The serious review of Avatar
Dec. 31st, 2009 11:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pyatI give it an 8 out of 10!
The story was not as thin as I'd been led to expect, but it was still fairly thin. Good enough for an action movie, sure. It reminded me, superficially, of H. Rider Haggard's She, with much less developed characters, and an everyman lunkhead as the hero, instead of a polymath.
The 3D was impressive. For the first time, one got a sense of how much space the various actors displaced. Sigourney Weaver, for example, is six feet tall. In 2D, this is much less noticeable.
The world was a combination of Roger Dean's landscapes and Wayne Barlowe's animals, in full motion and large as life. I loved it.
The Nav'i did not seem to fit in with the life on their world. They looked as alien as the humans. Many of the other creatures on the planet had six or eight limbs (or more), and they all seemed to have seperate orifices for breathing and vocalization/eating. The Nav'i were blue Masai warriors with tails. They were essentially human. I'm fine with that - they still looked marvellous. I'd have preferred they'd not have taken their visual/fashion cues from an existing human culture.
If I were a bigger nerd, I would suggest that Avatar is set in the same universe as Aliens, making Dr. Grace Augustine another Ripley clone, or maybe Ripley's daughter... I can't remember what the various timelines are for the films. The technology and corporate/military stuff seemed to be the same.
I can nitpick the military stuff, though it's clear Cameron was channelling Vietnam for a reason.
The marines were walking around this incredibly deadly and dangerous planet without helmets, even though their CO had huge scars on his head. They had gunships with unpressurized, unarmored gun decks and door gunners. How does that make sense on a planet with a poisonous atmosphere?
Why wasn't Trudy disciplined for pulling away from the strike on the Big Treehouse? Why did she describe a giant pile of mining explosives as a "Daisy Cutter?" Will soldiers 144 years from now still be using terms ("shock and awe", etc.) from a minor 21st century conflict? And technology that's basically just Vietnam with computers?
Corporate administrator Parker Selfridge was a lot less sympathetic and realistic than Carter J. Burke, from Cameron's Aliens. Selfridge was a total cartoon character. Burke at least knew the value of trying to curry favour with people and ingratiating yourself.
Um... more later, maybe. I need to clean my house.
The story was not as thin as I'd been led to expect, but it was still fairly thin. Good enough for an action movie, sure. It reminded me, superficially, of H. Rider Haggard's She, with much less developed characters, and an everyman lunkhead as the hero, instead of a polymath.
The 3D was impressive. For the first time, one got a sense of how much space the various actors displaced. Sigourney Weaver, for example, is six feet tall. In 2D, this is much less noticeable.
The world was a combination of Roger Dean's landscapes and Wayne Barlowe's animals, in full motion and large as life. I loved it.
The Nav'i did not seem to fit in with the life on their world. They looked as alien as the humans. Many of the other creatures on the planet had six or eight limbs (or more), and they all seemed to have seperate orifices for breathing and vocalization/eating. The Nav'i were blue Masai warriors with tails. They were essentially human. I'm fine with that - they still looked marvellous. I'd have preferred they'd not have taken their visual/fashion cues from an existing human culture.
If I were a bigger nerd, I would suggest that Avatar is set in the same universe as Aliens, making Dr. Grace Augustine another Ripley clone, or maybe Ripley's daughter... I can't remember what the various timelines are for the films. The technology and corporate/military stuff seemed to be the same.
I can nitpick the military stuff, though it's clear Cameron was channelling Vietnam for a reason.
The marines were walking around this incredibly deadly and dangerous planet without helmets, even though their CO had huge scars on his head. They had gunships with unpressurized, unarmored gun decks and door gunners. How does that make sense on a planet with a poisonous atmosphere?
Why wasn't Trudy disciplined for pulling away from the strike on the Big Treehouse? Why did she describe a giant pile of mining explosives as a "Daisy Cutter?" Will soldiers 144 years from now still be using terms ("shock and awe", etc.) from a minor 21st century conflict? And technology that's basically just Vietnam with computers?
Corporate administrator Parker Selfridge was a lot less sympathetic and realistic than Carter J. Burke, from Cameron's Aliens. Selfridge was a total cartoon character. Burke at least knew the value of trying to curry favour with people and ingratiating yourself.
Um... more later, maybe. I need to clean my house.
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no subject
Date: 2009-12-31 04:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-31 05:02 pm (UTC)*beats you over the head*
no subject
Date: 2009-12-31 05:05 pm (UTC)"Waaaait a minute... who'd have guessed that Mr. Krook was a bad guy, and Mr. Boffin was a good-natured idiot?"
no subject
Date: 2009-12-31 05:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-31 05:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-01 04:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-31 04:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-31 05:11 pm (UTC)"No, Jakesully! Don't shake that hand! Is just for *incomprehensible ritual name*!"
no subject
Date: 2009-12-31 05:45 pm (UTC)And yes, I wish the Nav'i had more of a visual connection to the rest of the fauna.
