On Seeing "Avatar" Again

Viewing the film Avatar again reinforces my love-hate relationship with it: even though I sincerely would love to love it, I find it so derivative and deja-vu and tedious that I could scream. I love the sensuous animal nature of the Na'vis, and that is the entire extent of my admiration.

The story is based on a short story Call Me Joe from the 1950's that is immediately recognized, although in the short story, the action took place on the surface of Jupiter; i.e., a gas giant planet about which Pandora orbits. If you recall the shot of Pandora in its orbit, the gas giant has a Great Blue Spot storm on its surface atmosphere and looks a good deal like Jupiter and its Great Red Spot.
James Cameron also has what I consider a bad habit of having obsessionally structured scripts which he follows rather faithfully, only to have to edit out large portions of the finished product, leaving us with informational GAPs which tend to startle me, if no one else. The whole business of Sigourney Weaver's school was hard to grasp, and I am used to walking into movies in media res and getting a grasp without much problem.
Floating land masses, adrift in the atmosphere have been standard fare of surreal artists for a long time. Furthermore, they make absolutely no sense whatsoever in the atmosphere of Pandora, but they do have interesting possibilities for havens in the atmosphere's of gas giant planets.
The whole business of the Home Tree swept me immediately into Tolkien's Shire, along with his depiction of the evils of industrialization in the Shire being paralleled by the "company's" mining operation for "unobtainium"
I found the company middle-level management hacks practicing their putting in space a sincere homage to Borges: a mirror of infinite representations; how many times may one use a stock scene? I fully expected Peter Boyle from Outland to smile at me; his quest was illicit drugs, however. (I must also admit that Sigourney Weaver had begun to resemble Frances Sternhagen - also in Outland - quite a bit.)
The characters were shallow depictions: Military Man, Company Hack (... I mean, can't you just sense Paul Reiser as the hack from Aliens in this? I felt so bad to see Giovanni Ribisi wasted in a mish-mosh of characters stitched together.) I found the mechanized body suit in which the Military Man fights at the end too redolent of Sigourney Weaver in her mechanized hydraulic body suit in Aliens.
I thought the religious theme shallow, but what religious themes in films aren't when you think about it? Films that use traditional religious imagery to depict religious experience are doubly damned by too great a dose of sugar and saccharine.
The chase scenes through the forests looked like Star Wars forest moon of Endor, home of the Ewoks.

I think my biggest disappointment was that James Cameron turned what could have been a historic film combining sensuality, religion, and the discontents of our age into something that is a good deal less than a not particularly good comic book: technically a masterpiece, conceptually a re-hash, and spiritually a porridge.