10 Groundbreaking Films That Are Actually Terrible

Even without that box office world record, Avatar's position in film history is unassailable. After decades of 3D being treated as a gimmicky fad, it's a permanent fixture in the cinema - and it works, thanks to Avatar.

Sadly, the film itself is dreadful. James Cameron's filmmaking obsession has always been with emerging technology, not storytelling, and his 'white saviour' plot - a Good White Dude joins an indigneous community to become the best of them all, saving them from the Bad White Dudes and getting the girl - is derivative, predictable and cringeworthy.

It's not just the plot, though. The disconnect between the human protagonists and their avatars is massive, so everything we learn about Jake Sully becomes irrelevant once he goes native.

Unfortunately, any attempts to get to know this new Jake or the People he's befriending fall utterly flat. The Na'avi may be amazing technical advances in performance capture and animation, but Cameron and his cast and crew have no idea how to blend the two to create a character: the performances aren't big enough for animation and the animation isn't nuanced enough for performance. The result? Deathly dull cartoons.

Avatar is a VR theme park ride riddled with patronising, boring bullsh*t. If you're into that kind of thing, you can turn your brain off and go "wooooooo!" a lot for about half of this long, awful movie... but, like everyone else, you'll forget about that 'unforgettable experience' as soon as the credits roll.