I really don’t think that was it, most people have no opinion on it at all.
How could you really take offense to the film? It’s kinda toothless.
How can people who didn’t like the Avatar movies not simply drop it after a while. Their dislike isn’t that it’s shallow. If that was it, they’d have moved on. It’s something else. Their hate has the same kind of vibe as people complaining about “wokeness” in other movies. Hell, I still hear people complaining about the “bad science” and “unrealistic villains” of Captain Planet, but praise 80’s Transformers.
My grandson loved the Transformers movies even though I can’t remember a thing about the first one (the only one I’ve seen). Lindsay Ellis did an essay on why the first one is so forgetable (hint, its Michael Bay’s direction). I also was way too creeped out by the decepticon woman (Alice from Revenge of the Fallen) which was a total Michael Bay creation showing a bit too much about Bay’s issues with women.
Avatar has James Cameron’s solid direction and scriptwriting. It has the kind of strong women that Cameron can seem to write that others cannot seem to get right. But Avatar gets into some creepy themes much the way True Lies did to which Cameron clearly has a blind spot.