Yes, and the drama of that is undercut by it being way too little, too late. There’s no indication Sully even considers it an option. He makes no lamentations about his handicap whenever he has to unplug from his idealized Na’vi body, I don’t recall any moments where he comes out of a long avatar session and tries to step out of the interface tube, thinking that his legs would work. When the female Na’vi finally meets Sully’s crippled human form, she shows instant love and acceptance, without even a hint, one might expect, of revulsion at his physical limitations despite the lengthy exposition he (and the audience) gets about Na’vi culture and how unforgiving it is of physical limitations, i.e. climb the mountain to get your glider and if you go splat, you’ve shown yourself unworthy.
Well, I’d say telegraphed rather than lay the seeds, but I’m technologically-minded.
Saw it again yesterday, and found it just as engrossing the second time. I’m seeing yet another visit to the movie theater in my future… I found myself really enjoying the extra details that were thrown in. When he comes out of cryo, his locker says “Sully T” instead of “Sully J” - they didn’t have time to change it once his brother died.
Bryan Ekers - Sully definitely feels his handicap after unplugging. I distinctly recall a scene where he unplugs and sits looking at his legs before reluctantly swinging them out. Even his first time in the avatar is all about regaining what he lost. He takes off running because, for the first time in years, he can. He relishes the feel of the dirt between his toes.
Yes, and I commented earlier that I liked that scene. My point is that by the time the Colonel makes the offer (and it’s moot anyway, isn’t it? - wasn’t Sully’s primary motivation in accepting the job in the first place to get his legs back?) Sully had already gone over to the other side and there wasn’t even a hint of ambiguity in his response - he was offended, and the audience was supposed to be offended on his behalf.
Then for some reason he turns into a moron and forgets to warn the Na’vi about what’s coming.
Actually my reading is that Sully’s initial reaction to the offer is ambiguous rather than an outright rejection. But certainly it does seem to be made in good faith by the colonel who seems to think he is genuinely doing Sully a favor. It’s a good example of how Sully’s perspective as a handicapped person is different which is my point.
And after all they have been through, Neytiri is hardly going to reject Sully because of his handicap. In any case my point was that the handicap distanced him from the other soldiers, not the Na’vi. The film makes that perfectly clear in the early scene where the two soldiers comment on him.
The Na’vi essentially never even see his handicapped form. Neytiri picks him up and weeps with tears of love like she’d just adopted the cutest puppy in the world, and then smash cut to Mount Seleya for the mind-transfer.
It’s possible I missed it, but does Sully ever describe his handicap to Neytiri?
Meh. Sully rolling around is more unusual than isolating. In a world where spinal injuries can be repaired, would paraplegia be more unusual than seeing a guy limping around on crutches with his leg in a cast? There don’t seem to be any actual consequences to being paraplegic - just that for some unexplained reason, fixing it is pricey.
I know you won’t, but you really need to see the movie again. You keep stating things as if they were fact when they’re not facts. I did that too, but at least I saw the movie again, and admitted that I was wrong. Sully had not “gone over to the other side” when Scarhead offered him his legs back. He hadn’t even met the Na’vi at that point.
liirogue is right, “Sully definitely feels his handicap after unplugging.” It’s one of the many subtle moments that people who are bitching about the movie being so simplistic missed because they weren’t looking. You would prefer a “OH WOE IS ME!” dialogue scene that would play into your misconceptions about the movie?
Sully was dying when Neytiri met his human form, she had to save his life. There was hardly time to show any “revulsion” even if she had been inclined to do that, which I’m sure she wasn’t. The avatar Sully and Neytiri spent months together. Don’t you think that at some point, at least after she started accepting him, that they would have talked and he would have told her about his human form? I know, they didn’t have the scene so it didn’t happen. But B comes after A and before C, and a lot of stuff wasn’t shown.
I would imagine the fact that his paraplegia could be fixed if he had the resources would be even more demoralizing. In any case the movie makes clear it affects him deeply in a number of scenes. The scene liirogue mentions where he sits and looks at his legs after unplugging. The scene where he tells Grace he is tired of being told what he can’t do.
Really, I was under the impression the legs offer came much later in the film. Scarhead and Sully’s initial conversation wasn’t specifically about legs, as I recall, just the Colonel’s effort to appeal to Sully’s marine-loyalty to report tacitcally significant Na’va characteristics to him personally.
I remain prepared to be corrected. Possibly someone has linked to an online copy of the script and I missed it.
They’re not misconceptions until proven so. Sure, he feels his handicap - and as pretty much the same nuisance he felt at the start of the movie. Since by all indications, it’s only a temporary condition anyway, how is Scarhead’s offer supposed to be compelling when Sully getting his legs fixed was the plan all along?
In a movie that length, sure there was.
Exactly - a lot of stuff wasn’t shown (and a fair amount of contradictory stuff was) and I’m disinclined to give such a weakly-written story the benefit of fanwankery.
Possibly my opinion will change in a year or two when the movie starts appearing on cable. On a small-screen TV, the wonder of the spectacle of the visual of the magic of the amazement of the depth of the mystery of the Pandoran landscape will be more muted, allowing a distraction-free deconstruction of the plot.
I took that as a “gung-ho marine” cliché rather than a “overcome adversity” cliché, myself. The fact that his paraplegia is not a permanent condition destroys it as a plot point, I figure. Cameron shoulda just left him paralyzed for life.
As an afterthought, I retract my acknowledgement of correction. There are least some doctors that aren’t telling what he can’t do. These would be the doctors who told him he could walk again, and working up enough scratch to get the (apparently routine) procedure done is why Sully’s on Pandora in the first place.
Anyway, the military man who distrusts doctors is a cliché, too. You can see loads of it in a 1941 film titled Dive Bomber in which flight surgeons are grounding pilots for (the pilots believe) specious and arbitrary reasons. This is also referenced, in reality, in the book The Right Stuff, in which test pilots and proto-astronauts see going to the flight surgeon as a no-win situation.
That’s quite an imagination you’ve got there. Nothing of what you said above is in the film. It’s just as likely Sully is on Pandora due to the massive investment The Corporation has in his brother. All of this is speculation, though.
Actually, no, that wasn’t his primary motivation to take the job. First, he ended up on Pandora completely by accident - he’d recently been wounded and essentially lost his job and then his brother is killed. He took the flight because nothing else was coming up in his life. Second, he accepted the Colonel’s mission before anything was mentioned about fixing his legs. He’s just arrived on Pandora and his new boss, Grace, is quite emphatic that she doesn’t want him there and certainly doesn’t need him. He’s seen that song and dance before - the military he belonged to on Earth. Then an authority figure that he can identify with comes along and says “Yes, you can be useful, and here’s how.” Sully is more than happy to follow a familiar, secure boss. And then that boss tosses out a carrot in the form of getting his legs fixed.
Wasn’t there something in the expository narrative as Sully was getting unfrozen (or thereabouts) that mentioned his legs and how much fixing them would cost?
Early in the movie, before he’s even met the Na’vi, the Colonel dangles the carrot that he might get his legs back. Later on, after he’s already embraced the natives (in more than one sense), the Colonel gives him the good news that the corporation has approved the cost, and he will get his legs back.