It seems a faux pas to review Avatar from any spiritual age older than 12. If my prepubescent self could be roused for comment, he’d probably say, “Gee whiz, those 3-D blue-cat people are totally rad!” But as a (slightly) older person, who views excessive promotion in the same way that that 12-year-old viewed cooties, I regard Avatar as an inevitable technical achievement and a decent, enjoyable, respectable, pretty, but altogether stunningly unoriginal movie. This is the sort of production in which the writer-producer-director-demiurge, James Cameron, recruited a U.S.C. linguist to concoct a language for the alien species. It’s bucketloads of perspiration and almost no inspiration. All that sweat—and all the rest of the movie’s liquidity—seems to be dumped everywhere; but the movie might well have been imagined by a calculator, using Joseph Campbell archetypes as variables.

Cameron can tell a story, and the story is in apposition to his techniques. When humans invade a moon called Pandora, in search of a rare element called Unobtanium—just because Cameron isn’t laughing at these names doesn’t mean you shouldn’t—one straggler, Sully (Sam Worthington), decides to join with the scientists, in opposition to the military and their capitalist overlords, in protecting the pre-industrial natives known as the Na’vi. He mingles with the Na’vi—who look like the missing link between tabby cats and the Blue Man Group—by wearing a bioengineered virtual-reality suit (his “avatar”), and he immerses himself into their eco-friendly culture. Sully even gets a pussycat-Pocahontas: Neytiri (Zoe Saldana).

Terrence Malick also took a stab at the Pocahontas story when he made The New World. So much of that film was like staring at a landscape painting in a museum without the freedom to move to the next picture; but whenever the Europeans and indigenous Americans encountered each other for the first time, he instilled a state of pure anthropological exaltation. Cameron never quite hits that. Malick’s characters can sometimes seem nonexistent, but Cameron draws his from comic books; and this technocrat’s vistas twinkle without coming to life. The pulp players in Avatar have some witty lines, but I never felt the lithe vibes of Up, or the trashy exuberance of Star Trek. Cameron is too busy “[disrupting] an entire industry” to realize how silly his enterprise is. (The director of the first two Terminator movies and Titanic hasn’t been one to sort out the plethora of ironies in what he’s doing with capital and technology.) Money is the alchemy that converts frivolity into gravitas, but it sometimes takes an alchemist to fill seats in theaters the world over. For all its technical innovations and left-wing undertones, Avatar is a deeply old-fashioned movie: one that, conceivably, anyone could enjoy.

What I think people may be reacting to—aside from the kinesthetic roller coaster effects—is Cameron’s stalwart pre-postmodernism. His self-seriousness has bulldozed away any snark, any irony; it’s been so long since we’ve experienced a new fantasy blockbuster without self-effacing self-awareness that we’ve forgotten how it feels to be genuinely wooed. (Traces of anything like the winky gay subtext in Lord of the Rings have been Febreezed away.) But I can appreciate the despotic director’s dedication to the plot without feeling much emotional attachment to it. (Although I did feel the blow when Sigourney Weaver’s hard-ass scientist was dispatched. She has so much strength and physical presence as an actress that she exposes a shortcoming in all the groundbreaking hooha: She holds the screen much better as a human being than as Catwoman.) I can also appreciate the beauteous landscapes; the garrulous veloci-panthers; the veiny, phosphorescent trees; and the ground that sparkles like a night light when trodden over. But I’ve seen all this in movies before—just not quite so realistically rendered. So when I read such ex-cathedra ballyhoo as “let’s be entirely clear about one thing: There is no other movie like Avatar, and there never has been,” I feel like launching myself into space—where no one can hear me scream.