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So I finally saw "Avatar" and I thought it was pretty OK.

Here are my primary beefs with it:

1. The character designs were ugly

I get he was going for animals that looked conceivable and represented what could have been a feasible evolutionary path, but they all looked pretty stupid. Maybe I'm just too subscribed to the Pokemon school of fictional animal animal creation, but every animal in Avatar was hideous. It's hard to get excited about stupid looking blue alien guys riding even stupider looking eight-legged horses. Everything that didn't look dumb (scenery, human technology) was uninspired.

2. The dialogue was really stupid

It was 90% stupid one liners. The rest was painfully bad romantic dialogue. Any scene where they had to explain some concept was especially painful.

3. He has horrible sense of character design

Every character was a stereotype and had either no redeeming qualities or was completely flawless. The only exception was the main character, who "develops" from someone with no redeeming qualities to someone completely flawless. Worse than that, he made an entire species with no flaws.

4. The plot was completely generic and predictable

But even big fans are admitting this.

5. The acting was passable at best

In that it was, for the most part, about as good as the actors could do given the characters and lines they had been given. But it wasn't any better either.

6. The way James Cameron writes action scenes is really unbearable

The meat of this movie is the visual effects, which are primarily displayed in shots of scenery and "thrilling action scenes". The problem with the former I'll address, but the problem with the latter is pretty unbearable. They're unpredictable in the way that every time I cannot imagine that he will do something so generic, and then he does. A monster chases him and gets stuck in some trees while he tries to stumble over roots. Then he jumps off a waterfall. Sigh.

7. The visuals are amazing, but:

So, the movie is mediocre in best in pretty much everything that I feel makes a movie good: characters, acting and plot. It does have something that I can appreciate, though - incredibly sophisticated and generally amazing special effects and 3D. I cannot deny that this movie is powerful simply to watch. Scenes of soaring over floating mountains, glowing forests, spaceships slowly docking with a space station... such scenes are completely pointless and largely stupid. But they do look amazing. Really, really amazing. I simply cannot begin to understand the level of work put into these effects. If it was slightly more subtle, or not wrapped in the context of sub-par everything else, this sort of amazing visual experience would make this a pretty darn good movie.

Essentially, this is Crysis the Movie. That shot of coming over the mountain and seeing the bay with the rising sun is amazing, but the gameplay that follows is average at best. And, like Crysis, I was wishing for a documentary version that just gave me freedom to explore around. Honestly, though, it was a pretty good movie. All my problems with it are problems I have with 99% of big-budget Hollywood movies today, but that doesn't mean they're excusable. Simply put, Avatar is good entertainment I guess but it is has no real artistic merit. I put it on the same tier as Transformers and Independence Day, but it is at least on or near the top of that tier.