If being impressed with the fantastically visualized grandeur of a CGI landscape is the same as liking a movie, then I liked "Avatar."

Except it isn't, and I didn't.

This? Groundbreaking?! The ever-popular Puerile Savages Who Are Wiser Than Us, ravaged ruthlessly by uni-faceted frat-boy soldiers fond of pugilistic statements ending in "bitch!" who just wanna "getter done!"and be "home by dinner"? Seriously?

Don't the writers ever have any karmic backlash from regurgitating cliches which fatigue even the very WORD "tired'–and may in fact be clinically dead?

I like to think there's some penalty, like an outbreak of back acne or something.

And for those reviewers who say, "Well, at least the kids will like it," I should let you know that my 9-year-old, the first of us to comment as we left the theater, pronounced it "The most predictable movie I have ever seen in my life." Later, at home, he said that even "iCarly" has better stories...and in any event it's shorter. If you knew my kid, you would appreciate the utter damnation issued with that comment.

I should no longer be surprised, but I can't help being (always!) disappointed. So many talented writers in the world...there's just no excuse. Why trouble to perfect a human-seeming wince or pained smile on a rendered character, and leave its REAL humanity at the pancake-flat, J. Jonah Jameson cartoon level? I'd rather see claymation, or people's hands moving plastic soldiers around, or yanked about with visible strings...set to dialog that makes me actually give a damn. Since we got to the theater late, we had to sit on the floor in order to all sit together, and I felt every murderous second of its 2.5 hour running time.

I should note that I do think 2D caricatures (rather than complex characters) work sometimes, in some movies, such as parodies, like the zombie movie "Fido," or, well, comic book movies, like the recent Spider-Man franchise. But in this tsunamic belch of self-importance–complete with flying dragons and jazz hands!–it is not working within the rules of its own atmosphere to have crap dialogue and flushable characters.

I did, however, have to love the scene where Neytiri embraces his "real" non-avatar form (much smaller than the avatar body); it brought back all that I so loved (!) about Titanic--Cameron does seem to have a weakness for diminutive men being enveloped by larger women :D Cast opposite Kate Winslet, L though at least in this movie he did not look like a teenaged lesbian, which was all I could think when Kate Winslet smothered Leonardo de Caprio on the prow of the Titanic.

This movie has nothing, NOTHING on The Matrix, nothing on good television sci-fi (BBC and the new Battlestar Galactica); it was infinitely less fun than the new Star Trek movie, and I am amazed it's won so many people over. Maybe, as in the movie "They Live," (a B-movie I actually find more original than this one), we should look to those dark glasses...they seem to have made us all forget that we already saw Dances With Wolves once before. Which was actually more than enough.

TATONKAAAAA!