It's 23 years since James Cameron turned his hand to full-immersion, set-in-the-future sci-fi with the wonderful Aliens. A budget of $18.5 million wasn't exactly chickenfeed for an action movie back then, but it still forced the Great Man to hack up or abandon some of his more expensive notions for the movie. Anyone familiar with the Alien quadrilogy will have seen him fiddling with pull-toys, raging at the tea-obsessed British electricians and putting mirrors into sets in order to extend the bits that he couldn't afford to build.

Has he been haunted all this time by niggling little details about the movie that uber-fans like myself were actually wowing over? It's possible...

Every time I see something new from the painfully mean publicity flow for Avatar, it seems to be something that reminds me of Aliens.

For one thing there were the power-loaders...

...and before that there were the hypersleep chambers...

And now, it seems that the 'steadicam-Uzi' from Aliens is making a vicarious reappearance in Avatar, as the following faux production still, yesterday revealed on /Film, reveals...

This particular gun-mount seems attached to some kind of...hmmm...dropship door, but it's fully articulated much like the portable version as sported above by Jeanette Goldstein.

For a film on this scale, all this must be an expensive form of therapy, but in all honesty, I can't say I'm ready to complain yet...

/Film

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• Exoskeletons: New Avatar production art
• Why Simon Brew is really looking forward to Avatar