You will be disappointed...

Rating: 9/10 (18 December 2009)

...if you go into this movie expecting the greatest movie of the past twenty years. However, this movie is certainly compelling, solidly executed, and (perhaps the most important and rare quality in Hollywood at the moment) original in concept.
I went into this movie as a bit of a James Cameron neophyte: I have never seen Titanic, and I do not imagine I have seen any of his other works. So I did not encounter this movie with the grandiose view of James Cameron that everyone else seems to have (in fact, I distinctly avoided Titanic because I thought it looked like a bad movie). So with only a slightly negative disposition towards Mr. Cameron, I took in this movie.
Expect to see a lot of money being shown on screen: giant blue cat aliens are not exactly cheap to render, nor is the world, Pandora, on which they live. Expect a strange meshing of science fiction and fantasy concepts, as the Na'vi (see giant blue cat aliens) and Pandora are so in tune with one another that it appears magical in a strangely familiar yet unique way.
Expect a romance. In fact, this is probably my only gripe with the movie. The romance is the only part of the movie which feels completely cliché to me, simply because it feels as though it was shoehorned in as a plot device. I felt that the movie would have been far more compelling if Jake Sully had somehow managed the feats of plot without the help of a powerful female getting the hots for him. But hey, that's Hollywood, I can't blame Mr. Cameron for that.
Some people claim that the characters are cartoony in the manner in which they are characterized, to which I have to humbly disagree. Every single character in this story had a redeeming quality, even the villain, and every single character in this story had a devastating quality, even the hero. Where some people find it hard to sympathize with any of the characters, the manner in which they were written (even the very cliché speeches of Jake Sully) came off as completely natural. Jake Sully is a traitor, but you forgive him because the humans are out of line, but you forgive them because they're just following orders, but you feel for the Na'vi because their way of life is being disrupted, but the big corporate head guy clearly has lost control of the situation to a crazy marine commander, but you forgive him because he's just trying to do what he was hired to do by the big corporate head guy... I could go on forever like this, but my point is that though the movie encourages you to root for one character over another, nobody is a complete wash of black or white. No one in this story is a saint, and no one in this story is Satan. Everyone came off as complex, with their own unique back-stories which may have been somewhat cliché in their own rights, but combined in such a fascinating way that you have to wonder at the flexibility that this environment holds. The villain of this movie, transplanted into a similar environment with slightly less sympathetic aliens and told from his perspective, would be just as sympathetic as Jake Sully is in this movie. As a writer, I will say this to all of you out there: this is no easy task.
Let's not even mention the fact that the plot itself is a variation on a cliché theme in sci-fi. Original story goes: super-advanced aliens invade Earth. Avatar is a direct subversion of this concept, and it delivers amazingly well. Only criticism I could offer here is that I could easily see people interpreting the story as environmentalist propaganda; it happened with WALL-E and this one is just as overt. But if you acknowledge that possibility of message going in and let it be, there is nothing problematic about it inherently: it works with the story.
So in conclusion, if you are looking for a mega-blockbuster that is so "totally not cliché that it in itself becomes cliché," (that is, the cliché of a movie that sacrifices coherence for originality) Avatar will not deliver: it has far too much depth of character and plot to allow itself to deliver such frivolous desires. However if you are looking for a movie that will lend itself to some dissection, into craft of writing as well as directing, acting, and special effects, this is a good movie to look into.