Except that it sounds silly and has – at least by my reading of various threads here and elsewhere – pulled a decent number of people out of the film for at least a few moments due to its ridiculous name. Making up a name wouldn’t require Wikipedia justification when people say to themselves “‘Unobtanium’? Really? WTF?” as both myself and my wife did.
I predict Bryan Ekers will be first in line for the sequel. 
Cute, but no… I’ll almost certainly open up an Avatar 2 spoiler thread first to help me decide whether or not to invest the time and money, so plenty of people will see it before me.
Whew! Nineteen pages later, and nobody has picked the particular nit that I came in here to nitpick.
First of all, saw it last Saturday in 3D. I thought the story was shopworn but serviceable. I thought the CGI was absolutely stunning and couldn’t take my eyes off it. The Na’vi and the avatars were completely believable to my eyes and did not trip my Uncanny Valley alarm. The 3D, however, didn’t overwhelm me OR underwhelm me… it just sorta whelmed me. In my opinion, Coraline showed much more stunning and innovative use of 3D imagery than Avatar did.
and now for the nitpick: Here we have humans whose consciousnesses are uploaded into artificial bodies that superficially resemble Na’vi-fied versions of themselves, which means that their blue selves are a good 40 percent taller and correspondingly bigger than their pinkish-tan selves. Lung capacity, throat size, head size – and vocal cord length – all a LOT bigger.
So why do their voices sound exactly the same? It seems to me that their voices might have a similar timbre, but they really ought to be pitch-shifted down an octave or more. It bothered me.
There’s no inherent reason that vocal chords must be inherently related to body size. Plus that’s an area where they could’ve done some genetic engineering.
Sadly, it’s a “mistake” Hollywood has been making for decades. I remember reading something back in the '80s, written by a zoologist or something, describing watching the original King Kong. He’d never seen the movie, and he was curious to hear how the small speaker in his TV would handle the low-pitched sounds a gorilla that size would produce. He was disappointed to discover Kong made the same high-pitched shrieks typical of a normal-sized gorilla.
Likewise, Japanese monster movies like Godzilla. I watched a comedian do a bit on the subject that went something like this:
“Did you ever wonder where they got that sound Godzilla makes? Did the Japanese movie people come over here and say, ‘We’re making big monster movie! We need big monster sound!’ ‘Oh, like this? deep-throaty-rumbling-growl’ ‘No no no, it’s a big monster! Big!’ ‘Okay … deeper-throatier-morerumbly-growl’ ‘No! Big monster! BIG!’ ’ EEeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!’ ‘Ah! Run! It’s Godzilla!’”
Same here. I was amused throughout the movie that the 3D didn’t really work for me in most outdoor scenes. Oh sure, it was somewhat noticeable and it probably enhanced the picture in the way well-done makeup enhances a face without being obvious, but the only place it really popped and was interesting was in the tech areas with the holographic displays. I couldn’t stop staring at them, it was just beautifully done.
I didn’t really get that Sully was a douchebag, other than his almost selfish desire to always be having fun as a Na’vi, to the point where he totally forgets about the three-month deadline in order to have some nookie. But even that is somewhat justifiable; as a Marine without the use of his legs, and with the recent loss of his twin brother, he’s got a bit of an identity crisis. The Avatar program gives him the chance to be someone else, who incidentally has some really awesome legs. It’s really not a wonder that he’d throw himself fully into it, and be willing to say whatever he needs to to the right people to ensure he can stay in the program as long and as often as possible.
I do think that they didn’t get the scaling quite right. A body with longer legs should take a longer time per stride than a human, for instance (though each stride covers an even larger distance, so the net effect is still greater speed than a human). And this effect should have been even more extreme due to Pandora’s lower gravity. All of the scenes of Na’vi (or avatars) moving around should have looked like they were in slow motion.
Then again, this would probably have looked wrong to everyone in the audience except physics nerds, so maybe it’s best they didn’t, from a cinematic standpoint.
I can’t offhand recall where I read it (probably Asimov’s The Measure of the Universe), but I remember an author who pointed out that a squirrel looks a lot faster than an elephant, but an elephant can easily outrun a squirrel.
I suppose if a well-trained human and a well-trained Na’vi got into direct one-on-one combat, what should happen is the human would be moving much faster and should be able to easily dodge the Na’vi’s attacks, which to the human would look long and slow and somewhat clumsy. Simple physics says I can swing a knife much more quickly if my arm is three feet long than if it’s five feet long.
The human might not be able to inflict any serious damage, unless he goes for known vulnerable spots like eyes or whatever a Na’vi has for Achilles tendons and whatnot, and if the Na’vi gets a firm grip on the human, it’s all over, but it kinda puts me in mind of descriptions of hummingbirds as “pugnacious.” It’s small and you wouldn’t think it’s a threat, but it’s moving so damn fast and aggressively, it makes you nervous anyway. Also, that scene in Star Trek III where a brig guard calls Sulu “tiny”, and gets his ass kicked.
