Avatar. Say it with me, “Avatar.”

No, with more gusto.

Okay, close enough.

When I say the word “avatar,” an image of magnificence comes to mind, an embodiment of something great. In this respect James Cameron’s newest work, “Avatar,” does bring an image – not one, but many, many images – of magnificence to the screen. The effects are solid and the scenery is oh-so intoxicating. I’ll quote Wesley Snipes from “White Men Can’t Jump” to describe my feelings: “Ooh, it’s pretty, it’s so pretty.” You can’t help but feel pure awe at the scope of technology involved in the creation of “Avatar’s” art.

That’s about where the magnificence ends.

Somehow, in a story where you can do anything because it is an entirely new world, everything is still really, really predictable. This isn’t one of those, “Yeah, I thought something like that would happen” moments. This is a “Next this will happen, then this, then this, etc. ” thing. You can call it a classic story format, I call it poor and lazy writing.

From the get-go, the hero, Sam Worthington’s, path is laid out with his disability, which will obviously be overcome. That’s cool, that’s good story-telling. Then you learn a little about the character and realize he is sort of unappealing. He aptly is described as a “child” by the warrior-princess he meets, and child heroes make me think of Disney, not epic battles.

Well okay, nevertheless he can still be redeemed by giving him some quirks that will endear him to the audience, right? He doesn’t have any of those things to make him appealing. He’s given legs thanks to his avatar, so his greatest challenge is overcome without any real effort. He was just filler for the rest of the movie; he’s not a bad actor though, the role is just not great.

The rest of the characters have more substance, despite being secondary. Sigourney Weaver does a fine job with the bad dialogue given to her, though I’m disappointed she didn’t have a little more action like Ripley from the “Alien” movies.

Zoe Saldana is still sexy in her alien giant smurf form and is a far more interesting character than Worthington.

For the first time I saw Joel Moore as more than the lame “Matrix” wannabe J.P. from “Grandma’s Boy.” That in itself is pretty impressive.

Stephen Lang was the perfect choice for the aged but still intimidating and gung-ho military commander bad guy – bad guy being his most common sort of role. Seriously, the guy is almost 60 and is in better shape than most people in the world.

But with the great casting of Lang comes another big problem: The portrayal of military personnel. “Avatar” makes soldiers look like unthinking, murderous brutes. Apparently, to have a caring bone in your body and be a soldier, you have to be crippled or Michelle Rodriguez. If I had wanted a lecture on the evils of military presence in foreign lands, I’d just talk to some stoned political science student toting a T-shirt saying “Drop Bush not bombs.” Soldiers aren’t idiot meat-heads; some, yes, but not all. But they certainly aren’t the bloodthirsty characters in “Avatar,” looking forward to destroying a race just because they’ve been told to. Really, the soldiers didn’t have to be heartless to make them believable; Lang’s character maybe, but not the rest.

This brings me to the next message I didn’t like. Giovanni Ribisi plays the bureaucratic dork sent to make the profit no matter what. Big business doesn’t need to be portrayed as purely profit-driven. The evil corporate empire doesn’t have to have an iron-fisted way of dealing with opposition in order to be understood by audiences. The precious ore, “unobtainium,” – nice pun Cameron – so sought after isn’t even given enough of a back-story for audiences to understand why it may be so precious. We only need know it is valuable and that the boys upstairs will do anything to get it.

I get it, most businessmen aren’t completely eco-friendly, but with the technology portrayed in the film – interstellar travel, cryogenic stasis, advanced cloning and gene manipulation – you’d think maybe along humanity’s scientific progress, we had made some advancements in getting at hard to reach stuff other than blowing up whatever was in the way. They do mention we’ve damaged our own planet, though I would have liked a little more elaboration on that to get me in the right frame of mind.

Looking past the negative portrayals, the movie has poor dialogue. The cliche action movie one-liners are one thing in over-abundance, but even the lines which should have more substance aren’t that great.

Maybe Cameron wanted to ensure nothing detracted from the colossal impact of the effects.

On a comical side-note, the big message of the movie is corporate bad, family good. So naturally, this amazing spiritual race is being saved by, and their supreme deity has chosen, a corporate-hired outsider whose interactions are only allowed through advanced technology created by corporate evil.

Hmmm. It’s only slightly less funny than Cameron’s message that we need to learn to live more at peace with our environment by appreciating the natural beauty of life and then telling this tale through a movie that cost something like $500 million and isn’t using reality for it’s creation. Just sorta funny to me.

Regardless, we all know “Avatar” is going to make a bundle at the box-office. The pull of Cameron love stories mingled with some action and the massive amount of money thrown at effects is more than enough to ensure a profit. Maybe if some more money had been thrown at writing a better script, or at least with dialogue sounding better than that of George Lucas’ “Star Wars” movies, perhaps this would be a truly magnificent film.

What I can say is you should definitely go see “Avatar,” as long as it is in 3-D. It may be the best gift you can give your eyes this Christmas. Just remember, don’t expect more than eye-candy and make sure you’re going to a 3-D showing. Me, I’m not watching it again unless it’s in IMAX.