What is clear is that Cameron remains a natural-born filmmaker, even when he gets obsessed by world-building at the expense of plot and dialogue. You feel you can almost reach in and touch Pandora, not because of the 3-D but because the director has imagined the planet’s dangers and beauties well beyond the borders of the screen. Other elements show the King of the World starting to repeat himself: The clomping exoskeleton from “Aliens’’ gets a redo here, as does that film’s butch Latina Marine, now played (very engagingly) by Michelle Rodriguez. Worthington is solid and bland as both the human and Na’Vi Jakes, but since the hero is in effect our avatar, that vagueness makes a kind of sense. (It’s up to Weaver, Saldana, and Rodriguez to provide the gumption - but Cameron has always loved powerful women.)
Avatar
Out of body experience: It’s easy to get lost in the visually spectacular world of director James Cameron’s ‘Avatar’
The director has said he has been carrying this story around since he was a teenager dreaming it up in his bedroom, and that makes sense, too. At night the jungles of Pandora bioluminesce like black-light posters, and there are times you may feel you’ve landed on the Disco Planet. The character Neytiri is a classic teenboy daydream - the wild woman conquered - and what’s the whole avatar business but a way to imagine oneself out of a small, impotent body and into something stronger, truer, realer.
At the same time, “Avatar’’ is merely the latest white man’s romance, and it hits every stop in the playbook: The broken hero who finds renewal by leaving his decadent people, who joins a tribe of noble savages and becomes purified, who leads his new children to victory (because they can’t lead themselves) and becomes a legend in the doing. Tarzan has been here, and Herman Melville, and so has Kevin Costner. As a cultural cliché, it reflects profound disgust with the society of men and a yearning for authenticity - for a connection deeper than anything our fallen modern world can provide.
Is Cameron aware of the traps of this fantasy? More than it might seem. “Avatar’’ is, after all, a movie where the hero dreams himself into a strong blue body and wakes, crestfallen, to find himself back in his own skin. The movie knows that Jake Sully is like Pinocchio, a human marionette aching to be a real alien, and at times it takes the measure of the distance between the two. Not for nothing is the standard Na’Vi greeting “I see you.’’ Not for nothing is the scene in which Neytiri finally says those words to the human Jake the most emotionally powerful moment in the film.
I think Cameron loves the fantasy more, though - enough to sail close to the edge of the ridiculous in the final moments of “Avatar.’’ Enough to spend 15 years and hundreds of millions of dollars building a beautiful someplace that doesn’t exist and into which we can blissfully, forgetfully project ourselves. Here’s your Kool-Aid, he says. Drink deep.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. For more on movies, go to www.boston.com/movienation.