Here’s a question: Is there any possible way that Avatar could have a happy* ending? I mean, at the end of the movie, a planet of stone age level mystical blue giants barely fended off a small fleet meant only to guard a mining operation. And this took the combined effort of something like half the planet’s combined military. The only humans who actually LIKED the natives stayed on the planet; all the guys who saw Na’avi as nothing more than evil savages who killed most of their friends and drove them out of business went back to Earth. And once they go back to Earth, what will they do? They’ll go to their local government representative, say “Yes, Pandora has all the resources we could possibly need, and the Na’avi were only a problem because we didn’t have enough fire power”. And then Earth will declare war on Pandora, send a couple of orbit-level bombers, probably loaded with nuclear weapons simply because they weigh less than conventional explosives, and carpet bomb the planet. After all, the atmosphere was already poisonous; what’s a bit of radiation once you overcome that challenge? So Earth turns Pandora into a giant sheet of glass, mines all the minerals it needs, and leaves while happily whistling.
Is there any possible plausible scenario where this DOESN’T happen? Am I missing a big reason why humans aren’t going to come back in a week? Or can the dragons fly into orbit and take out spaceships too?
*Happy being defined as "The Good Guys win. Those of us who always cheer for the villain are out of luck.
IIRC, the movie mentioned the public sentiment and the political situation on Earth was such that the gov’t wouldn’t allow Evil-Corp to go too far or be too blatant in mistreating the Navi, which is why the humans just didn’t carpet bomb them to start with. Presumably the antagonists of any sequels will find they’re under similar restraints.
My argument is, would the survivors not tell the populace, “Hey, the Navi are vicious bastards! Look, they just massacred our entire protective fleet and forced us to evict Pandora! After all we did for them…” and if they did, would the populace not say, “What? How DARE they?! Kill them all! Bring out the nukes!”
Oh, I was cheering for the humans all along. I get that they’re supposed to be the bad guys, but screw the aliens! Go Earth! Ruining the ecosystem doesn’t count if it’s someone ELSE’S ecosystem, right?
I suspect the population would be sceptical of the claims of an organization that wants to profit from a planets claims about that planets inhabitants. And the Navi can’t be portrayed as being that brutal, since they let the rest of the human population evacuate instead of eating them. And the humans left on Pandora might have a way of communicating with Earth, I don’t think we know.
Plus even if the population bought Evil-Corp’s story, its still a bit of a stretch that they’d sanction xenocide over what was a relatively minor skirmish.
Why don’t we nuke everyone in Afghanistan? We could leave tomorrow and kill every living person within the borders.
Oh, right, we don’t have the political will or moral indifference.
But I’m sure in the future, we’d be willing to destroy the only other sentient race in we know of in the universe because they stopped us from destroying their holy sites with the minimum force necessary to repel us.
Yes. The fact that I’m asking why the brutal, moral-less corporation (who is portrayed as brutal and moral-less) who is already willing to wipe out the Navi won’t simply come back with enough force to do so is secretly because that’s how I feel about Afghanistan. You have perfectly gleaned my true intentions.
Another optional happy ending, with human minds absorbed into the world-mind collective that the sentient trees of Pandora represent, they quickly evolve into an AI that understands technology on a level humans can’t begin to approach and when the human fleet of planetbusters arrives in the Pandoran system they are given the equivalent of “go away and play somewhere else, children, adults live here.”
I have sketched out (in my own head) a ‘happy’ end to the Avatar saga, based on the fact that the spacecraft used in the film is the same one Charles Pellegrino devised for his novel ‘Killing Star’
I assume (in my sketch) they are both in the same universe; the Earth is depopulated by the Killing Star aliens, who dismally fail to make intelligent contact with humans; they follow the last Valkyrie to Pandora, and instead of killing the blue Pandorans manage to make (telepathic) contact and they all live happily ever after (after killing the last humans).
I’m pretty sure your misreading Lobhan. He’s just using Afganistan as an example, the point is that even in the real world, just because the US can technologically use its military to wipe people out and take their stuff, its not really politically possible, even in countries that the US population probably doesn’t feel much affinity for.
I actually liked that bit of the first movie. Usually sci-fi movies take a certain amount of suspension of disbelief, because even though we have ICBMs and nukes in todays world, sci-fi humans end up fighting with the equivalent of WWII weaponry for dramatic reasons. Avatar at least bothered to give a plausible explanation for this.
Just like our current-day brutal and amoral corporations, they know full well that they can get away with whatever they want only as long as they keep it enough on the down-low that they don’t get the attention of the fickle public looking for the next item of righteous outrage. A planetary genocide is kinda hard to spin positively, and once it becomes a trend on the future-Facebook, it becomes a threat to something that the brutal and amoral corporation actually respects: its bottom line.
It’s not really any different from McDonald’s just coincidentally becoming concerned about beef quality within weeks of “pink slime” becoming a household name, or Apple’s change of heart regarding the working conditions in Chinese factories that just so happened to take place after major investigative journalism pieces into same. Exterminating a planet isn’t something you can change your policy on after the fact, so it makes sense to think about the possible results from a PR perspective before doing it rather than after.
Or for that matter, the freedom and possibly the survival of its CEOs. If you start using mass destruction weapons to lay waste to planets, that’s the sort of thing that can result in a government sending soldiers or missiles instead of lawyers to deal with you. For an analogy, what would be the reaction if a real-life multinational corporation nuked a country?
Why didn’t they do the reverse mind-body switcheroo…so that the N’avi could understand what it was like to be human? Then THEY could get excited about getting rich, picking up trophy wives, and playing putt-golf in your office.Basically, the humans were the villains-because they wanted the unobtanium-once the N’avi understood that, they could move the sacred tree so that the humans could get the stuff and then get lost.
It is a good parallel with Afghanistan-nobody in the USA wants to go there-we’re there because a bunch of fools in Washington THINK we should be there.
But there are plenty of practical reasons not to nuke Afghanistan or Iran that have nothing to do with the morality of the issue. Destabilizing the region, angering other world powers like Russia and China, pissing off our trade partners, increased terrorism and attacks against America etc. Even if you think no foreigner has any right to life, you’d hesitate to nuke their country out of your own self interest.
But no such constraints exist for Pandora. They can’t do anything back to us, there’s no region to destabilize, no other interstellar powers exist. The ONLY reason not to nuke Pandora is morality.
So the question is - what’s the consequence of no longer having access to unobtanium? Is it valuable because the very rich make really pretty jewelry out of it? Is it valuable because cell phones get 5 bars everywhere on Earth? Or is it valuable as an energy source, and no longer having it means untold wars and suffering on Earth? If it’s the last, I’d say the blue giants have about 6 1/2 years before they get wiped out.
