Steven Dutch, Natural and Applied Sciences, Universityof Wisconsin - Green Bay
Wow. I thought Kingdom of Heaven got flaky reviews. But Avatar has brought out the wingnuts and moonbats in droves.
Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) is a paraplegic ex-Marine who agrees to sign on for a mysterious assignment on the moon Pandora. His twin brother, a scientist, was supposed to go but was murdered in a robbery. So The Corporation asks Jake to go, because his DNA is identical to his brother's. The payoff is the possibility of getting his legs back, which can apparently be done but is far too expensive for veterans' benefits to cover.
Pandora is a satellite of a gas giant planet, a hybrid of Jupiter and Neptune with Jupiter's turbulent clouds and Neptune's blue color. Almost certainly Pandora's rotation is locked to the gas giant meaning one side permanently faces it and the other side faces away. So the day and night cycle on Pandora will be equal to its revolution period, and unless Pandora whips around in 24 hours or so, day and night will last several days each. Also, every day there will be a total eclipse of the sun lasting hours at least as Pandora passes through the gas giant's shadow.
Also, at any given moment there are several other very large satellites in view, looking about like softballs at arm's length. This sort of thing is a staple in science fiction art - there's even some in Carl Sagan's Cosmos (Encyclopedia Galactica). But moons that big and close together would soon perturb each other's orbits drastically. Maybe they're locked in a stable resonance. The movie never deals with any of these issues and frankly doesn't need to. We do hear early on that Pandora has low gravity and that's important.
It has taken Jake nearly six years to get to Pandora, frozen in cryogenic stasis. The destination is a mining complex run by a sniveling suit, Parker Selfridge (Giovanni Ribisi). Head of security is the hard as nails ex-Marine Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang) who begins with a safety briefing on just how lethal it is on Pandora. Among other things, the atmosphere will render a human unconscious in under a minute and kill humans in four, but we never learn just what the active ingredient is. So everyone outside has to wear breathing masks. The mine is extracting "unobtainium" (a name borrowed shamelessly fromThe Core.) I have no idea what it is or does but it sells for "twenty million a kilo." That's impressive if the twenty million is present-day dollars or Euros, a bit less so if the currency in the future is inflated like 1990's Yugoslav dinars (I have a fifty billion dinar note). We see it hovering over a base plate on the CEO's desk so it apparently has anti-gravity or energy uses. But the close ups look like galena (lead sulfide) which is quite easily obtainium.
We only get a glimpse of the mining operations but the scenes are impressive, with equipment dwarfing anything on Earth. In particular there is a gigantic excavator with bucket wheels, like actually used in some coal strip mining on earth. One, built by the Krupp Corporation of former armaments fame, is the largest self propelled land machine ever built. The one on Pandora is bigger.
Jake is here for the avatar program, in which synthetic replicas of the local humanoid race, the Na'vi, are mentally controlled by human operators. The program is run by Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver), who thinks putting the inexperienced Jake in control of an avatar is about the stupidest thing since2012. "Just relax and let your mind go blank. That shouldn't be too hard for you" she tells him tenderly as she loads him into the link unit. On his very first day, Jake is charged by a beast looking like a cross between a rhino and a hammerhead shark. Grace warns him not to shoot since its armor is too thick. "A territorial threat display," says Grace helpfully, "Stand your ground." The hammerhead rhino runs off, which on Pandora is very bad news, since that generally means something even worse is on the way. Something worse, in this case, is a cat-like predator with serious anger issues. It chase Jake over a waterfall. The rest of the team searches for Jake but has to call it off when the sun sets because night operations are strictly forbidden.
Pandora is beautiful at night with all sorts of bioluminescent vegetation, but even more dangerous than by day. Jake finds himself being hunted by a pack of smaller but still cat-like predators. He fights them off in a losing battle but is saved when Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) shows up and kills several of the beasts. He thanks her and she spits back "Don't thank. This is sad." Then she tenderly caresses one of the dead predators. She tells him "You should not be here" and commands him not to follow, then changes her mind when luminescent floating seeds settle on Jake by the dozens. These are seeds of the sacred Tree of Souls and are attracted to pure souls. She takes Jake back to her village, in a tree. A Really. Huge. Tree. Because on a low gravity world like Pandora, trees can get really big. This one, called the Hometree, is hundreds of feet in diameter and thousands of feet high. The Na'vi are also huge - ten feet tall and very slender, and with bones reinforced by natural carbon fibers.
