10 Most Overrated Sci-Fi Movies Ever Made

It's been said before and it'll be said again - Avatar, the second highest-grossing film of all time when unadjusted for inflation, is less than the sum of its parts. The 2009 blockbuster - James Cameron's decades-in-the-making return to the science-fiction genre after his unprecedented success with Titanic - smashed past all expectations upon release, helping to herald the arrival of new technology and the rise of 3-D in cinemas worldwide.

But eleven years later, with its long-gestating sequels finally around the corner, there's little escaping that as a central hook, beneath all the technology and visual splendour, it just doesn't hold up in the way the very best blockbuster filmmaking does.

To briefly compare, it arrived a year on the heels of The Dark Knight, a film that managed to instill its themes with a sense of zeitgeist while ensuring it never lost sight of its more muscular credentials. Here, there's a lethargy to Cameron's work, while his characterisations often fall shy of the "show, don't tell" school of development with their expository nature. We hope his expansive slate of follow-ups can exercise these flaws with their expansion of Pandora - but we shall see.