I recently rewatched this film and it made me wonder about something.
The main character gives up his life and identity as a human and Earthman to live as a native of Pandora, and its undoubted that the movie-makers intended for this to be the ‘right’ decision, however although its a very pretty place and what we see of the natives society it appears to be fairly utopian, ecologically friendly and eglatarian.
However personally I wouldn’t want want to live there because for all it benefits its also completelty stable and stale, there is no progress and most likely never will be any progress, your great-great-great grandchildren are going to have pretty much exactly the same life as you and there is nothing to aim towards.
So would you want to live in Pandoran society? (as a native)
If the other option were spending the rest of my life in a wheel chair, I’d certainly consider it. Otherwise, probably not, and not just because I’m not interested in living in a “primitive” society. The Navi are sitting on mineral resources of incalculable value. The corporate villains in the movie represent the first attempt at stealing it from them. It won’t be the last. If the Navi don’t gear up and start adopting advanced technology, it’s only a matter of time until they’re wiped out. If they do gear up, it’s still going to be a lot of hard, bitter fighting until they can establish a clear and unassailable hold on their homeworld.
Either way, the society we see in the first movie is doomed, either to genocide, or to evolution. And either way, the transformation is not going to be something I’d be eager to put myself in the middle of.
The dominant lifeform on Pandora already has technology incalculably further advanced than ours. The Earthlings have the capability to make very large shuttles fly. Eywa has the the capability to make mountains fly.
Its going to be interesting to see what way Cameron takes the story in his sequels, because obviously from events at the end of the last movie humanity is going to come back, but this time with a real military and not corporate-security.
btw semi-related sidenote I thought the story could have been made more interesting if the human side had been made a little more sympathetic, even a throwaway line saying that humanity needed the unobtanium, a matter of species survival rather than what was depicted as simple corporate greed.
True, but you need technology to put these into effect, its hard to make major sociatal changes without it, especially on anything other than a fairly local scale.
Interesting point but this technology hasn’t really had much effect on the natives lifestyle, unless Eywa thinks an idealist hunter-gatherer lifestyle is the epitome of advancement. Which is another though, the Navi don’t appear to be indigenous to Pandora (every other species has six limbs, they have four), if they aren’t native then where did they come from?
My fanwank is that some thousands of years ago, Eywa noticed the developing lifeforms on Earth, and realized that we were likely to soon (by the standards of a sentient planet, at least) develop interstellar travel and come visit. So Eywa consciously and deliberately set out to develop a new lifeform that vaguely resembles us, and to which we could relate, to act as ambassadors to us.
No, I would not want to move there. The place is a Death World. Sure, they make it look all idyllic, but hunters* have a high incidence of being seriously fucked up - look up Neanderthal skeletal studies sometime. Broken bones left, right and centre.
which the N’avi are, given the amount of leather and bones in their material culture, plus you don’t need to ride dragons to hunt down SpaceTurnips, IYKWIM.
Huh. The lack of progress would be the one appealing thing about the location. Most of what everyone else in the thread indicates are the reasons i wouldn’t go, along with the lack of certain technologies I take for granted.
Wouldn’t that be the Unobtanium that the humans want? With it maybe we could make mountains fly on purpose with actual technology, rather than by random placement of resources which seems to the case on the planet. eg.Trees growing in a forest isn’t ‘technology’, btw. A house made out of the tree is.
I do hope not. There’s been enough internet whining about Avatar stealing its plot from Fern Gully or whatever, that I don’t want to get the sequel and have more whining about it now stealing the plot from John Varley’s Titan trilogy.
… Although, t’would be nice to get more recognition of that trilogy; maybe a movie adaptation of it.
I think there’s a fairly strong case to be made that Eywa is a planetary sentience, and that just about everything that goes on on Pandora is due to her machinations.
Yes, the unobtainium. Which we humans can’t synthesize at all, but which Eywa can make in mountain-sized lots. The mass manufacturing of unobtainium is certainly a very significant technology which Eywa has and which we lack.
Nice place to visit; wouldn’t want to live there. Pretty but waaaaay too dangerous.
Hollywood being Hollywood, yes, I’m sure there’ll be a lot more fighting in the next movie, but wasn’t it said that the Evil Multinational Corporation really didn’t want bleeding-heart do-gooders back on Earth to find out what it was doing? The implication being that the blue natives might get legal protection, a nature preserve, some kind of a reservation etc. if the EMC is too heavy-handed.
I think you are confusing a ‘resource’ with ‘technology’.
And no evidence that he makes the unobtanium or manipulates it. It might be the unobtanium that allows the sentience to exist rather than the sentience creating the unobtanium.