A technical triumph, but worth the wait?

Rating: 7/10 (17 December 2009)

I saw a preview of Avatar last night in Glasgow and came out with the impression that I'd somehow seen this movie before. And I have. And so have you, in one guise or another.
If you have an interest in movies then that shouldn't come as a surprise, and this isn't a complaint about lack of originality or clichéd plot devices (although there are arguments for both in this movie). There are after all only a finite number of themes on which to base a story.
What I'm trying to say is that the entire movie felt like a re-tread of something that had come before - and not just in passing, or in specific moments, but the ENTIRE movie.
There are very strong thematic similarities to movies like Dances With Wolves and Last Of The Mohicans that bob up to the surface in every Na'Vi scene (nomatter how much blue paint and exotic horse-things you disguise them with). Most of the human-orientated scenes unfold in the "Company" facilities that are clearly how the sets of Aliens would have looked had Cameron the budget and technology first time around, even down to the design of the VTOL craft and the power-loader battle suits.
Most of the exploration and action sequences feel like levels from any xeno-based Xbox 360 or Playstation game of the last ten years. Even the strange connective tissue the Na'Vi use to link to the natural world around them feels awfully like a deliberate design for the licensed game adaptation.
Maybe I'm being too cynical, but Cameron set the bar pretty high with his previous decade of movie making and I think I have a right to expect something a bit less generic.
Where the movie excels is in the visual effects and the colour palette - I watched the preview in 3D and was really really impressed. There's nothing like it in terms of CG rendering and seamless motion capture. Avatar represents the next step up in cinematic effects, in the same way that Weta Digital showed the world how to do it with the animation of Gollum in The Two Towers.
Weighing in at the best part of three hours, it felt like longer (something I never thought I'd say about a sci-fi movie) and could probably have used a few judicial cuts. There was just a touch of Tarantinism about it - i.e. self-indulgent and over-confident.
Overall, I did enjoy this movie and when you watch it yourself (if you haven't already), I'm sure you'll enjoy it too.
Despite all the incredible visuals, alien worlds, exotic flora and fauna and so forth, it's the strangest thing that I should leave the cinema wondering why it felt so unoriginal.