As for Aliens -- if you really look at it, Avatar is Aliens from the PoV of the Xenomorphs.
no subject
Date: 2010-01-01 04:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-01 04:45 pm (UTC)But who was on LV-426 first, even if it wasn't their homeworld?
And whose actions initiated the conflict between the species?
Just for a moment, drop the assumption that either film is an accurate depiction of the fictional events. Instead, they're propaganda from the respective sides.
Down here in the Untidy States, some people view our Civil War as a Noble Crusade against the Evils of Slavery. Others call it "the War of Northern Aggression".
Same events. Different perspective. And movies made from those conflicting perspectives are going to interpret events differently, and, consciously or unconsciously, the filmmakers will do their best to depict "their" side in the best light and the "other" side in the worst.
no subject
Date: 2009-12-31 05:55 pm (UTC)I think the military stuff is all basically a readability thing. Like all of us "know" what Vietnam looked like - complete with the open gundecks - in a way we don't culturally know Iraq. Terminology makes sense too, when you think of how much military stuff is constantly evolving slang or acronyms, and Vietnam or very very popularized modern stuff is the most accessible even if it's not realistic - even terminology as basic as MOS, SAW, or AFV are things that'd get a blank look from a lot of people.
And the no-helmet thing is to distinguish squad members. Now that you got me thinking about it, something that could be kinda interesting is if you had a movie in which everyone did wear their helmets, but you had enough time to focus on where people had badged up their uniforms, or painted individual signifiers on their gear, so that they were recognizable anyway.
no subject
Date: 2009-12-31 10:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-01 04:11 pm (UTC)Though, for the helmet thing, I meant that they were wearing their facemasks and had bare scalps, or bandanas. You couldn't really tell them apart, anyway.
no subject
Date: 2010-01-02 04:23 am (UTC)On Avatar and things
Date: 2009-12-31 06:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-31 09:02 pm (UTC)The only thing I can figure is something similiar to human evolution - primates are a very very old branch of mammals (older than rodents), and therefore there are probably some other four limbed species kicking around we didn't see. For a variety of unknown reasons, a six-limbed ancestor with breathing orifices on the chest did better than a lot of four limbed creatures with noses, and grabbed up evolutionary niches.
This contradicts with something else I noticed however. As pandora is a moon of a gas giant in a 'goldilocks zone' of liquid water, it has *impressive* defense against extinction via space rocks (thus the high levels of symbiosis between life-forms), evolution must have moved very slowly, as there were no mass extinctions to goad it towards lots of niche filling and rapid evolutionary diversity.
The only thing I can figure is that there were both four limbed and six limbed ancestor species, and something happened to a majority of the fourlimbed ones (disease, six limbed were better adapted than a majority of the fourlimbed, etc), leaving a minority of four limbed species, one of which was an ancestor to the navi.
But really, it boils down to making the navi more sympathetic to humans who are watching the movie, as the blue people are the good guys and we're supposed to like them. That's why they are humanoid and have big eyes and we avoid nasty parts of hunter gatherer society like intertribal warfare.
I mean, certain things about the movie niggled at me because they were dumb or racist (Alt titles: 'Dances with wolves, now with alien sideboob' 'Roll fizzlebeef and the noble savages of pandora' and 'Superwhitey saves the oppressed indiginous culture in spaaaace'), but it still was absurdly good. The reason we're asking these kinds of questions is because of how much detail was put into the setting, rather than mocking it for being like most movies with aliens where biology is more or less ignored entirely for the sake of making something look alien.
no subject
Date: 2010-01-01 05:03 pm (UTC)Counter-argument: if the underlying mechanism of that "extensive symbiosis" developed early on -- and given how it extends across phyla, that seems likely -- maybe Eywa can deliberately direct the course of evolution on Pandora.
no subject
Date: 2010-01-01 05:36 pm (UTC)I could see artificial selection being a reason for several adaptions, especially considering the fact that the planet has a consciousness of sorts.
It also depends how long that emergent system has exisited - if we're talking about something that came to being in the last million years or so, a lot of interesting things could have happened. We don't really have a good idea how long that moon has been around, or how old life is there. If I had to guess based on previous conjecture, not nearly as long as earth due to the lack of mass extinctions. But that, of course, is assuming consciousness occurs whenever evolution has been running long enough. The truth is that we don't have a good idea as we are the only sentient race we know of.
It's all about the boobies
Date: 2010-01-02 04:30 am (UTC)So, there you go. They look very much like humans, down to breasts that have no fat in them and no apparent function, because they have to be teh seksay. Yay.
no subject
Date: 2009-12-31 10:26 pm (UTC)What is the movie about? Is it all a video game or simulation? Or is it a real planet? What's all that 'avatar' business about?
no subject
Date: 2010-01-01 04:17 pm (UTC)It's about a human mining operation on an alien world that is inhabited by the blue skinned aliens. The atmosphere is poisonous, and the aliens are 10 feet tall. To better deal with the aliens, the humans have a few "Avatars", vat-grown alien bodies, and the main character pilots one of them remotely with SCIENCE.
no subject
Date: 2010-01-02 02:43 am (UTC)