Avatar review thread

[Broomstick]

Cowboys vs. Indians... er, RDA vs. Na'vi

Remember that the Earth-Pandora relationship is NOT the quick-transport relationship experienced by even the remotest spots on Earth in the present day. This is much more analogous to the long Atlantic passage between Europe and the Americas in the 1600's.

There ARE historical instances of native people with neolithic tech threatening or even massacring more technologically advanced invaders. Certain conditions must apply:

1) The natives have to be healthy (check - presumably, the Na'vi are not susceptible to human diseases and vice versa due to differences in biochemistry)

2) The tech-advanced invaders must have small numbers (check)

3) The tech-advanced invaders must have long supply lines (check - even more so on Pandora than on Earth, not just because the voyage is measured in years, but because they can't exist in the alien environment without significant imports)

So... on Pandora you have Humans with impressive fire power and tech, but sharply limited numbers and multi-year supply chains. They can NOT be resupplied quickly either with personnel or material. The natives VASTLY outnumber them. Eventually, the invaders will run out of bullets Therefore, it is not impossible for the Na'vi to pose a credible threat. True, when they're firing arrows from the ground at Quaritch it IS ridiculous, but the Na'vi aren't stupid and are capable of learning new tactics.

All of which leaves the question - what happens when the next ship arrives, presumably without knowing what the hell has happened on the ground? (No FTL communications, remember?) Clearly, at this point the Na'vi are in control. They will have only a few years, if that, in which to figure out what the hell to do. I see several possibilities.

A) It will take time, but the Humans eventually retaliate and we get natives on reservations

B) The next ship arrives and re-starts a largely abandoned operation, basically re-setting the stage for ongoing conflict.

C) Jake and the remaining scientists/personnel convince the Na'vi they need to prepare and the Na'vi basically take over the mining operation, so when the next batch of Humans arrive it's the Na'vi they have to deal with. Giving the overwhelming natural advantages the Na'vi have for working in the Pandoran environment this might wind up the happiest ending for everyone. RDA has to send a hell of a lot of fewer people, but maintain their monopoly supply on unobtanium. Basically, the Hudson Bay/Dutch East India corporation model, but with natives on one end supplying the goods. As long as the Humans can't get faster/more efficient spaceships this could last a long time.

Assuming either B or C I would expect at some point some Na'vi make the trip to Earth, particularly if the Na'vi can tolerate Earth environments with no life support. Even if they do need life support this is still possible.

[JointStrikeFighter]

The fluff mentions that they do have low bandwidth FTL comms.

[Broomstick]

"Fluff"?

I'm going by what's in the movie, which is what the vast majority of people are going to know about. The extra-film stuff is "cheating".

[Oskuro]

Is there mention of how fast the interplanetary ships are, or how far out Pandora is? How long for a regular transmission to fly between Pandora and Earth?

[neoolong]

It took them 5 years to get there, and apparently Pandora is in Alpha Centauri, so they can go almost the speed of light.

[SylasGaunt]

Is there mention of how fast the interplanetary ships are, or how far out Pandora is? How long for a regular transmission to fly between Pandora and Earth?

Stated cruising velocity for the ISV venture star and her sister ships is .7c.

[PeZook]

It took them 5 years to get there, and apparently Pandora is in Alpha Centauri, so they can go almost the speed of light.

No, they can't. It took them 5 years of onboard time to get there.

[Knife]

All of which leaves the question - what happens when the next ship arrives, presumably without knowing what the hell has happened on the ground? (No FTL communications, remember?) Clearly, at this point the Na'vi are in control. They will have only a few years, if that, in which to figure out what the hell to do. I see several possibilities.

We don't know a few things so guessing is just that at the moment. For one, we don't know if the ship was still on station in orbit or if it had departed back to the Sol system again. If it wasn't there, where did the humans go after being kicked off planet? Was there only one shuttle? The ship showed two coming into Pandora, but we don't know if both landed. They left in a shuttle, so was it shuttle number two, or did they wait until the next ship showed up and kick them all off? How often does a starship come into Pandora? Once a year, biannually?

Now, the next few ships after the battle should be easy to stop from landing, they should already have been underway and not have any thing heavy to challenge the natives with in terms of weapons. Jake should have around six years before a possible strong retaliation to prepare. According to the fluff, most of the stuff on planet is made on planet with a type of that rapid prototyping type stuff in polymer. In six years, he should have most of the Na'vi out fitted with those M-60 looking guns he was using, along with some semblance of built in defenses in what ever the tribe decides will be their new home/village.

Edit: I wanted to comment on the UAV bitch too,

Their helo's were heavily armed due to local critters attacking them, even the utility helo's. To use a UAV, you'd need to arm them and have them maneuverable enough to counter Banshee and super pterodactyl bird and not really be able to have them orbit for surveillance.

