I doubt if there are many of you who remember the movie FernGully.

Probably because you didn't see it, what, 15 years ago.

But I bet a bunch of you have seen the recent remake, FernGully 2.

They call it Avatar.

So yeah, the wife and I, and youngest son, were in for the first showing. And yes, our theater had it in 3D.

Yet another pair of worthless 3D glasses to add to my collection.

So. Avatar.

Yeah, we liked it. Sure we'll go see it again. But I have almost never found a movie I couldn't complain about, and this one is no different. In fact, it provided me with enough ammunition as we sat enjoying breakfast at the diner after the show, that youngest son felt obliged to announce "I liked it."

Yes, I did, too.

But it ain't a great film.

Great technology, sure. Great sets (digital though they be), sure. But even the wife complained we should have gone flying on a dragon, rather than swooping around watching other people fly on dragons.

And the plot, however, is simply an updated, space age version of FernGully. Even down to the tree-munching landscaping machines. This story was 110 percent predictable, with not a single surprise in it anywhere. There were two minor characters who died, that I did not expect to die, and that was about it for unpredictability.

The 3D effect was great in the digitally-created world, but in the real world sets, well, lab tables were too flat, and either really close, or really far. No gradient or perspective. But even in the digital world, items too close to the screen flattened out before they disappeared. For that, maybe you have to be sitting in the center of the theater for it all to work 100 percent.

Now, some of the really irritating things...

We are already attacking enemies remotely from half-way around a planet. In twenty, thirty years, the idea of sending soldiers on the ground in mass with weapons will be as antiquated as the firing lines of the Civil War. Humans certainly won't be doing that in another 150 years.

Yet, here we are sending in squads of soldiers on Pandora...

And the whole, great premise of this story is that a human warrior has arrived just at the moment he is needed to prevent catastrophe. He even declares he knows the human strategies, and the he and the Na'vi have the home field advantage in the coming battle.

So what great, winning strategies does this savior bring to his new people?

They charge a wall of armored, machine-gun toting soldiers with bows and arrows. And, just like samurai charging into gattling guns, they get slaughtered. Their savior is an idiot, and fights the battle exactly the same way they would have fought it if he had not been there. It is only the intervention of a third party that turns the course of the battle. A third party that any of them could have called for help.

Want to see a primitive race take on a technologically advanced army using a home field advantage? Watch the Ewoks take on the Empire on the moon of Endor. Silly as that Star Wars episode seems compared to this advanced film, there was at least some cleverness to the Ewok's attack. Jake Sully's "salvation" of the Na'vi was just stupid. Even a grunt Marine from the early twenty-first century could have come up with something better.

And then there is the finale... where the Sky People (us) all leave to go back to our "dead world".

Ummm, no. I doubt that. As Sigourney Weaver said herself in another movie... "I say lets take off and nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure..."

The only way we would leave and stay gone would be if we had been shamed into looking at ourselves. And if that happened here, I didn't see much of it. And if human civilization really, really needed unobtainium for our species to survive, do you think we would leave?

Want to see a realistic, intelligent solution of how a technologically advanced society gets a rare mineral it absolutely has to have from a planet inhabited by bow and arrow primitives? Check out the episode of StarGate where this exact same plot was played out.

And what of the few humans allowed to stay on Pandora? They got no avatars to transfer into, so they gotta stay in contained atmospheres. Do they have the technology to keep generating breathable air? For generations? Or are they just here until they die or get eaten, 'cause they certainly can't go out and live with the natives.

Probably the most disturbing aspect of this movie struck me as we drove home in the wintry cold... if I had a choice of either joining the Na'vi or unplugging and returning to human civilization... I would not be blue. For these adorable natives were never once shown as having any curiosity about anything else. By being connected to everything in their world, they know their place, and stay in it.

They are about as interesting as mushrooms. And after a dozen generations will be as unchanged as a dozen generations of mushrooms.

Perfect harmony is static, unchanging.

Boring.

And a useless existence.

Dead or not, lacking any green or not, a society that explores and changes is better than that.

No matter how beautiful the environment. Or how ugly.