500 Days of Summer and the Big Lebowski both follow the hero’s journey. Most movies do though some are more obvious than others.
But I think you’re right in that it’s how you dress the hero’s journey that makes or breaks a film and Avatar failed miserably. Visually stunning but the storyline and dialogue were really mediocre.
Yeah, people seemed to miss that those folks were basically the 22nd Century version of Halliburton and Blackwater. Once their profit motive was diminished the likelihood of their return shrank, and once the Na’vi sympathetic humans were able to convey the message back to the public and governments back home it’s likely that the potential backlash to a scorched earth policy becomes enormous.
Of course there are 2 sequels planned, so we’ll see how Cameron decides to unravel the politics and economics of 22nd Century Earth.
I see no reason to assume that, personally, though I can understand why, if sequels are made, it’ll continue to exist as a plot device that humans will be violent ignoble savages (thus creating conflict) who nevertheless hesitate at decimating an inconvenient aboriginal population (thus avoiding an abrupt ending to the story), though this historically has never really been a problem.
Of course it’s completely impossible that humans have actually learned from the past and that a thoroughly modern and informed society would shun anyone who acted so brazenly. That couldn’t possibly be realistic.
Heck, you had a Marine colonel who was willing to drop whole palletes of C4, and it wasn’t the better angels of human nature that stopped him, so forgive me for being unconvinced.
Cameron just stacked the deck so the noble savages (with the heroic help of their own John Dunbar) could win, so I guess this is his version of Inglourious Basterds. I wouldn’t have a problem with that per se, but I wish he’d gone full-out with the Eywa counter-offensive. Having the herd animals attack was okay, but a crazy-ass “Planet Hell” nightmare where the insects and plants get into the action woulda been cool, and a far more convincing defense than nobility and arrows.
“Sure, we’re all one with nature, Scully. You can stand back, now, it’s time for nature to kick ass!”
Why does everyone keep callin him Scully? His name was Sully.
You keep talking like the people on Pandora are indicative of the general populace. They were mostly hardened, paid mercenaries who naturally want to slash and burn. That’s what they are there for and what they do. The rest were corporate men driven by greed. The scientists were universally against the slaughter and several fought back. It’s not like the people on Pandora were some balanced cross section of the human race. Pretty much everyone acted according to how you’d expect them to, and assuming the rest of the human race is constituted anything like it is now you can be sure that wholesale slaughter isn’t going to be widely favored or allowed once the insular bubble of the RDA’s oversight was breached.
I don’t see how my assumptions about the general populace are less valid than yours. The impression I got from the corporate guy was that it would be embarrassing and such to simply slaughter the N’avi, but the pressure was significant and increasing and it was going to get done. I expect there’d be some controversy and hemming and hawing and such, but simple history tells me that the public’s attention quickly goes elsewhere and the politicians follow suit.
Sure, until the new season of the 22nd-century descendant of American Idol starts up. Heck, Pandora is six years away. It’s hard enough getting people to focus on events happening six timezones away.
We don’t know enough about this universe. The Na’vi may be the only alien species we’ve made contact with, in which case there’s no way the public is going to support wiping them out unless unobtainium is critical to the survival of the human race. We also don’t know if they have FTL communication - maybe they didn’t have time to communicate back with earth about the situation, and when the government finds out about what they did they’re going to be severely punished.
I think it’s way too huge an assumption to say “well, badly informed, non-democratic societies in our past, with totally different morality than ours, wasn’t too upset that we slaughtered the natives during colonial times!” when A) that’s not something we support now, and our society-wide aversion to slaughter is only trending upwards, and B) native peoples of some random content probably are worth a lot less in the public view than possibly the only other intelligent life we’ve made contact with. People want to play the “humans are evil!” card way too far on this one.
You do know that America could drop fuel-air bombs on Afghanistan and “win” the war tomorrow, right? We could bake every human in the country, but we don’t, because it’s politically untenable.
There is every reason to assume that it is political considerations that kept the company from having cruise missiles and small-pox blankets. They had defensive weaponry and mining explosives. I’m sure some will want to come back and reduce Pandora to a shiny parking lot, but some people wanted to do that to Iraq.
The humans will have rules and political pressures to act within some envelope. I assume the next films will be about how they attempt to stretch that envelope.
I don’t get a lot of the nitpicking, but I guess this boils down to the old “hard sci-fi vs soft sci-fi” game. Avatar is soft. We only get enough science and political structure to support the plot which i agree was rather trite and cliche’d. Most of the nits were sufficiently referenced in dialogue if you paid attention.
