What has always amazed me about James Cameron is how his fans rate his absolutely average and utterly predictable fare with any credibility at all (with perhaps only Terminator 1 & 2 aside). Upon my first viewing of Avatar, down went the remote with the distinct feeling that I had seen it all before. In this movie Cameron shamelessly borrows from his own back catalogue with an obvious tipping of the hat towards Aliens (the mechanical walkers as per the Ripley loader) and The Abyss (luminescent lighting effects adorning all the Avatar life forms). What is worse is the plagiarising of a host of other movies, including plot lines lifted from Dances with Wolves (outcast soldier operates in isolation on the frontier to understand an alien race and eventually falls in love with indigenous girl, eventually abandoning his previous culture to become one of the tribe). In short, all been done before, nothing special and why can Cameron not write anything new?
The analogies between Aliens and Avatar in particular are painfully close - cryogenic sleep pods, Sigourney Weaver at loggerheads with a corporation and a businessman, human alien symbiosis, big alien human war, attacking of the centre point of the alien culture (Eywa and Alien Queen) et cetera, et cetera.
What would have saved the movie would have been a strong plot to back up the undeniably excellent CGI. In particular I enjoyed the dismayed facial expressions of the Zoe Saldana character which brought much humour to those sequences. However, like in so many movies of the modern era, there is just TOO MUCH reliance on that CGI at the expense of any existence of a workable plot. For example, in an advanced human era why would the morality of our race have taken such an obvious step backwards as the corporate and military forces in Avatar try to commit genocide on an incumbent species? This is such a plot issue everything that follows just falls down.
Equally frustrating was the laughably vague explanation of how humans have managed to create duplicate Avatar bodies successfully for them to even be used by the human characters. This is glossed over to say the least in a 5 second waffle about DNA hybridisation by the Sam Worthington character to the point where it seems that neither Cameron nor his writers could come up with a decent explanation - so they just left one out altogether.
So I suppose it is for kids really as they will no doubt enjoy the big neon animals and lots of needless and over long sequences of flying around on creatures who make noises lifted straight out of Jurassic Park (just listen to the sound of the Velociraptors calling in the complex kitchen and then watch Avatar!). All of the above just drags the whole experience down. This was THE disappointment of 2010 by a country mile.