Yeah, the only reason I'd watch the sequels is to see if they're going to push the bar (yes, mixed idiom) on CG some more.

Regarding story, my friend recently made a pretty decent point about recycled and rehashed story. Haven't people been reusing and reshaping the same old stories for millenia? Fairy tales aren't original... many classics have the same story structure (hero with a thousand faces type thing). Anyway, I think the difference now is that we're so saturated in continual entertainment that they do become tired cliches instead of new takes on familiar themes.

I for one think it would be an improvement if only a dozen movies were made in North America a year. Then maybe we'd get enough of a break from the cliches that they'd return to being old friends.

My two cents (and that's not all I think, but I'm just going to leave it there for now).