Avatard
Avatar is a motion thrill-ride movie that somehow got made into a feature-length 3D film instead. The acting, characters, situations, settings -- these are all exactly what you'd find exceptional in a Disney or Universal Studios theme park. For a theatrical audience expecting something to rival Titanic for example, those expectations will be as cold and sunken as the boat.
Adventure films often have sacrificed characterization for thrills, but even so we've had our Indiana Jones and our Mummy films, both light years beyond this oh-so-distant Pandora world with its float-stone "Unobtainium" (very unimaginatively named) rocks.
Even the alien culture is juvenile for a race allegedly in tune with both nature and millennia of ancestors - more Keebler Elf than a true tribal hunter/gatherer clan. There was no sign of shelters, toolmaking benches, etc., it was as if they lived near naked in the forest and branches all their long lives! I guess eating cookies that come from pockets in the trees and hiding in boles and under leaves is good enough for them...
It seemed too convenient that there's a way to interface between creatures yet the Na'vi couldn't simply use this to check the veracity of what each other say, when the dramatic moment came when a question of honor became a dramatic point in the story. Rules that work but don't work mean hackney.
The ecology of this planet also seems strange in that Na'vi are so humanoid yet everything else on the world is so alien, 4-limbed and tentacled, etc. Creationists must love this film as it affirms the Grand Design.
The film had an obvious plot complication - that of the mind/body separation. It had a creative means of transfer, and I actually preferred that to a technological means of doing so, albeit the full lightshow/ceremony of the process got gratuitous (Disneyesque) for me. I was expecting some surprise function to force a transfer, like killing the pilot while fully linked - first time could be hidden because his avatar could be killed almost simultaneously, for example.
Avatar teaches us nothing. That's its failing. It just shows us beauty and ugliness in an imaginary place and from a familiar source. It stirs emotion but no real pathos, well save for a living tree you get to care for through its connection with the Na'vi, so it's an unusual emotional connection -- I'll grant it that.
Things without points are blunt objects. As blunt objects go, Avatar has been one of the more pleasant ones that have taken hours of my time and $13 of my money away from me. I might even club some friend over the head with it should they not have seen it -- but that's highly improbable (I live in a far distant corner of the galaxy).