I'm glad to see you didn't drink the Kool-Aid. You make a lot of good points: AVATAR'S lack of impressiveness or originality in some of its key elements, notably the storyline or narrative, the content vs. the look and setting. Make no mistake the visuals and the setting are beautiful and make AVATAR one of the fun mainstream blockbuster watches (and far from the usual run of the genre) for the year, but also far from fully achieved enough to become a classic, as you state.

AVATAR has many predecessors; including those you mention, A MAN CALLED HORSE is another going-native film with powerful content. Many have noted how derivative AVATAR is in content, which is funny since its fans are insisting that there has never been anything remotely like it, that it's a whole new threshold of film-making!

You're also right about how AVATAR is unoriginal and timid in presenting us with such human-like aliens, and its surprisingly limited use of Na'vi by Jake even after he "goes native." This is a paradox given that (as I noted before) Cameron engaged a linguistics professor at USC to create a whole new language (1,000 words) for the film, that he then chose to resort to the rather ridiculous excuse that the Na'vi people have all been taught English by Grace, so Jake can go on speaking English to them most of the time. In THE EMERALD FOREST also Tommy, who becomes Tomee, naturally speaks only the Invisible People's language after he's joined and been raised by them.

The whole thing is that joining a people in surrogate/avatar form is only joining them provisionally, not fully.

Indeed storyline is always of essential importance in any film that has one. If a film has no storyline, okay, we can appreciate it purely for its look or setting.