So Cameron’s latest opus has been released to the public.  Tweets were coming in from people standing in line for 3am showings.  The buzz has been epic, the anticipation was (and still is) through the roof.  Reviews are already flooding in.  This movie could potentially bring SciFi solidly back into the mainstream where literary and cinematic properties are concerned.

So why is the sci-fi community less than impressed with the result?  It’s got awesome special effects, it’s got alien worlds, space marines, lithe and beautiful blue-skinned alien women, giant robots, interstellar travel, what else could the people who are *supposed* to be lining up in droves to view this movie possibly want?  Where did Cameron go wrong?

Thing is, he didn’t.

Avatar isn’t for us so much, not for the hard-core Sci-Fi fans who know the exact conditions under which you *could* have sound in space, or understand *why* a triple helix is a biological impossibility and just what kind of biology you’d need to make it work.  Avatar is a piece of transcendent fiction, it’s written to appeal to those who love a good story and a great visual spectacle, but not, so much, for the sci-fi aficionado.  Arguing story memes like space-marines is like arguing the possibility of a cross-class romance in Titanic.  There’s no point.  There’s going to be tried and true (and hackneyed and overused) tropes in here *because* the movie is appealing to a broader audience.  It’s going to need those points of commonality, hackneyed sci-fi ideas that everyone has been exposed to, so that it can engage an audience for whom the idea of 10ft tall anime-eyed alien is something so far outside their experience that they’d be hard-pressed to keep up with the storyline.