cool, I guess. But man what a stinker of a story. Smart, Avatar is not. Subtle, nope. I couldn't even get into it on a lowbrow scifi angle--the AMP suits felt ridiculous to me (while the idea of 30mm on tap to the individual soldier is cool, the whole thing in execution is impractical and not even in a cool way); the convenient usb plug on animals, na'vi, plants, etc...seriously? The vehicles..? And other issues (why in the heck do they have a freaking space shuttle to drop some megabomb by flying UNDER the trees?)

I have a big suspension of disbelief threshold, but come on. Maybe I expected too much. My gripes really sum up to one complaint: a focus on SFX leading to a heavy-handed, trite plot--a terrible combination. Which is, to my surprise, the complaint that's usually left to lesser movie makers. That's stuff we say about Devlin/Emmerich. But man, at least Stargate was a better popcorn movie than Avatar. In a year that we had scifi like Moon, how can I be content with "scifi" like Avatar?

And I'm a big, big, big James Cameron fan. Aliens was a 100x better a movie on so many levels.