I've now been to see this movie, thanks mainly to Jong and The Wench double-teaming me, and I have the following conclusions: First, I was essentially right; the movie is (as everyone has been saying here over and over again as if it is somehow a defense of the film's overall quality) absolutely visually beautiful and very well made (apart from the note that I think that a lot of the 3-d animation, while amazing at times, tended to end up distracting from scenes as much as it added; so it was a mixed bag that I felt was at times over-used just because its a new toy... that, and I spent the first 20 minutes or so with my eyes severely watering trying to adjust to the damn glasses).
However, "visually stunning" is not a decent rebuttal to the points raised here. There's a mentality, foremost among nerds, but also in general, to think that because something looks cool or high-tech that also means its good. This is less forgivable among those nerds who actually believe that just being a "geek" makes you smarter than the average person, when very clearly it does not, if you can be fooled (like so many "average people" were apparently also fooled) into thinking that Avatar is a really smart movie just because its visually stunning and sci-fi. Not all sci-fi is smart, and not all pretty movies are smart.
In the second place: you can judge a film on three different levels: aesthetically for its beauty, in the literary sense for its writing and philosophically for the message it conveys and the depth at which it conveys it.
Aesthetically, on the whole, this is a beautiful film. But in the other two elements, its a horrible movie.
The dialogue is godawful, the characters are pathetically shallow, the whole thing is just putrid melodrama, from a literary standpoint.
And philosophically, Edsan has it right, the thing is a 3-hour propaganda piece. It re-wraps the old "Noble Savage" argument, and in a particularly stupid way. The problem with the Noble Savage has always been that in fact Savagery is not Noble at all, and those who try to portray the Noble Savage inevitably create a fairy-tale where the "savage" in question is always clean, gentle, handsome, and in touch with the earth. In reality, the Savage is covered in filth, violent, crawling with parasites, and not necessarily an iota more ecologically conscious than we are. In this movie, on top of that the Alien Noble Savage has the benefit of wearing magic USB-ports, and being Objectively Right because the movie leaves absolutely NO room for doubt that their nebulous earth-goddess/life-force is REAL. (this also ties into the awfulness of the story as literature, because this particular revelation of absolute rightness for the Navi thrusts the humans into Absolute Wrongness and makes any kind of grey moral-uncertainty impossible).
The ultimate irony of the Noble Savage, and the ultimate irony of the movie, is that had the main character been born a Navi instead of a human, and had the Navi been portrayed in a realistic way, there's NO WAY the main character would have been alive to save all the Navi, because the moment he was crippled he'd have stood no chance of surviving.
The truth of the Savage, and the truth of the "Nature" that the wishy-washy Hollywood pantheists always wax romantic about is that Nature is a First-Class Bitch, and that it is Survival of the Fittest. Rooting for nature means rooting for the power of the strong over the weak, the hunter over the hunted, and that being weak means that you'll be dead.
Believing in Civilization is actually believing that humanity can do better than this, and create a world where the weak are protected.
The anti-human, anti-western anti-civilization Hollywood new-ageism is there just like I predicted; too. So is the White-Guilt complex mixed in with the underlying (ironic?) racism of "only the civilized white man who betrays his own people can actually save us from them, we savages are far too stupid to be able to do anything for ourselves".
Its a beautiful film to watch, but in every other respect, Avatar is a horrible, horrible movie.
RPGPundit