Avatar

Here is a movie called “Avatar.’’ If you drink the Kool-Aid (it’s for sale on every channel and in every magazine), the film may indeed look like the Brand New Thing. If you don’t, “Avatar’’ may instead appear to be a long, tactile, visually revelatory, dramatically simple-minded 3-D science-fiction adventure made up of live-action sequences and photo-realistic digital images. (Instead of “computer animation,’’ by the way, journalists have been instructed by studio publicists to use the phrase “the Next Generation of Special Effects.’’ Mmm, mixed berry!)

James Cameron’s gamble, in other words, has paid off in ways both problematic and successful beyond measure. The 60 percent of “Avatar’’ that comes from the computer - either in wholly invented images or by wrapping human bodies in imaginary digitized forms - is bewitchingly, tantalizingly realistic. The film creates a planet called Pandora, a race of tall, blue cat-people called the Na’Vi, and gives them both a dazzlingly colorful rainforest reality - part Rousseau, part George Lucas on inhalants.

The roughly 40 percent of the film that is live action - those scenes involving human colonizers from Earth amid their predatory mining and military hardware - is, oddly, less convincing. “Avatar’’ focuses on a scientific team that has cloned Na’Vi bodies for human hosts to patch into as they (the humans) lie in high-tech tanning beds back at the base. With these biotech sock-puppets, head wonk Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver, juicily riffing on both Ellen Ripley and Dian Fossey) hopes to “win the hearts and minds’’ of the indigenous population. If she doesn’t, the corporate suits and military men (represented, respectively, by Giovanni Ribisi and Stephen Lang, both of whom would twirl their mustaches if they had them) will happily force the issue.