Wow, not nearly as good as the first two.

Rating: 7/10 (25 July 2010)

OK, so I of course loved the first two films, loved Avatar in 3D, had seen the trailers (including in 3D during the World Cup which looked awesome), and had high hopes for this film. We saw it this morning in Real-D 3D.
First of all the 3D added very little to the presentation, so if you aren't specifically a fan of 3D then don't bother as you'll not be missing anything. I had to actually exert some effort to notice the 3D much of the time which was odd. It felt like there just wasn't enough information being presented by the 3D effect, even less so than other films including other animated ones.
But anyhow, what about the movie? Well 7/10 is all I can give it. Yes, it's a Pixar film, so you know it's going to be well produced. But quite a number of things really bugged me:
It's much, much darker than the original movies (both figuratively and literally). Over the top nightmarish at times. Very much like Harry Potter in comparison to the originals which were much more Loony Toons.
If you've seen the trailer you've seen many (most?) of the good lines and gags in the film. They picked out the cream for the trailer and if you've seen it then you've pretty much seen the movie. This was really annoying especially after having seen the trailers probably a dozen times over the last year.
Lots of expository, relatively less physical gags. I couldn't help feeling that the filmmakers were treating this as somewhat of a chore. They needed to wrap up the series and so this, and this, and this need to happen to get there so let's march the characters in that direction. Too much time was spent getting through all this rather than just coming up with a fun movie.
The first two movies are classics, and 10/10 in my opinion. This one is just OK, and not the light happy fun of the first ones.