It turns out humans and Na'vi know a lot about each other. Thanks to a school Grace set up in a failed attempt to foster cooperation, many Na'vi speak English. Grace is fluent in Na'vi. The Na'vi know that the avatars are controlled by humans. The avatars collapse when not linked telepathically to a human, and the Na'vi call them Dreamwalkers.
The shaman of the Na'vi clan decides that Jake is to be taught their ways. Jake's being an intellectual blank slate (though far from stupid) turns out to be an advantage, since the Na'vi had tried and failed to teach other humans (Sounds like the classic line from Plan Nine From Outer Space: "Their minds are too controlled"). Colonel Quaritch is delighted by this turn of events. He had contempt for the avatar program and the scientists who were trying for a diplomatic solution, but having an ex-Marine for an avatar suits him just fine. He tells Jake to report to him with intelligence. Jake notes that the language is a pain, but he figures it's like learning to assemble his weapon - just a matter of constant repetition. And if we could get that kind of discipline from our real military, we might do a whole lot better in guerilla conflicts.
Meanwhile Grace decides to get away from corporate micromanagement and relocates her team to a station in the mountains. These mountains are located in the middle of some sort of force field vortex and consist of great floating masses of rock, in some cases kilometers across, tied together by enormous plant roots. They are big enough to have forests and waterfalls dropping into space. I watched this and thought "This is physically and geologically absurd and I don't care." In fact I may start a research program to find some new laws of physics just to make it possible. Because if there isn't something like this somewhere in the Universe, there bloody well ought to be. (The rock formations seem to be based on the karst of Guilin in China and Angel Falls in Venezuela.) At the core of the vortex is the Tree of Souls surrounded by great circular natural arches of stone. I realized that it is possible to make something like this believable - or at least not a wholesale abuse of suspension of disbelief - if you pile on believable small details in rich enough quantity. For example, one arch has a dangling slab as if it were really the result of erosion.
Jake alternates between life as a human, mostly dictating reports, and life as a Na'vi. At one point he learns to command and pilot a flying reptile. It's physically unlikely, but a heck of a lot more plausible on a low gravity world than on Earth. Yet for all the visual wonder, the middle third of the movie drags. We know Colonel Quaritch and boss Selfridge will finally decide to use force. And we know Jake will side with the Na'vi (One wag called the movie Neo Skywalker Saves Ferngully for Pocahontas). We're just waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Jake and Neytiri finally fall in love and mate, which among the Na'vi is for life. Their tryst is rudely interrupted by massive bulldozers, and when Jake smashes the remote control cameras, he is recognized. Colonel Quaritch invades the remote outpost and drags Jake back. He gives him an hour to try to persuade the Na'vi to leave their tree, which is, unfortunately, right over a huge deposit of unobtainium. Jake is spurned by the Na'vi and Neytiri. The colonel pulls the plug on Jake's link module and flies off to take down the Hometree. They escalate from tear gas to drive the Na'vi out, to incendiaries, to high explosives, eventually toppling the tree. One gunship pilot, Trudy Chacon (Michelle Rodriguez) ceases fire and peels out of formation in disgust.
If unobtainium is so fabulously valuable, why not just tunnel under the Hometree and bring it out? On a low gravity world the problems of supporting tunnels would be greatly reduced. Backfill the tunnels and nobody loses. Of course, Humans and Na'vi Cooperate and Share Nice wouldn't make for a very dramatic movie. Sort of like Little House on Another Planet.
Jake and Grace are to be shipped home, but Trudy frees them by knocking out a guard. They escape in a stolen gunship but Grace is wounded. They fly off to the remote outpost and carry it down into the forest. In the vortex, instruments don't work, so the outpost will be hard to find. Grace is carried to the Tree of Souls and the shaman tries to transfer her soul to her avatar body, but she dies before the download can start.
