Not bad, but largely over-hyped and unoriginal

Rating: 6/10 (9 January 2010)

Seriously: 1. The soundtrack - Pretty standard 'epic-jaw-dropping-orchestra' fare, nothing particularly new here.
2. The effects - OK. Let's be clear: I'm a professional Software Engineer with a hand in computer graphics (specifically, high end visualization of geological volumes) so I've made a lot of pretty pictures myself, and know how a lot of Avatar was made. I've seen a lot of CG, some of it good, a lot of it bad.
The effects in this movie are nice, and large parts of this movie are basically render porn, specifically some of the volumetric effects (the water, smoke, dust), some of it isn't that impressive (some of the surfaces just look downright plastic, particularly that huge gunship thing), and some of it REALLY isn't that impressive (external shots of the spaceships at the start made me cringe).
If we look at it as a matter of scale, this movie is hardly ground breaking: For $237,000,000 you can buy a LOT of computing power. Throw enough money, time and manpower at any computing problem and you'll get something purdy.
If you want to talk about pioneers, read about the founder of Pixar, Edwin Catmull; he is one of the guys who made hard things easy. This movie looked nice, but it DID cost $237,000,000 so if it did look crummy, someone would have probably been kneecapped.
3. The 3D - 3D isn't new, I don't know why people are so excited. The process they used is a good many years old, and has been used for far less hyped movies. At the start of this movie I went 'wow, this is interesting' and about 10 minutes later I stopped caring, like everyone else I saw this movie with. Kudos though for not making half the audience vomit with nausea.
4. The storyline - I just read that James Cameron wrote the script in two weeks. I wonder if he wrote if after watching Fern Gully? The storyline has a pretty heavy liberal bias, 'military bad, environment good, let's all hug a tree' type stuff, been there done that. It's neither particularly insightful of thought provoking; if you believe this stuff you'll swallow it whole, if you hate it you'll really hate it, and if you're after something thought provoking (duality of man), you'll be left severely disappointed.
The other problem I had was that at times the need for visual spectacle overtook both storytelling and pacing in priority, a large portion of Avatar feels like a a tech demo. I've sat through enough tech demos to know when I'm watching a finely tuned fly though of a rendered scene to show off all the sub-surface light scattering and how well the volumetric effects handle the 200 light sources. subtract some of the rather protracted visual scenes and there could have been some decent dialog, and perhaps even an original storyline. I count this as a missed opportunity.
5. Etc - I got a cool pair of glasses.
In summary, this movie cost $237,000,000, and it's pure spectacle. The soundtrack is forgettable, the storyline would get you a C+ in junior high school (or accused of plagiarism, have you seen Pocahontas?), and a lot of the visuals feel contrived to the point of a tech demo. It's not completely bad, but it's not spectacularly good. I did get to keep those 3D glasses though.
I think it's a C+ at most.