Avatar was a great story of becoming a man, finding oneself and your destiny. It was a great battle of David vs. Goliath. It was a moving retelling of how the west conquers and destroys other cultures and peoples in our never ending expansion and consumption, while in my opinion it wasn't heavy or preachy.
And the word Avatar brings to mind the way people are spending more time online and interacting through technology and not so much face to face. Usually the virutal reality stories reflect the doom and gloom side of technology and how it's going nowhere good. But in Avatar instead of the virtual reality world being fake and limited or evil, it's actually a real world and perhaps more real and more rewarding than our shallow world. I'm not thinking of specific examples, but there must be loads of movies like Tron where the characters get stuck in the VR world and must escape. The Avatars in Cameron's story aren't fake representations of a real person. Instead they're a real living being (although genetically manipulated). They exist in our reality even though they belong in the otherworld. The two worlds aren't connected by a computer or something metaphysical, it's just another planet from ours.
A few characters with avatars even attempt to crossover into the other world for good. It's "ironical" that the cutting edge technology is what's used to allow us westerners to leave behind the trappings of our modern life and find simplicity.