Grace had begun to discover that all the plants on Pandora could communicate and perhaps formed a global intelligence, which the Na'vi worship as Eewa, their deity. It was through this communication that the shaman had hoped to save Grace. "She's real," Grace says as she dies.
Jake mobilizes the Na'vi to fight the Corporation, and it turns out the choppers are no match for flying reptiles. I did wonder, though, why nobody thought of simply dropping rocks into the rotors. Also Na'vi arrows are about half an inch thick and four feet long and punch handily through plastic windshields. Jake and the Colonel duke it out, and just when it looks like the Colonel has won, Neytiri puts a couple of arrows through him. Jake is near death from exposure to Pandora's atmosphere, but the Eewa mind meld transfers his soul to his avatar body, and the movie ends with a closeup of his avatar eye opening.
Leading off the list of weird complaints about Avatar is its alleged erotic undertones. I have absolutely no idea how anyone can see eroticism in Avatar, but they do. Writing in "College Candy" on December 12, 2009, Brittany from the University of Richmond posted Male Obsessions I’ll Never Understand, one of which was:
And it baffles me that every time the trailer comes on, every male in a 10-foot radius immediately goes from 6 to midnight.
Isn't that a bit hard to verify in a dark theater? Then there's Refusing to See "Avatar," As a Feminist Act by Jessica Grose on Double-X (December 11, 2009)
Enter James Cameron's Avatar, which appears to be about blue aliens and dragons. Oh, and also CGI alien boobs, which Cameron seems inordinately obsessed with. As Josh Levin points out in Slate, Avatar is not meant to appeal to women. I have zero interest in seeing this film, despite the rave reviews so far, including the one from Variety that says "everyone who ever goes to the movies will need to see" Avatar. Since Hollywood does only care about the box office, it is my small act of quasi-feminist resistence (sic) to refuse to see this movie. I know that if Avatar flops, it won't necessarily get more films directed by women with stories starring women made. But maybe it will mean that instead of spending hundreds of millions of dollars to make the ideal cat-person breasts, studios might take a smidgen of that cash and spend it on one or two movies that aren't geared toward 15-year-old boys.
Yes, Neytiri is bare-breasted in the film, but her apparatus is so non-human in appearance that the movie still earned a PG-13 rating. Considering that a large fraction of the pre-agriculture human race went around that way, it's realistic. But the very idea that any of this is aimed at erotic fantasies is hilarious. I've served on military deployments and lengthy field seasons in isolated places, and I'd have to be isolated one heck of a lot longer than I ever have been to find Avatar titillating.
To be fair, many other commentators on Double-X had praise for the film and Cameron generally for his treatment of female characters. But Emma Rosenblum (Vulture Web, New York magazine) disagrees:
But in the case of “Avatar,” the movie doesn’t seem to give an equal shake to Sigourney Weaver (a Cameron film alumna) when her character shuttles from her human body to her Na’vi form:
The male characters’ avatars are the strongest, most powerful versions of their current selves, but they share their respective human’s facial structure, general build and age. Leading man Jake Sully’s (Sam Worthington) blue doppelgänger can walk, run, fly, and mate — things his crippled human self is unable to do, and cowering science-geek Norm Spellman’s (Joel David Moore) avatar is a macho action man. But looking at them, you can see right away that they’re Sully and Spellman’s blue twins. But then look at the avatar for Weaver’s Dr. Augustine: When we’re introduced to her, the slinky alien is wearing a belly-baring Stanford T-Shirt and sporting beaded dreadlocks, a marked difference from her usual lab coat and fine lines. So Augustine transforms from a 60-year-old scientist into a college-age Outward Bound instructor?
Well, the male leads are all young and basically morph into their Na'vi equivalents. Pandora is a dangerous world and Na'vi routinely perform feats impossible for any human. Does it make more sense for Grace to transform into a Na'vi in peak form, or should Grace morph into a 60 year old Na'vi? Should she be able to keep up with her fellow avatars, or should she have to stop every few hundred yards and rest?
