The Bell Curve:

I don’t do science fiction. I have enough trouble learning how to master the power button on the Wii I got for Christmas without cluttering my head with superhuman acrobatics.

That’s why I resisted seeing “Avatar,” which is making money faster than the Enron team of hijackers and is winning paeans like the following in a recent New Yorker review: “James Cameron’s ‘Avatar’ is the most beautiful film I‘ve seen in years ... We may be overcome by an uncanny sense of emerging, becoming, transcending — a sustained mood of elation produced by vaulting into space.”

Well, not necessarily. Not if “Avatar” hits you — as it did me — as being patterned on a John Wayne Western in which the cowboys ride birds instead of horses and the dialogue is right out of Tom Mix, all dolled up with breathtaking photography and three-dimensional projection.

I understand that the political right is incensed over what its believers see as the liberal propaganda in “Avatar.” If this movie, indeed, carries the marching orders for us Lefties, the Republicans are home free.

If there is a powerful political message in the last 20 minutes of “Avatar,” which is intended to arm the alleged Socialists who simply want to see the government as one of our health-care options, it gets thoroughly tangled up in a story that casts both the bad guys and the good guys as U.S. Marines.

If we can set aside the remarkable special effects in “Avatar” and focus on the narrative, I am reminded of a published short story of mine that was reprinted in an English textbook as an example — I don’t remember whether good or bad — of narrative writing.

What I do remember is a teacher’s guide that highlighted a dozen lines from the story and then asked: “What is the author really saying here?”

I doubt if very many students come up with the right answer, which is that I was simply looking for a bridge from one passage to the next.

I’m not foolish enough to compare my simple effort with “Avatar,” but in my story, hidden meaning was supplied by the reader, not the author, whose only meaning was getting on with the story.

In “Avatar,” the opposite was true. What Cameron and his cast and crew of thousands was really saying was so overwhelmingly visible that the director’s intent also had to be supplied by his audience with a complexity of interpretations ranging from the sanctity of private property to an attack on capitalism — with a few dozen interpretations in between.

Watching all this in the theater, I wandered a good deal. There is a tendency, early on, to excuse the bad writing and syllabic dialogue in admiration of the technology. But even flying horses have their limits to captivate.

So do spatial bombers shooting up the scenery, and looking more cumbersome than sleek. When that time comes and attention is diverted to the mother ship and its cliched occupants, the flaws in “Avatar” are exposed beyond the ability even of the bird fleet to save the day.

I trust there won’t be a sequel to “Avatar” soon. Meanwhile, maybe they can loan a few billion to the Feds.

As long as we’re into the arts today, let’s take a look at the anti-“Avatar,” a just departed opportunity to vault into space in the environs of New York City, where the Pandora moon is wrapped in a daily search for love and a place to put down and the subway has preempted the flying horse. This is the setting for “Ordinary Days,” a musical jewel that lit up the rain and left a warm feeling behind when it moved on last week.

“Ordinary Days” breaks a lot of the cardinal rules for musicals. It plays for 80 minutes without an intermission, there is no spoken dialogue and very little action, only singing. And delight that is generated by four middle-youngish actors and a fine pianist in a highly creative system of sliding panels and stairs that are virtually another actor.

All this is the work of a fresh new playwright named Adam Gwon, who opened “Ordinary Days” this season on Broadway to sold-out houses. There seems to me to be an echo of a young Stephen Sondheim in Gwon’s work, especially in his lyrics.

South Coast Repertory deserves kudos for bringing it here so quickly, unalloyed joy in the apocalypse of bad news.

JOSEPH N. BELL lives in Newport Beach. His column runs Thursdays.