One reason why, despite all the hate it gets, I really like the Aeon Flux movie, was its embracing of some small sense of style. Ditto the Dune miniseries, ridiculous hats and all.
You likely know it already, but not everyone might - the Internet Movie Firearms Database is a handy resource for this sort of thing.
And yes, the future nowadays is all bullpup, all the time 
The similarly horrible Ultraviolet with Milla Jovovich also had some interesting technologies. Including gravity manipulation and like Tardis-like spaces that were bigger on the inside.
Confession: I’m the nerd you don’t want to sit near in a movie theater, because I will grouse about the violations of physics or practicality of a Cool Future Thing.
Take Star Wars’ hovercrafts. Nifty-looking, yes, but also a horrible multi-crash accident waiting to happen. How the hell are you supposed to stop that thing? And if you are going to have flying cars, then why is aerial future traffic visually identical to modern-day gridlock? (Futurama gets a pass because it’s obviously making fun of all of that.)
On the other hand, I’m also cognizant that sometimes you don’t need to explain everything. When the whole midichlorians thing came out I cried bullshit long and loud right beside the hardcore fans. The Force didn’t need to have a rational origin! It just exists! And maybe I was reading too much into it, but the True Force isn’t something you can tap into willy nilly–sure the Jedi were able to manipulate it, but Yoda definitely seemed to be more of the philosophy of “Go With the Flow”, because trying to arrange one of the fundamental forces of the universe to do your own personal bidding is Dark Side stuff, son!
Grin! When I saw The Hobbit, my first reaction was, “Doesn’t anybody around here believe in safety railings?” Star Wars, too, was terribly deficient in the most basic safety equipment!
To expand on what drewtwo99 said, there is tons of fantastic stuff in Avatar which is completely unexplainable by our current science. Although it’s mostly on the Na’vi side. Everything from the planet-wide gestalt between animals, vegetation and the Na’vi to the direct mental contact through a shared set of neural bundles that it seems all the lifeforms on the planet have. It’s like waking up tomorrow and being able to wire together your brain with that of a chicken and both of you understand each other’s thoughts, even without a shared language and vast differences in sensory organs. The kinds of evolutionary differences which would create such a world are simply mind-boggling.
Beyond that there’s the oracular aspects(the glowing flower seed that showed Neytiri she should trust Jake, and her mother’s vision of him in the clan), the planet girdling consciousness Eywa, the transferrence of consciousness from Jake to his Avatar at the end. Overall there are tons of things modern science can’t explain about the Avatar world.
Enjoy,
Steven
That’s because they aren’t evolutionary. The Na’vi, and the creatures they interact with, were intelligently designed. And I’m pretty sure that the specific purpose for which the Na’vi were designed was to provide a way for Eywa to communicate with humans.
dotchan, I presume that the brakes on a Star Wars hovercar are based on the same technology (whatever it is) that lets it hover in the first place. If you can exert a force straight down sufficient to support the car, then you can also exert a force in a slightly different direction to stop it.
I should point out that Eywa isn’t a supernatural being; she’s an intelligence inhabiting the planet-wide neural network formed by Pandora’s trees. That’s what Grace tried to tell the RDA administrator, who was basically the same character as the Evil Paul Reiser™ from Aliens, just played by a different actor. Sigourney Weaver, of all people, should have known this. 
I agree, though, that Eywa intelligently designed the animal life on Pandora, including the Na’vi.
I actually liked the fantastic elements of **Avatar **- they reminded me of a lot of 1970’s science fiction. In fact, the whole movie could easily have been a Roger Zelazny novella.
Patiently.
Kal’s heat vision. In the Silver Age, non-living Kryptonian matter was not quite as durable as living.
Well said. I’ve felt the same thing for a while now. It gets me around all sorts of niggling issues with “realism”.
It is an obvious joke, but I think most people dislike it because it looks like lazy writing.
It doesn’t help that the execrable movie The Core did the same joke just a few years earlier. At least they had the benefit of knowing they were a cheesy tongue-in-cheek scifi movie.
Despite my lukewarm opinion of Avatar (I liked it more than I disliked it) I’m actually really interested to see where Cameron takes the story with the next two sequels.
I sincerly hope its a but more nuanced than the original, which I thought could have been improved by highlighting that humanity really needed the Unobtanium and even better that its a clean non-polluting energy source which would help reverse the environmental degradation of Earth.
On the Na’vi, while all other higher wildlife on Pandora seem to have six limbs the Na’vi have only four, perhaps suggesting that they aren’t native to Pandora and are what remains of the last interstellar species that tried to invade.