What *is* the appeal of Avatar?

Possibly a dangerous question to ask, given that I am the energizer bunny of Avatar-hate, but the movie came up at one of the regular games last week and everyone else at the table seemed to like the film (except the one person yet to see it, who isn’t likely too) and I realised that where I see stunted story that doesn’t do anything after the set-up* a bunch of other folks are seeing unmitigated awesome.

And I continue to not get it, just as I never got the appeal of the Transformers film and the Matrix and a bunch of other things, and while I’m normally okay with that given that everyone reads a film differently it’s starting to bug me a little this time around. I find myself wondering whether the expectations of films have shifted so far into the boundary of spectacle that story ceases to be important, or if there’s been some kind of fundamental shift in the genre of film-making that I just haven’t figured out yet.

So I turn the question over to people who did like the film: what’s the appeal?

*Incidentally, there’s an interesting article on the Avatar-that-might-have-been if it’d followed the original treatment of the film. It seems to answer every major problem I have with Avatar and reads like a film I would have been gushing over if it’d actually made it to the screen (hell, if even a fragment of it made it to the screen *besides* the pretty FX)