This week, James Cameron returns to the big screen with Avatar, his first narrative directorial effort since some little movie about a boat twelve years ago. Cameron, the center of two decades worth of robot-fueled, Sigourney Weaver xenomorph-stomping geek worship, has spent the last twelve years producing, pulling out of projects, and directing documentaries underwater.

For years now, film fans all over the world have been wondering when (outside of his fictional version of Aquaman on HBO’s Entourage) Cameron would get out of the water, stop polishing his Oscars and get back to his sci-fi roots.

Having done that now with Avatar, an epic story about a paralyzed marine sent to infiltrate an alien society via a meat-suit called (you guessed it) an avatar only to fall in love with a blue animal lady and turn against mankind’s evil militaristic ways, the question I have is…will this thing be any good at all?

Sadly, there are reasons to suspect that the film will not be nearly as much fun as Cameron’s best material.

1. Stan Winston is dead.

When Winston, the special-effects version of Jesus, died, he left a gaping hole in the world of movie effects. We’re talking about the man responsible for creating creature effects for some of Cameron’s best work…including Aliens and the first two Terminator films. What’s always made Cameron’s sci-fi so real, so visceral, has been his ability to take larger than life sci-fi concepts as time travel, cyborgs and someone employing Paul Reiser and ground those concepts in some kind of tactile reality.

The Terminator felt like a real, physical being who could rip your heart out and imitate your mother’s voice over the phone. There was something undeniably physical about the danger the crew of the Sulaco face on the alien-overrun colonial planet. For all of the bells and whistles and special effects of The Abyss, the underwater environment that Ed Harris and crew live in as well as the space ship they eventually encounter look real enough to put your hands upon their wet surfaces.

Now that Winston is dead, to whom can Cameron turn to breathe life into his world? Which brings us to…

2. Too much CGI can kill.

The one thing that’s very noticeable from the trailers for Avatar is the stunning amount of CG that is being used. From what we see so far, this is a transition for Cameron away from practical effects and into the world of digital effects. This may have a lot of effects geeks frothing at the mouth and raving about Cameron’s 3-D brilliance, but too much CGI can choke the life out of a movie.

Special effects are important. No one is going to disagree with that statement, especially when discussing a sci-fi film. However, the special effects of a film are meant to augment a film…not dominate it.

But when we look at the films that make the most use of this stunning technology, we are inevitably left with the impression that when it comes to CGI, less is more and more means George Lucas.

Avatar, by the looks of it, has positively stunning CGI work, but the more I watch the trailer, the more I get the impression that I’m watching a video game and not a film. There’s something to be said for practical effects, and there’s something to be said for using CGI in moderation.

3. Where are all of the Cameron regulars?

I see Sigourney Weaver in there, and that’s great. I’ve always been a big fan. But where is Bill Paxton? Where is Jenette Goldstein? I recognize that Arnold is the Governor of California now, so he’s a bit too busy, but where the hell is the legendary Lance Henriksen?

Apparently, Cameron was all set to offer a part to Michael Biehn, but he decided to go in another direction because with Weaver already on board, he didn’t want people to think it was just Aliens all over again. Wait…what?

I want to think that it’s Aliens all over again. I mean, come on, now, James! You’re directing an epic, two and a half hour science fiction film. The first thing you want to do is sell me (as your advertising keeps doing, by the way) on the fact that this is just a part of the great legacy of Cameron sci-fi.

Trying not to remind people of your previous, brilliant work seems a lot like Al Gore distancing himself from Bill Clinton during the 2000 election, which…you know…didn’t work out so well.

4. Is he still James Cameron?

Around 1997, when Cameron released a little film about a little boat that made almost two billion dollars at the worldwide box office, something about the man changed. It’s hard to put your finger on it, but if you search your soul, you know that it’s true.

Somewhere, on the night when Cameron accepted about a billion Oscars for his work on Titanic, he changed. He went from “James Fucking Cameron” to the dorky guy who hoisted a trophy, awkwardly bellowing “I’m the king of the world.”

There was something fundamentally different about the man and about that particular piece of Oscar-grubbing work. He disappeared from directing feature films to focus on filming stuff underwater for documentaries for the last, oh, damn near a decade!

Really, when you look at it honestly…when you recognize that Titanic was vastly overrated and that True Lies wasn’t really all that good, then you start to realize that the last really good film that Cameron directed was the one I spent my young life savings seeing over and over again in theaters during the summer of 1991, T2.

Is it possible, then that this guy was just a guy who made a healthy pack of good movies a long time ago and has now just become another self-aggrandizing Hollywood weirdo whose best work is long behind him?

Hello, Coppola.

I want Avatar to be a big, lustrous Hollywood epic of a sci-fi film that wows my eyes and turns the gears in my head as well. But I’ve just got this feeling that it’s going to be, instead, just a better version of a Star Wars prequel.