[Gil Hamilton]

No, they can't. It took them 5 years of onboard time to get there.

If their peak speed before turn around is 0.7c, then onboard time and Earth time wouldn't be THAT different. The tau value for that isn't particularly extreme.

[PeZook]

If their peak speed before turn around is 0.7c, then onboard time and Earth time wouldn't be THAT different. The tau value for that isn't particularly extreme.

At 0.7C the time dilation factor is about, what, 1.5? That's rather significant.

[Serafine666]

It's like Mike said in his Star Trek Insurrection review: if the stuff the natives are sitting on top of is incredibly vital and beneficial (according to the official literature I've seen, this would be a fair description of unobtanium), blasting them out of the way or just relocating them will be looked back upon as an unfortunate but necessary step taken into a new golden age.

Though I wouldn't really shed a tear if the humans/environmental rapists ended up getting stabbed in the face with a space spear.

But you are correct. Cremating the untermenschen or just relocating them to camps will be looked back upon as an unfortunate but necessary step taken into a new golden age with more lebensraum.

^__________^

Shroom, I fully realize that you hate the concept on principle but doncha think that equating someone with Hitler is a little much? In case you've never read the material I was referring to, Mike was discussing how it would seem morally valid to scoot aside 600 people if it was possible to cure incurable illnesses and extend human lifespans by multiple illness-free decades. As I said IF the stuff is incredibly vital and beneficial, then scooting the native folks over to the virtually-identical idyllic paradise 20 miles yonder isn't exactly an outrage. When you scale a tiny number against billions, it still isn't particularly outrageous although harming people when there is a gentler way is always tragic. But if unobtanium is not, in fact, miraculous... then my statement obviously doesn't apply, now does it?

[Nephtys]

So I saw the movie this morning in 3D and well. I thought it was really good! I was cringing as I expected hilariously bad, hamfisted trash, but what I got was well balanced storytelling, and absolutely gorgeous aesthetics and art design. The alien planet, despite conspicuously having ferns, had lots of interesting and exotic alien fauna and flora. Those little lemurs in the beginning hinted on evolutionary precursors of the Na'vi pretty heavily, and all that bioluminesence and low-gravity floating seeds and such were gorgeous. I especially enjoyed how things lit up as they were contacted in some way. The CG was really top notch, and the integration with human actors was good enough that I was for a time, wondering if that really was Segourney Weaver, or if they finally made a lifelike human.

Anyway, I knew it was Pocahantas, and expected it. Big deal, so that's the big picture story. So? It had other things. The Corporates were doing their job, the Colonel (who had scars) knew this planet was a deathtrap for humans (ordering no night flights, heavy perimeter security) and was vowing to do his job, and the scientists being in general, disinterested in this stuff. Oh, and being decent people for once in a movie. Hell, when the Hometree was burning down, even Corporate Manager Guy was moved by it, as well as everyone else in the control room.

So yeah, it was a solid movie, I thought. Anything that may have been taken as out of the blue was well, well foreshadowed. Even the stampede of the rhino-things, because it was mentioned that they were highly territorial, and running away triggers them. And the banshee flock? This was banshee turf, those magic floating mountains. And to be honest, the less explained, the better most of the time. Do you really want a movie that tries so hard to tell us that the Flux Conduits formed by Inverted Tachyon Matrixes cause Polarity Reversal to create Phase Levitation?

Also, on the side. What the hell are (some of) you people in this thread even talking about? Is this just a little contest of who can complain and bitch and moan about lack of orbital strikes and such? That's not the point of the movie. It had lots of hardware porn, and I love machines... but holy crap, chill. If anything, I was tickled by the fact that their spaceship was a Valkyrie Antimatter rocket, with very familiar designs of those conceptual future NASA space shuttles. The human base was designed intelligently, and the robots made sense given how utterly broken the terrain was on Pandora.

[Nephtys]

Edit: Also, according to the official site, their ship has a pretty detailed layout of it's mission profile, specifications. It gives the acceleration/duration of each leg of the trip, including braking maneuvers and such. Of note is the cargo payload of 350 tons, and that there's 12 freighters of this class, all of which go to Alpha Centauri (where Pandora is located).

The resource of Unobtanium apparently is useful for energy production for creating starships, and some planetside energy work, but is not the only resource or even majority used for Earth. But it is important for creating antimatter beam-core starships. Ship's crew is 25, and nominal cryo-capacity is 200, and it refuels it's reaction mass from those white shuttles strafing the gas giant that Pandora orbits.

