Dances With Smurfs. That’s what the cynics labeled Avatar when its promotional assault launched last fall. Based on a two-minute trailer and a barrage of 30-second TV spots, fanboys concluded that James Cameron’s new two-and-a-half-hour sci-fi epic populated by 10-foot-tall blue aliens with tails was nothing but a 3D CGI remake of Kevin Costner’s 1990 flick.

But this is James Cameron, the guy behind Aliens and Terminator, the self-professed king of the world who captained Titanic to Oscar glory. Surely his first picture in 12 years, a $400 million magnum opus, would be anchored by a more compelling narrative than "guy realizes he was fighting for the wrong team all along," right?

Yeah, not so much. Cameron’s predictable morality tale is only saved by eye-popping visuals, and really, that’s what everyone came to see anyway.

The story starts in the year 2154, when paraplegic Marine Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) enters the Avatar program on the distant moon Pandora. By downloading his brain to a cloned version of the native Na’vi species, he can walk among the primitive hunter-gatherers and explain that his people need to strip-mine the pristine planet. But after falling in love with warrior princess Neytiri (Zoe Saldana)—you guessed it—he has a change of heart.

He might not have defected so easily if Cameron, who also wrote the script, hadn’t drawn such a clear line between the good, the bad, and the ugly; with the exception of tough-talking, big-hearted scientist Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) Sully’s human counterparts are greedy, violent eco-terrorists. The Na’vi, on the other hand, are a hard-to-hate, blue-hued update on the squirm-inducing "noble savage" archetype.

For the hardcore action-adventure crowd, the stunningly photorealistic landscape of Pandora will be reason enough to sit through lines like, "The wealth of this world isn’t in the ground; it’s all around us." But for everyone else, ask yourself this: Can you suspend disbelief long enough to accept that the Na’vi commune with the animals of their world through their ponytails?

Avatar opens worldwide Friday, December 18.