Batman Forever.

Could a cenobite escape them? No. The monastery's computer might break down and a repair person would show up wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the face of the Caped Crusader. How about a stylite perched upon a pillar in the middle of the desert? No. Tourists would drive by, and from their car radios wafting up to his God-dedicated ears would come the strains of "Colors of the Wind." It's no use trying to ignore Pocahontas or Batman Forever. Their protagonists advertise fast food on TV and, in turn, our children advertise the movies by brandishing Pocahontas plastic cups and Batman figurines collected from those fast food joints. Cabbies discuss the box office grosses of the monster megahits the way they used to analyze the final innings of baseball games, and politicians will, doubtless, soon enlist the superheroes in the war on drugs. (There is still a war on drugs, isn't there?)

You might as well come to terms with the unavoidables. And when you do...

Lo, they turn out to have been avoidable after all. For Pocahontas isn't about the seventeenth-century Indian princess, and Batman Forever isn't about anything. These heroes have been essentially ignored by their own creators. The unavoidables tum out to be orphans.

Pocahontas is the better picture, for the Disney craftsmen are too professional to ignore altogether the demands of plot, characterization, and visualization. Yet the movie is, at its core, quite dead. To this tale of two cultures discovering each other, the filmmakers have brought no sense of discovery but only a compulsion to confirm current secular pieties and box-office-tested formulas. Their motto seems to have been: Don't tell the kids anything they don't already know.

For what is Disney's Pocahontas but Disney's Little Mermaid retreaded? The heroine is Ariel coppertoned and endowed with Olympic-class legs instead of a fishtail. And just as the mermaid longed for the handsome mortal, Pocahontas cherished the European dreamboat, John Smith, no grizzled Elizabethan freebooter here but just another Disney idealization of a high schooljock. For King Triton we have Chief Powhatan, and there is the usual villain (Jamestown governor) whose defeat by the forces of goodness reconciles the heroine's father to her suitor. And while the human characters encounter each other, their animal sidekicks do the usual critter shtick that is supposed to steal the show.

All this recycling wouldn't matter if the filmmakers had carried over the comic and pictorial inventiveness of the last four Disney animated features as well as the plot strategies. But they haven't.

The great joy of animation lies in its power of instant metaphor. If a sports writer refers to a ballplayer making it safe to first "by a hair," animation can show the athlete's moustache actually uncurling to touch the base (as in the Disney short, "The Mighty Casey"). If a live-action director wants to compare gossiping women to cackling geese, he cuts from a shot of gossips to a shot of geese and the effect is pretty plodding. But the animator can actually tum the gossips into geese and back again with lightning speed and the swiftness mitigates the cliche. Pocahontas sometimes partakes of this magic, as when the princess sees the sails of John Smith's ship as very strange clouds and the Disney artists show us just why she makes the mistake. And there is a delightful moment (perhaps the best in the movie) when Wiggins, the daffy hairstylist-manservant of the villainous colonial governor, in an excess of designing fury, turns a sizable part of the forest primeval into topiary. But most of Pocahontas's animation is simply a matter of copying reality, putting before us talking heads that might as well be live actors rather than drawings.

The characters are the blandest Disney has given us since Cinderella. Powhatan and the other natives have been carefully drafted to avoid racial insult, but their characterizations are hewed from cigar-store wood. The Englishmen are all dolts, and the villainous governor isn't a patch on the sea witch in Little Mermaid.

But the worst failure is the title character. Here, the drawing isn't bad, and it was probably a good idea (given the script's fabricated love story) to make the heroine as athletically fetching as Carmen de Lavallade in her prime. But though the filmmakers have been strenuous in their efforts at political correctness, they have been undone by their own provincialism. While the princess communes with nature, she sings about her need for self-realization. In fact, self-realization becomes the keynote of her character, not tribal honor or human love or nature-mysticism. This wrecks the climax, the famous rescue of Smith from execution. What motivated the real Pocahontas remains a mystery. Was she simply kindhearted or was she prompted by her shrewd father, who was wary of warfare with the technologically advanced whites? Since Disney's Pocahontas is clearly in love with Smith, surely she needs no other motivation to save him. Yet, to pump up suspense, our heroine must wander off into the forest and wonder what to do while her lover is being led to the block, and only when the great tree spirit Mother Willow (gag!) reminds her that the needle of Smith's compass resembles the arrow that has haunted the heroine's dreams, does Pocahontas sprint into action. So that's why Pocahontas saves John Smith - to realize her dreams and, by doing that, to realize herself!

Pocahontas, meet Shirley MacLaine. (To be sure, American Natives did set great store by their dreams, but the filmmakers haven't made their heroine's climactic decision a matter of tradition but an inspiration of sheer egotism.)

Alan Menken, tunemaker of the last few Disney films (except Lioi7 King) has here put all his undeniable talent into one song, "Colors of the Wind" (nausea-inducing lyrics by Stephen Schwartz). Yes, it will be on the radio for the next four months. Yes, it will win the Academy Award. Yes, Barbra Streisand will cut her own single and win a Grammy. And yes, it is a mighty catchy tune. But the rest of the songs are depressingly derivative and forgettable.

As is the entire movie. Oh yes, most kids will love it. But, as Maurice Sendak has bluntly put it, kids have no taste.

How does one discuss Batman Forever? There's no there there. The earlier Batman movies, directed by Tim Burton, were heavy metal nightmares, dominated by their villains, full of ghastly jokes and haunting images. They didn't completely cohere - Tim Burton films never do - but they fascinated.

This entree, produced by Burton but directed by Joel Schumacher, isn't dominated by anything except the kind of technology that blows up everything in sight and you get sick of that before the movie is ten minutes old. The best verbal exchange is the one you've heard in the fast food commercial - "I'll get drivethrough" - and that's in the first scene.

Val Kilmer should have been a compelling superhero since he is a fine, classically trained actor and such are good at swashbuckling stuff (see, Daniel Day-Lewis in Last of the Mohicans and Liam Neeson in Rob Roy), having a sense of bodily line, commanding voices, and the ability to suggest martial prowess. But Kilmer is pallid to the point of invisibility in the Bruce Wayne scenes, and once he suits up as the Bat ... well, anybody with height and good posture looks adequately weird and commanding in body armor. Chris O'Donnell, a usually charming juvenile, is repellent as Robin, all adolescent barking with nothing underpinning the noise. And Nicole Kidman - so beautiful and so profoundly unlikable - curdles the love scenes. Sexual warmth is not her bag. (She'll probably be perfect as the icy murderess in the upcoming To Die For.)

But it's the villains who disappoint the most, for it is the villains who must provide the themes of Batman stories. Jack Nicholson's Joker personified hatred of beauty and normality, and Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman mocked yet glamorized feminist rage. But Jim Carrey's Riddler does nothing interesting with the idea of brain-teasing. Instead, he's a brain burglar with a gadget that taps into minds, and nothing significant is done with that. Carrey is the only performer here who grabs your attention, but he only grabs, he doesn't charm. Remember the obnoxious class clown in eighth grade? (Perhaps it was you.) Jim Carrey is that clown writ large. The co-villain, Two-Face, is meant to be a Jekyll-Hyde, but no matter which side of his face you're looking at, he's just Hyde. Driven to desperation by the stupidity of the script, the usually fine Tommy Lee Jones only snarls and howls.

At the multiplex I went to, one week after Batman Forever's opening, very few people were lining up to see it, but there was a mob going into Power Rangers. That's the trouble with dumbing down. No matter how stupid a movie you've made, there's always something dumber at the other end of the lobby.