Avatar

 So... what could I possibly say about Avatar that hasn't been said elsewhere before a hundred times, and better?

 Well, nothing, that's what. But that's never stopped me before.

 Upon rewatching it I'm kind of surprised at how few... well, surprises it held for me; I had forgotten a lot of the specifics, but my reaction to the whole remains completely unchanged. Maybe a bit more positive, since I knew what to expect, but there are no new real insights, nothing to add to my opinion of it; The only surprise was how well the CGI has held up over the last (oh god!) thirteen years. For good or ill, everything's there... right at the surface.

 Overall, I like it. It's a good spectacle/action movie with a carefully crafted but extremely shallow and very manipulative story. Despite that its science fiction is bad (let's not hold that against it, though, almost all Hollywood movies fail at the Sci part of Sci-Fi), it spends a lot of time focusing on the planet of Pandora and its species with an almost documentary-like focus, letting  you inhabit the setting more than just about any other movie (the only exceptions I can think of right now is Dune and the Blade Runners.)
 It almost feels more like a videogame than a movie, and this is one of the rare cases where I mean that as a compliment; so much focus on the backdrop is rare in non-interactive media. I say it's bad sci fi because, well, it is, in the same way Star Wars is bad sci fi, but like Star Wars it's got a very detailed and well thought-out fantasy setting. A little derivative in the sense that most things are recognizable as an analog of something from earth, but the amount of detail layered on top of it -the amount of spectacle poured on even the most unimportant elements of a scene- honestly makes it all right to me even if it underwhelms as a a plausible alien world/ecosystem. Suspension of disbelief is easy as hell when the production has been so tightly designed.

 Cameron's populism on the story department is, unfortunately, much harder to swallow. Beyond it being a white saviour movie that very cynically exploits white man's guilt (re: American natives, not black men)... it's just a bit shit, right? I mean, our protagonist almost immediately falls in with a fucking goddamn princess! Through dumb luck and cheap contrivances he's immediately able to accomplish more in days than the scientists that trained years for the same mission ever did. And.. of course he ends up being the Pandoran Kwisatz Haderatch. Fuck that noise. One thing that people miss when ripping on Dune is that Herbert was a very smart cookie and most of the cheesy tropes in the first book end up being subverted or they're explained by other, more powerful players' ulterior motives. Paul Atreides is a pawn, not a chosen one. Herbert had something to say. Cameron... well, he's got things to say too, but to put it kindly they're not nearly as sophisticated or nuanced. 

 It's Titanic all over again; You can call it elemental storytelling, playing with archetypes, whatever... I'd just call it manipulative and really, really fucking basic. However, this time the tropes and melodrama are action- and sci fi-related, so of course I'll find it easier to give it a pass.

 Another reason that it works is that Jake Scully makes for a very likeable protagonist. The only scene I respond to emotionally at all in this movie is when he first gets his Avatar - after an undetermined time as a paraplegic, he can't contain himself and just bursts out running... it's a lovely scene, and the only honest one in the movie. He's got a child-like purity that makes him a very engaging character throughout.
 (This is directly at odds with how long it takes for him to betray the military in favour of the Na'vi, which is the rare slip in an otherwise very slick script; it could be explained by military conditioning and naivety, but it comes off as another cynical script device.)

 And... that spectacle! It's a movie that never lets up and never cuts any corners, and it's hard to overstate just how good it looks, how goddamn cool everything is even after more than a decade. The action is clear, exciting and full of awesome moves and pyrotechnics, the designs are intricate and consistent, the cinematography clear, crisply edited and punchy. It's easy to roll your eyes at the story, but the spectacle more than fills out its two hours and a half nicely. The script may be shallow and cynical, for sure, but there's so much of everything else to make up for it.