Review:
Overall I enjoyed myself quite a bit, and think it's one of the better movies of the year actually. I was quite drawn into the fantastical Na'vi world, and I felt for them.
OTOH, I couldn't really care less about the villains. As real as the Na'vi felt, the villains seemed like video game characters, complete with the stiff acting and terrible dialogue.
Furthermore, the plot was quite predictable. Don't expect to be wowed by a deep and surprising plot, because if you do, you may just be disappointed. Go in with the expectations of an excellent Disney fable with awesome CG and better robot action than Transformers, and you'll probably be happy.
BTW, I don't think this movie needs to be 3D. The 3D was understated, which is nice, but then again with this level of understated 3D, you'd probably be just fine with no 3D at all. However, I may be biased somewhat because 3D gives me a mild headache, and Avatar was no different.
Also, in Avatar at the beginning with all the silver-grey human base scenes, I could see significant flickering in a few shots, sort of like what you see with a CRT with too low of a refresh rate. Luckily, I didn't see this in the Na'vi world or else that would have just severely pissed me off. When I got home I looked this up, and found out that James Cameron feels that we're not quite there yet with 3D, because with 24 fps shooting strobing is visible to some people. Well, it turns out that Avatar was still shot at 24 fps.
Good point, but maybe you could write it off as a difference in angle. Shooting upwards the angle of incidence would be minimal and less destructive, but shooting downwards or straight on but closed to 90 degrees, the angle of incidence would be much more focused and destructive. Yah. Something like that.
Weren't they bigger ones and from much closer and a better angle? That's how I wrote it off anyway.