“Ghosts of the Abyss” is a 3-D IMAX adventure. With that in mind, now would be a perfect time to discuss proper procedure an audience should practice during a 3-D film screening. In my 3-D utopia, there would be three rules that audience members must follow:

1. There will be no public expression of disbelief. This means no exclaiming “Wow!” or “Look at that!” to your peers in the audience. Such remarks will get you banned for one month.

2. There will be no attempting to put 3-D glasses on your infant. At my screening, a woman next to me kept trying to put the enormous 3-D glasses on her baby, who wanted nothing of the sort. Banned for three months.

3. Absolutely no trying to physically grab images appearing in the third dimension. Hey, idiot, it’s an illusion. Normally, such stupidity in a theater can be quite humorous. However, such an act during a 3-D experience is nothing more than annoying. You’re banned for life.

Now, back to the latest Titanic effort from director James Cameron. This pile of wreckage has made Cameron filthy rich, with his last Titanic epic, “Titanic,” racking up nearly $2 billion in revenues. It’s been five years since that film, so, if you’re Jim Cameron, what could you do next? Make another film about the Titanic, that’s what!

The documentary starts with 10 minutes worth of 3-D clichés. A crewman throws a large rope right into the camera, and all of the various robotic gadgets on the ship are shown reaching toward the audience. Look out! It’s coming right for us! These shots serve no purpose, except to force audience members to break rule No. 1 (see above).

This unscripted (yeah, right) documentary is less about the ship and more about Cameron’s actor friend Bill Paxton, whom Cameron is taking down to see the wreckage. We spend the first 20 minutes with shot after shot of Paxton gazing at the site of the ship.

This is where the film truly fails. Cameron should know that the 3-D effect lets us feel that we really are down there with him. The more he cuts back to Paxton, the more disconnected we feel and the more hatred we feel toward Paxton, whose idiotic analogies make us cringe. (“It’s like a great Sphinx protecting the tomb!”)

Perhaps I’m being too hard on Paxton, but what can I say, the guy’s a square.

With new camera technology, Cameron takes us into portions of the ship never seen before. He uses picture-in-picture to highlight the parts of the ship we’re seeing. He also lays near-transparent passengers over the wreckage, to give the audience a feeling of what could’ve been going on with the ship’s passengers before it sank.

As corny as that may sound, the technique is subtle enough to work. Putting human faces over rusty steel makes us personalize the ship, we feel for it. Cameron knows how to do this – especially since he is an expert at tapping into the public’s disaster fetish.

If you really think about it, we are obsessed with disaster, and Cameron knows it – and even better, he knows how to profit from it. He’s a master director when it comes to the disaster film. Such films go back all the way to “King Kong” in the 1930s to later films in the ‘70s like “The Towering Inferno” and, of course, “Titanic.”

Now is the perfect time to ask why people love to learn about disasters and the terrible hardships suffered by victims of them. Will this ever stop? Or will a future Northern Star critic be sitting in a 3-D IMAX theater 100 years from now attempting to grab images of two airplanes smashing into the World Trade Center? There is no answer to that question, but if I had my way, he’d be banned for life.