From Dikipedia, the insane LaMo encyclopedia

Pandora is also home to the Na’vi, a sentient humanoid race, who, although considered primitive, are more physically capable than humans. Standing 10 feet tall, with tails and sparkling blue skin, the Na’vi live in harmony with their unspoiled world. As treasure hunting Earth creeps encroach deeper into their forests in search of space booty, the Na’vi, formidable warrior, counterattack to defend their homes.

Jake has unwittingly been recruited to become part of this encroachment. Since humans can't breathe on Pandora, the Marines create genetically-bred human-Na’vi hybrids known as Avatars. So on Pandora, with his Avatar body, Jake's able to walk again and is sent deep into its jungles to scout for his fellow off world imperialist storm troopers. In the jungle Jake encounters many of Pandora's beauties and dangers, but none more lovely than a young Na’vi female, Neytiri of the local clan he us infiltrates. Over time, Jake finds he likes the Pandora lifestyle and falls in love with Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña). As a result, Jake finds himself caught between the military-industrial forces of Earth and the Na’vi, forcing him to choose sides in an epic battle that will decide the fate of Pandora. A trailer for it is here:
http://www.hulu.com/watch/110975/making-a-scene-avatar

Generally, it looks to me as if James Cameron wishes to continue to build on his utopianist view that  cooperation can reconcile humanity with technology (as seen in Aliens, and Terminator 2: Judgment Day,) when two protagonists, each who face impossible odds, work together to achieve their goals, with strong female characters. (Sarah Connor and Ellen Ripley being the most famous.)

Dick's stories typically focus on the fragile nature of what is "real" and the construction of personal identity. His stories often become surreal fantasies as the main characters slowly discover that their everyday world is actually an illusion constructed by powerful external entities, vast political conspiracies, or simply from the vicissitudes of an unreliable narrator. Alternate universes and simulacra were common plot devices, with fictional worlds inhabited by common, working people, rather than galactic elites. "There are no heroes in Dick's books," Ursula K. Le Guin wrote, "but there are heroics. One is reminded of Dickens: what counts is the honesty, constancy, kindness and patience of ordinary people."

Dick was heavily influenced by the work of Carl Jung, who was a self-taught psychiatrist and expert on the unconscious and the mythological foundations of conscious experience and was open to the reality underlying mystical experiences. The Jungian constructs that interested Dick were his archetypes of the collective unconscious, group projection/ hallucination, synchronicities, and personality theory. 

Mental illness and drug use was a constant interest of Dick's, and themes of mental illness permeate his work. The novel Clans of the Alphane Moon centers on an entire society made up of descendants of lunatic asylum inmates. Dick was a stimulants user for much of his life.

Background

The Mind Control Genre had its roots, I believe, in Cold War propaganda about North Korean success at brainwashing, which helped spawned a film and literary boom in paranoid novels about spies, saboteurs, and double agents which stoked the cold war's " have." The most paranoid feature of these plots was their circularity of developments, wherein the protagonist comes full circle only to find out that in uncovering his true mission and identity, he had been just executing the very mission his tormentors had  implanted in his brain from the beginning, negating the concept of free will or action.

Invariably the Mind F@*k Genre centers on areas dedicated totalitarians, corporate technocrats, or secret agency villains whose power/control quest is to create perfect robot soldier/assassin zombies, who can still function as they traverse a treacherous landscape that roams from total paranoia to schizophrenia to narrative realism to surrealistic subjectivity after their brains, their bodies, and their souls have been tortured into submission by both low to high tech brainwashing machines.

The Bourne Series cover Matt Damon’s existential quest of to discover why, when given certain Pavlovian commands, he turns into an unstoppable assassin. The Manchurian Candidate, Frank Sinatra’s 1962 movie that foreshadowed the JFK assassination is a early example of this Genre.

It's as if Karl Marx’s theory of the social alienation gets morphed into full scale schizophrenia with both heroes and villains being converted to subject commodities to be redrawn for profit and prestige, while commenting on issues such as xenophobia, propaganda, and cognitive dissonance. I would call Avatar a LaMo non-magical realist science-fiction adventure film with themes of imperialism and biodiversity.  I'm only guessing now but I think that Avatar could be a pastiche of five different highly enjoyed science fiction films.

• Aliens, a 1986 science fiction action film directed by James Cameron and starring Sigourney Weaver, Carrie Henn, Michael Biehn, Lance Henriksen, and Bill Paxton. Set fifty-seven years after the first film it is regarded by many film critics as a benchmark for the action and science fiction genres. In Aliens, Weaver's character Ellen Ripley returns to the planetoid LV-426 where she first encountered the hostile Alien accompanied by Colonial Marines whose action adventure tone was in contrast to the horror motifs of the original.
  
• Minority Report is a 2002 science fiction film directed by Steven Spielberg and loosely based on the short story "The Minority Report" by Philip K. Dick. Whose main themes  consider the classic philosophical questions surrounding foreknowledge and free will vs. determinism.
  
• The Matrix is a 1999 science fiction-action film starring Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, and Carrie-Anne Moss, which describes a future in which reality as perceived by humans is actually the Matrix: a simulated reality created by sentient machines in order to pacify and subdue humans. Upon learning this, computer programmer "Neo" joins a rebellion against the machines, involving other people who have been freed from the "dream world" and into reality. The makes numerous references to recent films and literature, and to historical myths and philosophy including Buddhism, Gnosticism, Existentialism, Nihilism, and occult tarot. The film's premise resembles Plato's Allegory of the Cave,  René Descartes's evil genius, and the brain in a vat thought experiment, also Jean Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation is featured.
  
• 12 Monkeys is a 1995 science fiction film directed by Terry Gilliam, starring Bruce Willis, Madeleine Stowe, Brad Pitt, and Christopher Plummer. Which depicts the world in 2035 as devastated by disease, forcing the population underground. Convict (Willis) "volunteers" for time travel duty to gather information in exchange for prison release. When he arrives in the past, he is arrested and locked up in a psychiatric hospital, where he meets (Stowe), a psychiatrist, and (Pitt), a fellow mental patient with animal rights and anti-consumerist leanings.
• Total Recall is a 1990 American science fiction action film featureing Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sharon Stone, based on the Philip K. Dick story "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale", directed by Paul Verhoeve. The film explores the question of reality versus delusion, a recurrent topic in Philip K. Dick’s works. The plot calls for the lead character and the audience to question whether the character’s experience is real or being fed directly to his mind. Which just may turn out to be the case for Jake on Pandora.