[Shroom Man 777]

Shroom, I fully realize that you hate the concept on principle but doncha think that equating someone with Hitler is a little much? In case you've never read the material I was referring to, Mike was discussing how it would seem morally valid to scoot aside 600 people if it was possible to cure incurable illnesses and extend human lifespans by multiple illness-free decades. As I said IF the stuff is incredibly vital and beneficial, then scooting the native folks over to the virtually-identical idyllic paradise 20 miles yonder isn't exactly an outrage. When you scale a tiny number against billions, it still isn't particularly outrageous although harming people when there is a gentler way is always tragic. But if unobtanium is not, in fact, miraculous... then my statement obviously doesn't apply, now does it?

Yeah, maybe I'm too harsh. Sorries. My perception has been colored since other parties have really been too eager to militaristically massacre thousands of people oh so conveniently just so they can dance around the corpses of a bunch of undeveloped aliens while shoveling expensively price-tagged shit rocks from the ground, and I've found it very grating since apparently it seems like their definition of entertainment is just killfuck and nothing but killfuck.*

Thing is, though. The fact that the home-tree not just sits on top of a big pile of unobtanium, but also a forest of bioluminescent trees that are a big part of the planet's world-brain, makes the home-tree and the assorted bits of planetary organism physiology just as vital to the natives as unobtanium is to us - if not more so. The fact that this crucial planetary physiological feature is not just part of the Na'vi's culture, but also part of their extended ecological network, means that as much as some people would hate to admit it, the brain-trees are more valuable than the unobtanium. Unless humans can somehow physically interface with unobtanium and make it a part of their extended physiological processes, by shoving it in a convenient orifice in their anatomy.

Unobtanium is just a rock that we use for our space ships and dildos. Those glowing trees of the Na'vi are part of them, and they're part of a living and breathing planet. That's no different from having a chunk of precious mineral inside your brain, and a bunch of corporate/milwank eco-rapists ripping out your medula oblongata and "relocating it some twenty miles yonder" for the sake of their paychecks.

Shit, in this situation the whole much-hated Gaia nonsense IS in fact scientifically measurable, and is existing, and nobody even knows or understands the degree of the significance of this thing and how it relates to an entire never-before-seen alien ecology.

(Hey, has it been established if the Avatar-verse humans have encountered other non-Pandoran alien lifeforms yet? Like, if another bunch of corporate/milwank douchebags happened upon a colony of acid-blooded extraterrestrials or something? )


*footnote:

See, this kind of thinking makes me want to make a more relevant and topical movie with the same ecological anti-nazi message as Avatar. In the future where global warming has made all the ice melt, the US military discovers oil in the Antarctic and sends the USMC Hooah to secure the resources. But Micheal Moore gathers all the native penguins and through tap-dancing, they overwhelm America's military might with the power of love and happy feet and after a climaxing nunchaku duel on top of The Last Glacier in Antarctica, Donald Rumsfeld or General Pretaeus can end up getting eaten by a walrus or an Antarctic hippo. With its military supremacy assfucked by a bunch of gay hippie penguins, America ends up exploding and the penguins end up performing an epic tapdancing number at the end of the movie just like Slumdog Billionaire. But with more furry yiff.

[CaptainChewbacca]

Just saw the movie. My overall impression: It isn't the greatest movie of all time, but it might be the greatest looking. They've overcome the uncanny valley problem that Spirits Within had, and the eyes LOOKED lifelike.

Its not a complicated, or even surprising plot. As soon as the chick said 'Only five have ever ridden the great beast' I thought to myself 'Well, since he's the star of the movie I'm betting he's number 6'.

Overall I give it a B+/A-, if only because they didn't do ENOUGH with the story.

[JointStrikeFighter]

"Fluff"?

I'm going by what's in the movie, which is what the vast majority of people are going to know about. The extra-film stuff is "cheating".

Yeah and Base Delta Zero events don't exist either because they weren't in the Star wars movies

[Companion Cube]

Says what? He comes to see them as his people, but I don't think that was what Grace really intended.

I mean he says that Grace intends to be his "new best friend" in order to get closer to the Na'vi while at the same time making it more difficult for him to relay info to Quaritch.

[adam_grif]

http://spoonyexperiment.com/2009/12/20/ ... 09-avatar/

The Spoony Experiment on Avatar.

[Elaro]

One thing bugged me about Pandora, though. What's with all the neural interfaces? It seemed like every animal and plant on that planet and I kept wondering about the possible evolutionary advantage of such an interface (and why it's so bloody widespread). One possible explanation is that the herbivores can "tap" into the floral neural net to detect possible predator movement, and the predators likewise (leading to information warfare escalation ahoy!). But that doesn't quite have the evidence to back it up, and you have to wonder if such a feature arose in different species independently, or if they're all descendants from a mobile part of Eiwa that broke off from the main organism and was able to replicate on its own (like if your finger could detach and reattach to your hand, and a mutation allowed it to reproduce, and wait a couple million years. )

[adam_grif]

Product of alien interference seems the most likely explanation for something as ridiculous as that. I think they went overboard when translating the Injun connection to nature into the scifi setting.

