But, is this the kind of movie, like “The Wizard of OZ,” that people will still be watching with a sense of wonder seventy years from now? The movie is at least 30 minutes too long, and the many thematic statements Cameron crowds into the narrative keep bumping into each other like all those deadly fast life forms of the Planet Pandora.

Some time during the second act, I found myself drifting in a fugue state of my own, my senses overwhelmed by pastoral set pieces counterpointed against cliff-hanger action scenes, one after another, each replicating itself over and over in the staccato rythym of a windshield wiper beating back the pounding rain. Perhaps this effect was intentional, since the Planet Pandora becomes, for Jake, his liberation from the claustrophobia of the tomb, a waking from the paralytic nightmare, a theme Cameron drives home cinematically with the power of Edgar Allan Poe’s best prose.

But, even this movie experience is not big enough for all the themes Cameron cribs from American Western movies and American History. We get not just a version of the Pocahantas story, as you shrewdly point out, but also evocations of Tecumseh and Blue Jacket.

Essentially a Sci-Fi Western, the movie owes much to “The Light in the Forest” and more to “Dances With Wolves” (“you turned Injun, didn’t you?”), an elegaic vision of the vanishing American “frontier” weighed down by a confused insistence that “the killing of the soldiers at the river was a good thing.”

In the overlong climactic battle sequence of this movie, a gaggle of Marine helicopters lays waste to the “blue remembered hills” of yet another lush paradise. For an American, this is disturbing enough, but more disturbing, in a way I don’t think Cameron intended, is the image of American Marines being thrown out the backs of those helicopters by the warriors of the Na’vi Chief (as played, of course, by Wes Studi). A good script doctor might have helped Cameron get all this under control before the fact. After the fact, a good film editor can probably fix most of what’s wrong with this very good movie.