Pandora is being mined by a corporation not a government. It is assumed that they are being watched by someone back home, since the head weasel had plenty of second thoughts and waffling on many of his decisions. He was also obviously caught between the scientists and his military back-up. The military was there as security for the miners and the scientists. It is explained right at the beginning that Pandora is full of hostile wildlife and that the Na’vi are both occasionally hostile and “very hard to kill”. Security details are not often supplied with WMD. I’m flatly surprised that they were supplied with what they did have. They also had to make due with converting a transport into a bomber.
Not everyone was on board with the military solution. You had human defectors, the science wing basically quit, (they were obviously absent) and in several scenes where the humans are being briefed on the military solution the actors had a wide range of emotions from “hell yeah!” to “that’s horrible!”.
Unobtanium is a joke. Get over it. Arguing about it’s cost and economic influence in a human economy that has achieved interstellar travel already is a nonstarter.
The Na’vi are internally consistent once you assume the biology of Pandora. They aren’t noble savages at one with the earth because it’s the right thing to do. They are acting consistently with biological fact that they are able to interface with other lifeforms and (less concretely) the imprints of their dead, which seem to be stored somehow within Eywa. In addition they don’t always do the peaceful, wise or right thing. It is shown that they have a warrior culture, and are not afraid to get physical or kill when emotional.
Sully’s use of the Tu’rok posed more issues to me, but can be explained adequately when viewed from a cultural standpoint. It is mentioned that a few Na’vi have managed the feat in the past, and it is also obvious that tu’rok is viewed with fear, reverence, and practical respect. The na’vi avoid it at all costs as it eats them and their mounts. Logically, most na’vi would’nt even dream of attempting something so idiotic. Sully attempts it as he knows it’s his last gasp effort of re-immersing himself into the culture. He could have just as easily died. His success was not because he was superiour to the na’vi in any way, it was because he was needed to drive the story and be the hero. A Na’vi doing the same thing wouldn’t have been as believable.
Just saw it. “A” for scenery designs. “C” for plot (as in I’d would have liked to have seen one).
3D effects were good. Movie was too long and I started to nod at the beginning of the battle scene.
A round trip to Pandora from Earth takes 13 years (6 to get there, a year layover, and 6 to get back). A data transmission (assuming no FTL) would take 4.3 years to reach Earth. The ship we saw was only one of a small fleet forming a transport loop between the 2 systems. Which means that there’s at least one (probally a couple) of ships already in route to Pandora with no way to turn around (imagine the surprise the passengers will get when they’re woken up). Plus a ship or two launched after the events of the movie, but before any transmission reached Earth. They’ll get visitors alot sooner than 12 years.
You’re accounting for acceleration and deceleration time, thanks. 
The response of the Terrans depends of course upon the script, but I thought that given the similarity to Indians, and assuming nonobtanium is very important to Earth, say super conductivity and small energy bills, the response would be like the United States getting the news about Little Big Horn.
Who knows, certainly interesting to discuss.
I presume those en route would be notified by those just leaving.
The most glaring plot hole, for me, concerned Trudy, the helicopter pilot. Her mutiny, first of all disobeying the order to fire on the tree, and then breaking the others out of the brig, came out of nowhere. OK, she had ferried the Sully and the scientists into the jungle, so she had more contact with them than the other marines did, but we were shown nothing that would plausibly have motivated her outright mutiny.
Did she overhear Weaver asking the Colonel if he was going to blow up children?
:dubious: Gee, I wonder what might have plausibly motivated her outright mutiny, just as she was ordered to open fire on a village of fleeing natives? I’m pretty sure that would be a breaking point for lots of people.
She said it herself, “I didn’t sign up for this shit.” She was an employee, paid to ferry equipment. It wasn’t “mutiny,” it was an employee deciding that the company had gone too far and she wasn’t going to be a part of it anymore. What could they do? Fire her? Yeah, they probably did in a scene we weren’t shown. But they had no call to lock her up or anything.
Yeah, but it’s not like they can just turn the ship around in intersteller space so they’d still need to stay on course (maybe the duty crew wakes up the other shifts to consult with, but not the passengers). Pandorpedia does into greater detail about the starships (25 crew, divided into 3 20 month shifts of 5, plus 10 medical staff to assist with reving the 200 passengers). The 12 month layover is needed for maintenance and refuling with locally produced antimatter.
No, but my point is that they will know before they travel to the surface.