"When will white people stop making movies like Avatar?" on 109.com says:
Specifically, it's a fantasy about race told from the point of view of white people.
This is a classic scenario you've seen in non-scifi epics from Dances With Wolves to The Last Samurai, where a white guy manages to get himself accepted into a closed society of people of color and eventually becomes its most awesome member.
Think of it this way. Avatar is a fantasy about ceasing to be white, giving up the old human meatsack to join the blue people, but never losing white privilege. Jake never really knows what it's like to be a Na'vi because he always has the option to switch back into human mode.
I'd like to watch some movies about people of color (ahem, aliens), from the perspective of that group, without injecting a random white (erm, human) character to explain everything to me.
Well, there's a good deal of validity in those comments. But just try immersing yourself in an alien culture with no interpretation whatsoever. RentPrincess Mononoke or Spirited Away. Both are reasonably intelligible to Westerners but nevertheless are filled with imagery and plot twists that are apparently meaningless, or at least very perplexing. Meaningless to Westerners, maybe, but doubtless perfectly sensible to a Japanese. Images and connections that are baffling to a Westerner are perfectly sensible to someone immersed from birth in another culture. Wouldn't those films make a lot more sense if you watched them with a Japanese cultural interpreter? Then tackle something really alien, like the Mayan creation story Popol Vuh and try to imagine what it meant to a Maya. Now imagine a culture on a planet sharing no common biology or history with Earth. Cameron cut us some slack by employing a lot of elements familiar from our fantasy or history, like the dragon riding familiar in fantasy literature or the Native American tradition of a hunter thanking his prey. It's probably impossible to imagine a completely alien psychology without becoming a paranoid schizophrenic, but if you think it will be easy communicating with alien cultures, it's because you have no idea how alien some human cultures can be.
The film The Last Samurai simply wouldn't have worked without Tom Cruise. It was only his recognition of the parallels between the samurai and the doomed Plains Indians that generated sympathy. Because the samurai themselves were cruel, cold, arrogant and, apart from courage (which they had in awesome abundance), pretty much lacking in redeeming qualities. They are no more sympathetic than the Kempeitai, the sadistic Japanese military police of World War II. And unlike the Plains Indians, the samurai were not being driven from their lands or overrun by foreign invaders. They were merely being told to give up the privileges of an elite - "merely" to us, but a matter worth dying for to them. They would still have their land and wealth. The samurai revolt was a reactionary revolt by a dying elite against progressivism. We could sympathize only because we knew they would lose. The prospect of them winning would not be cheerful at all.
So maybe some films of this class are attempts to assuage white guilt or are fantasies about leading some vulnerable group to victory. But the device of having someone from our culture grow from total ignorance to understanding and sympathy serves a useful purpose by helping us interpret the alien culture through sympathetic eyes.
And there's something worse than white guilt. That's no guilt. We could still be glorifying the extermination of the Indians. We could easily make Avatar as a shoot-'em-up Western where we root for the guys in the gunships.
The story of “Avatar” is the story of Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and other countries attacked and occupied by U.S. mercenaries and U.S. troops. (David Swanson, An AVATAR Awakening, PDABlog December 28, 2009)
"Avatar" Offers Antiwar Activists Opportunity for Street Theater by Rob Kall, OpEdNews, December 21 2009.
The storyline is built around an evil corporation that has gone to this gorgeous planet, Pandora, where it has no problem killing indigenous people, destroying their most precious cultural possessions. The corporation and its military personnel act horribly, killing wantonly, destroying some cultural icons, threatening to destroy the most sacred place on the planet, comparable to bombing Mecca or Jerusalem or the Vatican here on earth.
Does this sound like what Blackwater did in Iraq? Does it sound like the way the US is attacking the Taliban in Afghanistan? By the end, the audience has been totally offended by the militaristic support of corporate greed. The audience has spent 160 minutes falling in love with the indigenous people of Pandora, then watching military neanderthals heartlessly try to kill them and their most sacred place, where their deity resides.
