Oh, please don't get me started on the megalomaniac that is James Cameron, and his idiotic attitude to his hired writers... I know a few people who have worked with him, and yes, the guy has some issues, to put it mildly.
The rule of thumb with Cameron is the bigger his budgets get, the worse his films get. So The Terminator is still his best, followed by Aliens (both of which I love), and so on, until we get to Avatar, which was rubbish. Yes, it was great technically, but the plot was The Matrix meets Dances with Wolves on another planet, with none of the excitement of the former or the emotional heft of the latter. It was the first James Cameron film where I left the cinema profoundly disattisfied (even Titanic didn't have that effect on me, which despite one-dimensional characters worked in a blunt instrument romantic disaster movie sort of way).
The other thing that pissed me off about Avatar was it's inanely oversimplified, hypocritical, heavy-handed, sanctimonious preaching on things like environmentalism versus captialism, with all the political heft and nuance of an undergraduate trendy lefty that's just read Karl Marx for the first time. Cameron bludgeons us with humourless capitalism bad/environmentalism good sermons until I weirdly got the urge to colonise a third world country, oppress the natives, and strip mine for any material wealth.
Also, 3D is and always will be a gimmick. It was gimmick when Georges Melies tried it at the dawn of cinema. It was a gimmick in the 1950s with House of Wax, Dial M For Murder, etc. It was a gimmick in the 1980s with Jaws 3D and so on. And it was a gimmick when Avatar paved the way for all those ghastly 3D "conversions" where everyone wanted to make a cheap 3D buck, more recently.
Opticians say the human eye isn't designed to look at stereoscopic images for any length of time, which is why some people get splitting headaches from watching 3D feature films, and others simply "get used to" the images. 3D also reduces colour and contrast once the glasses are on, and has the effect of actually distancing the viewer from the action, rather than drawing them in. It is less immersive, not more, whereas good old fashioned 2D cinema has always had a far more hypnotic, immersive effect.
Rant over. Great article by the way.