It’s great to be Jim Cameron.

His new film, “Aliens of the Deep,” is less about any aliens of any deep, and more about himself and how much his marine biologist pals love their jobs. “Aliens” tries to celebrate these scientists and the strange creatures they study under the sea, but it tries too hard to be dramatic and loses its most redeeming qualities.

Ever since Cameron’s megahit “Titanic,” the director has seemed afraid to get out of the water. Like his last film, “Ghosts of the Abyss,” Cameron sticks with the large-screen IMAX 3-D format. He again faces the challenge of adding drama to a piece that completely lacks it.

While the likable Cameron makes it difficult to hate this film, he makes it just as difficult to appreciate it. For example, the film begins with a doctoral student from USC introducing herself and her fascinating job as a marine biologist. Then, Cameron introduces himself.

“I’m Jim Cameron, and here’s the deal,” he says. Now, we have a woman who has spent her life studying the ocean. She loves her job – something she tells us countless times.

But for some reason, Cameron believes that we need him, a Hollywood filmmaker, to give us “the deal.” By “deal,” Cameron refers to the “off the hook” nature of the ocean floor, and how getting a look deep into the ocean is more of a thrill than any Hollywood special effects could ever offer.

Seeing the creatures of the ocean in the IMAX experience alone makes this film recommendable, but it could have been much more educational had we been informed of what we were looking at. We see rare fish after rare fish, but we are told nothing useful about them.

We see a brilliant, ugly mouthed fish with feet (yes, real feet). Then, we hear Cameron on the soundtrack: “Wow! It’s got feet. They look like little toe socks!” A little explanation would go a long way.

But where the film really loses ground is in its bigger picture – convincing the audience that we (meaning NASA) need to send a robotic spacecraft to Europa, a moon of Jupiter. This robot will dig into Europa’s icy surface and search for life throughout the vast hypothetical ocean lying underneath its frozen shell.

But Europa is quite a ways away, and mission control would not be able to communicate with the robot. NASA would have to design a craft that could think on its own, dig its own hole into Europa’s miles-deep icy shell, control itself through an alien planet’s dangerous ocean and somehow beam or transmit some data back to humanity (a feat the film doesn’t even attempt to explain). The cost of such a mission to the American taxpayer is ignored for obvious reasons, but at least Cameron’s reaching plea provides the film’s greatest laugh.

While “Aliens of the Deep” is definitely lacking in content and contains plenty of silly logic, its spectacular visuals and wondrous sea creatures make it worth the look.

This leads us to Cameron’s admirable improvement as an underwater filmmaker – learning how a greater depth of field will be much easier on an audience’s eyes in the third dimension. Watch how some of the shots with a shallow DOF (foreground in focus, background not) tend to give double vision through your 3-D glasses, and note how Cameron has eliminated as many of these shots as possible compared to his previous “Ghosts of the Abyss.” There is ground to be made in this ever-growing IMAX medium, and Cameron is leading the way.

I applaud Cameron for making a living off his passions and struggling with new technology, but “Aliens of the Deep” brings him closer to the goofy George Jetson than the respectable Jacques Cousteau.