But like spaceships that make noise, the science loses out to the fiction.
I could not care less that the Na’vi did not sound like they had Dorothy Szbornak’s vocal cords, but for some reason that made me wonder…
Anybody remember if they used a Wilhelm scream? Or one of those bird sounds – hawk screech, jungle birds – that seem to get recycled in far too many movies?
Well, Bryan, I’ll forgive Cameron everything if we find out in the sequels that all the organisms with USB ports are a product of an intelligent design process.
I wouldn’t worry to much about parts of the setting that aren’t well explored. I mean, think about how Cameron’s various sequels advanced their settings. Terminator followed by T2, Alien (By Ridley Scott) followed by Aliens.
As for the Humans coming back and trying to exterminate the Na’vi, well, they could try that. But what would be the point? Who says the cheapest way to get unobtanium is to massacre the Na’vi? OmniMegaCorp doesn’t want to exterminate the Na’vi, they want to mine unobtanium.
Maybe A2 will just be a rehash of Avatar, with Jakesully kicking the ass of a yet another faceless troop of of even nastier mercenaries. But probably not.
He does progress throughout the movie and, I assume, will have assimilated quite well in Avatar 2. However, the scene with the ikran does show that by that point he hasn’t committed to the way the Na’vi thinks although he claims to. He wants to think that he is one of them, but he still treats the ikran as possession. And he was quite established in the Na’vi community by then, by the time Grace had even told him to *listen *to what the Navi has to say, something he didn’t seem to care a lot about. He just wanted to learn the cool forest tricks.
It even carries over to his catching of the big red dragon. He catches it to manipulate the Na’vi people, so he is in fact using their own mythology against them - or with them, in the long run, but fact remains that even in the end he is still an outsider.
Neytiri explained that five times before in their history, someone has ridden the Last Shadow to unite the tribes in a time of trouble.
Jake did exactly what those other five Na’vi did, and for the same reason.
Well, exactly, we don’t know how unobtainable unobtanium actually is. An arbitrary dollar-amount was slapped on it to give the audience some clue about its MacGuffiny value, and it’s clearly worth interstellar travel. That a bunch of bow-and-arrow wielding NBA prospects are in the way strikes me as a fairly trivial obstruction by comparison.
So I figure the only thing stopping the humans from exterminating the Na’vi will be other humans who stand in opposition, and if the stakes are high enough, perhaps not even that. Heck, I can imagine teams of latter-day claim-jumpers who travel privately to Pandora to grab all the unobtanium they can, even if it means engaging in intensive localized slaughter. Cameron can’t really have it both ways (well, of course he can, in a work of pure fiction, but I digress) - the mineral is impossibly valuable and worth killing for, or it isn’t. And if it is worth killing for, then something other than human reluctance is going to have to stand in opposition, which is why I’d like to see Eywa unleashed. Avatar hinted at this, but a sequel could really delve into it.
Trouble is, with every million Avatar makes, I think the pressure to rehash and not mess with success becomes greater.
At the risk of revealing what a Cameron fanboy I am, I’d say that it would take one ballsy studio executive to tell Cameron how to change the script to make it more commercially successful. 
Well, if Cameron takes the George Lucas route and sets up his own special-effects house, then I’m sure he can crank out whatever vanity projects he likes while servicing the other studios on their movies. I don’t know what his personal take from Avatar is, though, or how much (if any) of the technology used in its creation is under his control.
It’s hard to be the 900th person to weigh in on a movie like this. The visuals were amazing, the story was predictable, the imagination that went into designing Pandora was incredible, the moral was blunderingly obvious.
So yeah. Two comparisons I can’t help making, partly because I wonder how many people they will offend:
- Years from now, will people talk about the first views of Pandora the way older people talk about the first color scene in the Wizard of Oz? Maybe, but I think probably not.
- How does Pandora stack up against Middle Earth and, say, Hogwarts? Fairly well, I think. The details are thorough, so you can immerse yourself in an engrossing world and not focus too much on the story or writing, which aren’t that great.
I think Avatar is going to be this generation’s Star Wars. So I think both of your comparisons are pretty apt, really. (Star Wars also had an overly familiar story and rather lackluster writing.)
Vocal cords are only part of the equation - why aren’t their voices louder than humans’ voices? Why can’t they keep those faux-Injun war whoops going nearly twice as long with lungs the size of shopping bags?
To put it another way, why do the Na’vi have such comparatively high-pitched voices for their size? Is there a lot of helium in the atmosphere? And if so, why don’t the humans sound all squeaky when their masks get compromised?
I’m not sure if this is a whoosh, but the Na’vi are high-pitched in relation to their size so that they will be more like humans and easier for the viewer to relate to. Alien enough to be distinct and interesting, human enough to pass as “one of us”.