[Broomstick]

Yeah and Base Delta Zero events don't exist either because they weren't in the Star wars movies

If they weren't in the Star Wars movies no, they didn't happen as far as I'm concerned (and, in fact, I've never heard of them before) and neither did they happen for all the other millions of people who only saw the movies. The vast majority of people who see Avatar will look only at what's on screen, they aren't all going to rush home and Google the movie and the additional "fluff". The important and relevant stuff has to be on screen.

[Zac Naloen]

One thing bugged me about Pandora, though. What's with all the neural interfaces? It seemed like every animal and plant on that planet and I kept wondering about the possible evolutionary advantage of such an interface (and why it's so bloody widespread). One possible explanation is that the herbivores can "tap" into the floral neural net to detect possible predator movement, and the predators likewise (leading to information warfare escalation ahoy!). But that doesn't quite have the evidence to back it up, and you have to wonder if such a feature arose in different species independently, or if they're all descendants from a mobile part of Eiwa that broke off from the main organism and was able to replicate on its own (like if your finger could detach and reattach to your hand, and a mutation allowed it to reproduce, and wait a couple million years. )

We don't know what the evolutionary basis for the life on Pandora was. But I don't see how it would be impossible for the life to have evolved from whatever Eiwa is (Fungai, plant, something else?) and retained the capacity for the neural communication over time. There is obviously an advantage to it.

[Shroom Man 777]

I say it was all artificially and intelligently designed, perhaps after the Na'vi's ancestors wasted their environment and finally learned from the mistakes of the past and used crazy levels of biotechnology to remake Mother Nature and live in communion with it.

[mr friendly guy]

I know its a hard concept for dumbshits like you, but your whole argument is dependent on the premise that we do need the unobtanium. But you don't care about whether we really need it or not? Are you retarded or just dropped on your head too many times as a kid?

No, but apparently you were, since I've made it explicitly clear multiple times in this thread that I only support it if it is necessary to our survival. IF.

If as you say, it's not, then I don't support it. Your user-name is exceptionally misleading.

Except of course your reply was to my post which was disputing the claim that we need the unobtanium. Your whole argument is but if we do need it.. its ok. Thats nice, however not relevant to the actual point unless you are willing to commit to a need, which you are obviously not.

So its ok for the natives to resist us but someone still right for us to to attack them at the same time. You are too god damn stupid to see the inherent contradiction there aren't you?

What, are you going to argue some kind of moral absolutism here? That one course of action is obviously "right" and one is obviously "wrong" outside of just your opinion? I'm making statements to the effect that invading somebody else to save yourself is morally right to you, but that you can't expect the people you're invading to agree, and that to them, resisting is the right thing to do.

1. No.
2. No.
3. I am not asking ethics from the point of view of YOU, since I am kind of talking to you and not to anyone else. Hey it couldn't be that, I must be interested in the point of view of each side. I am not interested in what you belief the sides think, I am interested in what you think. Its possible for each side to believe they are in the right, thats a no shit, sherlock moment. Its even possible for both sides to be wrong. But its contradictory for both sides to be right unless you are going to argue that belief in being right is as good actually being right.

Your support is dependent on a fact which you don't even bother to find out if its true or not? What are you intellectually lazy or some shit?

A laughable attempt to make me look like I'm saying something I'm not.

I'm saying that I support driving out the locals, where it is necessary for our survival. Whether or not it was necessary in the movie or not is not what I'm disputing, because my stance is already clear:

If it's necessary, agree, if not, disagree.

Isn't that just a summary of what I said?

[Ghost Rider]

Yeah and Base Delta Zero events don't exist either because they weren't in the Star wars movies

If they weren't in the Star Wars movies no, they didn't happen as far as I'm concerned (and, in fact, I've never heard of them before) and neither did they happen for all the other millions of people who only saw the movies. The vast majority of people who see Avatar will look only at what's on screen, they aren't all going to rush home and Google the movie and the additional "fluff". The important and relevant stuff has to be on screen.

Okay, before we go into what isn't and is canon. In this respect Broom, you could be right or wrong. That depends solely on what the creators considers canon.

Thus for Avatar, you may be right. He may consider what is on screen as the only truth. But Star Wars, your opinion is incorrect and your logic of others follow this same idealogy with you is fucking fallacy and you know this. Sure it's yours to keep but is the same value as calling the sky green. So really, yes...the movie is important but don't be a fucking idiot and claim others are wrong for using outside material without demonstrating that is what the creator has said for his work.