Isn't the film a sort of Dances-with-Wolves-meets-Jurassic-Park-meets-Die-Hard-6 (or is it 7 by now? - remind me)?

No harm in that, mind you. Obviously it gets a message through to very great numbers of people and has value for them. But though the story disowns violence, the director James Cameron still serves up an enormous and repetitive portion of it for the young market (who nowadays must have it, it seems, even to the extent of bringing a bit of combat into the forthcoming 'Alice in Wonderland', to judge by the trailer for that movie).

Doesn't this imaginative film's failure of imagination come from its seeing no alternative to 'destructive science’ but a sentimentalized primitivism? Why was life on Cameron's planet Pandora in 2200 much as people have for a few hundred years now idealised the past right here on good old Earth?

Can standstill or regression really be the only hope for the future? Would we all be ok again if we could only go back to 1600? If not, would we be safer in the 14th Century? Earlier than that - the year dot, say? Was everyone and everything just fine then?

The past is always perfect, compared to the present. Happiness, as the old Hollywood actor Oscar Levant pointed out, is not something you experience - it is something you remember.

But if the human race is to survive, it starts with solving the problems that events and change have brought us to right here and now, not with hankering after a society that never existed anywhere outside the dreams of Rousseau and his followers.

And while we are criticising director James Cameron, he really should have known nearly a century later that Titanic's disaster was not a symbol of a doomed age or the gods’ vengeance on man’s hubris.

It was a hole in a faulty boat caused by a reckless captain.