Okay, so I saw Avatar yesterday. Apparently my take on it was a lot different than most of yours. My review is spoiler free, aside from the summary from IMDB and I don't think there's anything in there that wasn't in the trailer.

First, here's a short summary via IMDB:

Yes, it was beautiful. Yes, it had amazing, unbelievable special effects. It definitely deserves credit for all that. We saw it in 3D, and I've never seen anything that amazingly beautiful on the big screen before. I definitely recommend seeing it in theaters, especially in 3D, while it's there because I think it will lose a lot at home on DVD.

However.

Avitable wrote in his review "Even with the basic plot and one-dimensional characters, the movie is phenomenal." And not just Avitable's review, pretty much every review I've read has said something like this.

I don't think the beautiful picture should make up for the complete lack of original plot. I mean, really, is that what filmmaking has become? We'll just recycle the same, overused plot but pretty up with groundbreaking special effects? Because I can tell you, I knew what was going to happen 30 minutes into it. I could tell how it was going to end, I could tell how the love story was going to go.

If it took James Cameron this long to make this movie, he should have had time to write an original story to go along with all that CG. I've seen this all a million times before, and at least then it didn't take almost 3 hours to tell the story.