After a torrent of glowing reviews and an impressive showing at Sunday's Golden Globes, The Aviator appears poised to soar to the head of the Oscar race (no pun intended). So, I figured I'd weigh in on whether or not the high-flying epic (last one, I swear) is worth your time and money.

The short answer? Sort of.

Movie of the year? Not even close.

The Aviator opens with young millionaire Howard Hughes, played with plucky energy by Leonardo Dicaprio, as he directs Hell's Angels, a high-octane silent-era spectacle about World War I fighter pilots. We admire Hughes instantly because of his shrewd perfectionism, even when it defies practical sense; e.g. although it costs him thousands of dollars a day to rent out a private fleet of actors/aviators, Hughes calls off Hell's Angels for months at a time because he says the clouds don't look quite right.

With the help of his Gangs of New York set designer Dante Ferretti, director Martin Scorsese reconstructs a marvelous portrait of heyday-era Hollywood that sparkles with the glamour and gluttony of the time. Also impressive are the numerous airplane sequences both during the filming of Hell's Angels and when test pilot Hughes tries to break world records for velocity.

Scorsese and cinematographer Robert Richardson do a remarkable job of capturing the terror and exhilaration of supersonic flight with jerky, hyperkinetic photography, although much of the credit -- particularly for the Hell's Angels sequences -- belongs to the digital effects wizards as well.

When he isn't breaking world records or breaking his bank building planes, Hughes romances several Hollywood starlets. Of these, The Aviator grants the most prominence to his affair with the legendary actress Katherine Hepburn, played in the film by Cate Blanchett who, if they were contemporaries, wouldn't exactly be mistaken for Ms. Hepburn's sister.

Blanchett does an OK job of parroting Hepburn's walk and posh Connecticut dialect, but her performance is significantly hampered by the limits that often accompany the mimicking of iconic figures.

We simply know Kate Hepburn's face too well for someone who looks nothing like her to create an acceptable facsimile. The result is an awkward limbo between the interesting character Blanchett and writer John Logan have created and Blanchett's too-blatant-to-ignore Hepburnisms that veer dangerously in the direction of caricature.

Scorsese, or his casting director or whoever, actually makes a rather annoying habit out of desecrating the legacies of old Hollywood with miscast representatives of the new -- a habit that imagines Kate Beckinsale as a drowsy Ava Gardner and Jude Law, in a ridiculous cameo, as Errol Flynn.

Unfortunately, the film's problems with characterization extend to the protagonist, as well. We learn about Hughes' sexual appetite from tabloids Hepburn reads, reinforcing Hughes as object rather than subject. Likewise, it's through a newsreel that we learn of Hughes' famed round-the-world flight.

Scorsese dedicates a significant amount of screen time to chronicling Hughes' infamous obsessive-compulsive behavior, culminating in an extended sequence where the aviator isolates himself in his screening room, babbling incessantly and urinating in milk jars. But even in these sequences, it feels like we are observing Hughes' strange behavior from a distance without really understanding it. The effect of this distancing is that we see Hughes, but we don't empathize with him.

He remains at all times a colorful, but merely surface-level creation and thus a rather dull character to watch for three hours of screen time.

As attractive as the film's frills can be, its sense of humanity is sorely lacking. And thus, like the spy plane Hughes flies over Beverly Hills, The Aviator runs out of gas about halfway through and comes crashing down to the ground.