I recently watched Avatar on Blu-Ray thanks to a friend who loaned it to me. By the end, I couldn't help thinking: "I'm glad I didn't pay to watch that."

The financial success of this film (and the rave reviews being doled out here) proves that if it's shiny and colourful enough, people will quite often fall head over heels for it.

OK, so the visuals are very well done and imaginative (to a point). But are we so accustomed to a complete lack of substance in this day and age that we are willing to overlook it if the packaging is "really pretty"? Not me brother. For me, this film amounted to little more than eye candy.

I won't bang on too much about the re-hashed plot. More than enough reviewers have pointed out the near identical similarities to Pocahontas, Dances With Wolves and, yes, even Fern Gully. But I've found the attempts by other reviewers to try and justify this to be, well, lacking. Yes, plots and story lines are constantly being re-used in films, but the very talented individual knows at least how to put a new spin on them. Not James Cameron. What he's done with Avatar amounts to little more than what Ted Turned did in the 80's with his drive to "colorize" old black and white movies.

But other problems also cropped up in my mind through the (very long) course of the film. To save time and space (and because I'm just too damned indifferent to the film itself), I'll just cover one of them. The creatures on Cameron's Pandora almost all had six appendages and breathed, not through their mouths or noses, but instead though passage ways located on or near their shoulders. But for some mysterious reason, the Na'vi somehow missed out on this particular evolutionary pathway, despite their supposed "closeness" with the environment around them. Maybe I'm being overly analytical, but this was a huge gaping wound in Cameron's creation in my mind.

But the biggest issue of all was what I came away with after the film, which was...not much. I didn't care about any of the characters. None. Not a one. In fact, I'd be hard pressed to even name any of them. I find it next to impossible to reflect back on any particular scene with anything resembling fondness. What does come back to mind very readily however, are the visual effects. And to me, that is not the sign of a great, or even good, film.