There was clearly a lot of shorthand used in the movie. I guess Cameron trusted people to be able to figure things out. Every part of the movie that seemed to be an aside was actually setting up a future plot point–it’s no surprise that the attempt to upload Grace’s consciousness was supposed to support Jake’s upload, the minute Neyteri said her ancestor rode a big dragon you knew Jake was gonna tame a dragon, the minute you see the sacred tree you know the bad guys are gonna bulldoze the tree, and so on. I kind of like the fact that these points weren’t belabored. “Oh, now the Na’vi hate me? Guess I’ll fulfill this mystic quest and show up on a dragon. That’ll shut em up.” Done and done.
And the Na’vi hometree is on top of the unobtainium, because of course it is. There’s a remote base for the avatar pilots because they need it for later when they mutiny. And so on.
Unobtainium is the sort of joke name that I find perfectly plausible. And all the creatures that have USB ports? That ain’t natural. Which means those creatures were engineered to have USB ports. Just like the Na’vi. So the current Na’vi species isn’t the original alien species, but could be their modified descendents, or some sort of avatars, or just another cool species that Eywha designed. Just because there isn’t any evidence of intelligent design on Earth doesn’t mean there wasn’t any on Pandora, and the USB ports are clear evidence of intelligent design.
As for the Human/Na’vi DNA fusion, well, I guess that proves panspermia in the Avatar universe. Earth life and Pandora life both use DNA because they evolved from a common prokaryotic ancestor. Prokaryotic life on Earth evolved very quickly after earth was formed, one possible explanation is that Earth life arrived from elsewhere.
The DNA fusion could also be the result of a more advanced biotechnology than ours (which, obviously, they had). Even if Pandoran life uses a different genetic code, so long as they still use the same set of amino acids it’s plausible that the human geneticists who made the avatars translated the codes. That is to say, “Sully’s DNA has AAG here, and that codes for lysine, but in the Pandoran code, lysine is CGA, so we’ll splice in a CGA here”.
Only finally was able to go see Avatar today, so I’m going to have to go back through all the posts in this thread later. My 2¢:
The special effects were perfect. Beautiful but not so distracting that they pulled you out of the immersion.
Plot was meh-ok. Sentimentally touching in places.
Nitpicks: I’d feared the native victory would be Ewoks-ridiculous but it wasn’t. The natives took heavy casualties and they probably would have lost if all the Pandoran animal life hadn’t stepped in. I still wonder though that they went from routing the expeditionary force to completely occupying the (presumably) heavily fortifed base. And one would presume that the humans had major assets in orbit to call upon.
Hey, don’t be dissin’ the 'Woks. They actually showed some tactical cleverness, with the giant logs and stuff, so they must’ve been hip to mechanical advantage and such to set those traps.
Speaking of the animal life and their successes, I figure the attack helicopters in the film are some kind of cross between an Apache and an Osprey, so even if it’s the mass of the former, that makes it eight tons or so. Maybe half that, if it’s made of some futuristicky ultralight ceramic or carbon-60 or something. Meantime, the largest flying creature to have ever lived on Earth is a pterosaur, estimated at about 127kg. Assume Pandora’s red dragon is generously ten times that amount.
So, a 1.2 ton critter grabs a 4-ton helicopter and casually tosses it around. I sense a physics problem here.
But that’s not what happened. The 1.2 ton critter latched on and caused the helicopter to spiral out of control and then when it had gathered enough momentum it released it.
That is part of what made it so sad for me. Even if the love story aspect had a sort of happy conclusion, there was still so much death and destruction that would be impossible to recover from, and nothing was ever shown being done or spoken about to keep it from happening again. If it were real life, the company wanting the unobtainium would just come back with more forces, more fire power, more…everything…and overpower what was left of Pandora in the end.
If it had been a more decisive victory where there were few casualties and the bows and arrows had been enough to defeat military weaponry, then it would have been unrealistic but much more satisfying as a “happy ending”. It would not have necessarily made a better movie but it would have probably kept it on my “to-buy when the DVD is released” list.
The ship that brought Jake and his avatar was a transport. There was no reason for it to have any capability to inflict damage on the ground from orbit.
I originally though it was a plot hole that, since the shuttle was destroyed in the final assault, there was no way to send the human prisoners back up to the transport for return to Earth. However, I suppose there could have been one shuttle at the transport and one as the base. It would be too risky not to have a backup.
Overall, the movie was a triumph. But obviously it didn’t have a good balance of plot, characters and visuals. The special effects were off-the-charts great and everything else was just … serviceable.
I don’t mind the thin plot. As others note, “Star Wars” had a thin, simple plot, too. The more serious problem is the lack of fun, quotable moments. Think of Han Solo shooting Greedo and how that moment was surprising and told you so much about Solo’s character. Think of lines like, “I don’t know, kid. I can imagine quite a lot.” Or the scene with Vader force-choking an underling.
This was meant to be a more serious, mature movie than “Star Wars,” I’ll grant you. But it still needed more memorable moments and lines to humanize the oversized spectacle.
Maybe instead of “Star Wars,” the comparison should be to “Aliens” – “nuke it from orbit” and “Get away from her, you bitch!” and Ripley going berserk with a machine gun. One fun moment after another.
I think it’s too early to say that just yet. Movies have to sink into the pop culture consciousness for at least a year or three before they start to become quotable. Even Aliens didn’t have that level of pop cultural impact until after it was out on VHS.
I can see “I didn’t sign up for this shit” becoming a memorable line, though.
It’s too “generic”, though. People say that all the time in relation to things at their work that they didn’t necessarily agree to when they started. I agree that it’s definitely not a “Quotable” movie, though.
‘Unobtanium’ - whatever it was supposed to be, the earnest use of that word - as opposed to tongue in cheek in The Core (can’t believe I said something positive about The Core) jerked me right out of the movie.
The 3D actually worked well for me, which I wasn’t completely expecting - my eyesight doesn’t usually permit it. I thought it was generally well done and believable, only using pokes in the eye when it was natural to do it.
The fauna and especially the fauna wasn’t quite alien enough for me - there was bamboo; there were palms - there were aroids and even something that resembled a pineapple. Probably a bit anal of me to find this a tiny bit annoying, but I kinda did.
In the big battle scenes, the natives didn’t think of dropping rocks into the rotors of the aircraft - that seemed like it should be obvious to me.
Apart from that, I found it a generally quite enjoyable movie - I enjoyed it, but cannot rave about it.
It was also tongue in cheek in Avatar. The way you can tell is that it’s not possible to use the term unobtainium in a not tongue in cheek way. Hopefully this aids your movie-going experience in the future.
The first time it was used in the film, I thought it was tongue in cheek. But it wasn’t used just once and it appeared in earnest - I don’t accept your explanation, sorry.
The term unobtainium is a joke. It means, “We’re not going to waste time with some hokey explanation for our magical metal.”, it’s an inside joke so that people who know simply get it and move on.