Actually, no. That sounds like what the Taliban did in Afghanistan. Remember the Buddhas of Bamyan, 2000 year old massive stone carvings that were demolished in March, 2001? In other words, six months before 9-11 the Taliban declared themselves the enemies of humanity. Blackwater may have been boorish but they didn't systematically and deliberately destroy ancient religious monuments.
Hardly anything is more baffling than the sympathy some intellectuals have for Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. At least Marxism gave lip service to championing intellectuals, even as they were oppressing them. But radical Islam is the most virulently anti-intellectual movement on the planet. They offer nothing for intellectuals. They hate learning in all forms except for sterile Koranic study. They hate women. They hate gays. If they come to power in other Middle Eastern countries you can be absolutely certain other precious antiquities will be destroyed.
Leftish criticisms of Avatar pale into insignificance compared to the full-bore wackazoid comments on the right. Typical is "Time to Call Out James Cameron" by Kurt Schlichter (Breitbart Big Hollywood, December 22, 2009)
Oh, the bucolic natives are once again oppressed by the evil Americans! Nonsense! Americans have freed more people from oppression than any other group in history. The world would be an immeasurably worse place if we had not conquered North America. And the American Indians were imperfect like all human beings – some were good, some were bad, but they were certainly not the dopey, touchy-feely constructions of pure Rousseauean sweetness and light of modern Hollywood’s patronizing portrayals.
Did you see an American flag anywhere in Avatar? I didn't. I wonder if Schlichter ever heard of Wounded Knee? Or the Trail of Tears.
Oh, evil businessmen ruthlessly ravage mother Earth and exploit innocent Third World peoples in a greedy race for profits! Nonsense! Capitalism and market economics have done more to improve the lives of human beings than anything else. The Third World’s embrace of socialism, self-destructive cultures and through-and-through corruption are the overwhelming causes of its problems.
You have to admire the convoluted logic here. Schlichter reinterprets a movie portraying an evil corporation as a blanket assertion that all corporations are evil. His counterargument is that, because some (most) corporations improve our lives, therefore the events in Avatar are impossible.
Tell that to the folks in New London, Connecticut who had their homes taken from them by eminent domain so that the Pfizer pharmaceutical firm could expand. The land is now a vacant lot because Pfizer decided not to build. Oh, but that'sgovernment taking people's homes? Nice try. But if Pfizer hadn't used its influence on the City Council, the property would never have been taken. Or tell it to the people who have been frivolously sued by the RIAA for nonexistent file downloading. The reason Avatar is believable is because stuff like that actually happens.
Oh, evil Western countries are causing climate change that will result in an environmental catastrophe! Nonsense! Global warming is a scam, a hoax and a fraud, and is less science than pagan religion. I wish it weren't; hot weather is a great excuse to mix up some Sapphire and tonics and this cold weather we keep having is becoming a real bummer.
"Climategate" will have to get a hundred times worse to rival the incompetence and outright fraud committed by climate denialists.
You’re welcome to compete with us in the marketplace of ideas. Except we’re going to be Wal-Mart: embraced by most Americans; and you’re going to end up like Circuit City: obsolete, inflexible and ultimately bankrupt.
There is no way hard drugs were not involved in writing that paragraph. The Republican Party blew control of Congress in 2006, continued with more of the same, lost the White House in 2008, and continue to insist they weren't conservative enough. Inflexible? Check. Obsolete? Fast approaching it. Ultimately bankrupt?
We’re calling you out – on your flabby arguments, your weak thinking, your stunning ignorance of history and your rank hypocrisy. We’re not going to be distracted by bright colors, loud explosions, or hi-tech gimmicks. We’re ignoring all of the hype.
Breitbart is complaining about flabby arguments, weak thinking and stunning ignorance of history?
And why are the deaths of American fighting men – you know, the folks who are keeping at bay the bastards who would saw your open-minded, tolerant, liberal head off with a butter knife given half a chance — something you think ought to bring cheers from the audience?
Jake Sully points out almost as soon as he lands that the corporate security people were once military but were now just corporate flunkies. They're no more "American fighting men" than mall cops are real policemen.
Hey, Jimmy, you made your stupid movie. Now we’re going to make you make your case.
How's $2 billion in box office and still climbing? Is that a strong enough case?
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