Love it or hate it, “Avatar,” James Cameron’s latest venture into exorbitant-budget cinema, is a bad movie. Let me explain: “Avatar” is, at best, half a movie. The 3D visuals are as breathtaking as the plot is insipid. Most of you, by now, either plan to see it or shun it. However, if you plan on waiting for the DVD release of “Avatar,” don’t waste your time (unless you plan on purchasing one of those $2,000 3D TVs set for release this spring). Watching it in 3D is the only way you will get anything out of it. Which gets me back to my initial point: “Avatar” is a bad movie.

To give credit where credit is due, Cameron wrote the screenplay for the film (i.e. the ideas behind the movie are his and his alone), which is something most of his fellow American and so-called ‘Oscar worthy’ directors like David Fincher (“Fight Club,” “Zodiac” or “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”)  can’t say about their own films. Cameron’s films, however, have rarely enjoyed good screenplays and “Avatar” may be his worst yet.

Let’s start with the obvious: the characters. The meat of Cameron’s previous stories have been the characters, but in “Avatar” they provide merely a backdrop for layers upon layers of allegory. My fellow cinefile, Whitman sophomore Alex Pearson, reminded me that even in “Titanic,” a film I loathe to this day, Cameron made Kate Winslet’s character interesting enough to root for and, halfway in, you are struck by the fact that the entire story is uniquely driven by a non-stereotyped female character: feats that, lamentably, most movies fail to achieve. Conversely, “Avatar” is recklessly carried by a growling colonel (Stephen Lang), an uninspiring hero (Sam Worthington) and “Na’vi For Dummies” manual (Zoe Saldana): three items I would not take to a foreign world like Pandora.

Next, we have the never-ending ennui (what others call the film’s plot). Unlike his better films, namely “Terminator” and “Aliens,” Cameron heaves the plot of “Avatar” into the Pandora (allegory: Iraq) rain forest exceptionally prematurely. All we are told is that a corporation that employs marines (allegory: Blackwater) seeks to exploit the reserves of a valuable mineral called unobtanium (allegory: oil) before we endure an hour-and-30-minute-long encyclopedic explanation of our hero’s interactions with all the mundane elements of that world.

What the first half of the movie unfortunately demonstrates is how the impossible can not only become possible, but boring, when introduced in large quantities. Furthermore, stories of encounters (take note first-years!) are recycled without nuance by each generation:  As a recent post on the ever-wonderful FAIL Blog points out, the plot of “Avatar” is eerily familiar to that of Disney’s “Pocahontas” so as to almost constitute plagiarism.

It’s unfortunate that Cameron chose to marry pathetic plot devices (and a terrible narrative) to beautiful visuals that nearly forced me to overcome my acrophobia. What’s more remarkable is the way “Avatar” uses 3D to accentuate depth instead of the proximity of objects to one’s head. Most 3D movies, until now, find humor in throwing objects or sticking things out of the picture at the audience: Even Henry Selick’s gorgeous adaptation of “Coraline,” arguably the film that most effectively used 3D until “Avatar,” hinged on things popping out at its audience.

Fundamentally, a film consists of two elements: an audio-visual one and a narrative one.   “Avatar” only has a good audio-visual component and that is why it is a bad movie. A half-movie is not a good movie at all. Like “Titanic,”  “Avatar” is not even a mediocre movie because it lacks the half that gives it any purpose, emotion or drive. But also, like “Titanic,” it is one that will force future cinematographers to reconsider the ways in which they employ technological advances in their films.