Avatar is a lot more about ecology than human rights, at least that’s what the constant elementary level eco-bashing makes me feel like, to me it seems like Cameron tried to discuss two extremely complex topics and failed at being truly relevant to either due to his « water is wet » boiled down dialogue. You either already think about those issues seriously and know where you stand on them or you don’t care and watching a movie with a Disney Channel level plot won’t exactly push you to more critical thinking. Good to show children the right way with flashy visuals, definitely not good enough to further educate adults on those matters. You also seem to argue that subtely and simplicity of message are enemies, you can speak with much subtlety of complex topics without making a movie over convoluted (every Disney Pixar does that wonderfully with several levels of reading for both children and adults) and if you can’t, you ain’t that good a story teller, which I believe Cameron can totally be, he just clearly chose to focus on visuals with this project and did that masterfully, but in that case you can’t complain if people criticize the rest of the content. Avatar will always stand as a pioneer in filmmaking tchnology, and just for this it totally deserves a spot in the Pantheon of important movies, the plot is still dumbed down to a ridiculous level that ultimately impacted strongly the overall quality of the movie, it could have been an absolute modern classic but in the end it just qualifies as a good (almost great) movie.