Knife wrote:dragon wrote:Shroom Man 777 wrote:Unless the fluff contradicts it, I don't remember anything in the movie that said that humans were dying off in poverty and death because the corporate milwankers hadn't blown up the home-tree and killfucked the natives to mine some unobtanium over there yet.
All that was said in the movie was at the end when the humans were boarding the ship to go back.
They said that that all but a select few were being sent back to a dying world. But they didn't say why the world was dying.
Even then we can't discount hyperbole from the dude who just went nature nuts native. We know that Earth isn't a Coruscant type planet with some dialogue between Jake and the Colonel in the movie where Jake says he did some time in South America in the Marines and the Colonel said it was mean bush, but not as mean as the bush on Pandora. Jake saying Earth was a dying world may have been more philosophical, in terms of where earth was in industrialization and where Pandora was; furthering the noble savage bit the movie was pushing with the Na'vi.
To be fair, I think Jake is a very suspect narrator at the end. That said, to some extent we're being given information that is either biased or incomplete; I get the feeling of an "Alma Problem" on Sully's description of Earth: We don't have much else to go on that's clear, and Sully may or may not be reliable.
I can see his statements being literal (no more trees, etc., period), quasi-literal (limited to areas he wouldn't regularly have exposure to/wouldn't have seen in a while/greenhouses), or figurative (he means the environment is a wreck). Likewise, a "dying world" could mean "we're running out of energy and we're headed for a train wreck with people dying off in large numbers" or something more philosophical along the lines you suggested.
Absent directorial fiat, my inclination is to go with "quasi-literal" on the trees/green stuff (still a broad category, but I can't nail it down much more), and "deep, deep trouble and running out of affordable energy" on the state of the Earth. Note that for these purposes, I mean "can get food to the average human worker at a price that said person can afford", not "can fill up one's SUV at $1 a gallon". "Affordable" and "standard of life" are wonderfully flexible terms that can be bent to suit one's interests and point of view, I would note.
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Moving along, I would like to make clear some of my thoughts on "director's intent" in general. Cameron clearly intended a fairly straight-up fight where the humans are the bad guys (sans Sully and Co.) and the Na'vi are the good guys. The honest truth is that I generally go into a movie not giving a crap who the director wants me to like, and I often find myself getting frustrated at directors who have their antagonists kick dogs for the hell of it just to make clear who the antagonist is. Call it "evil for the sake of evil." Too much of that and I'll walk out of a movie.
To his credit, Cameron did not go over the top in this regard with Avatar. Yes, he made it quite clear who the audience is supposed to side with, but (to cite an example given elsewhere in the thread) he wasn't having Selfridge line Na'vi up at the edge of a mass grave or engage in other behavior for the sake of it. There was not the evil for the sake of evil that often shows up.
The hangup he ran into with his parallel is this: He made Earth out to be a train wreck to strengthen the nature-industry parallel, but he also failed to make clear just how bad that situation was getting, the consequences of mission failure, etc. In this regard, I think he may have overshot his intended goal with some of us: Instead of the comments coming across as "the humans have wrecked Earth irreparably and don't deserve the resources they're taking from this pristine environment at the cost of damage to it", he gave off what certainly felt like an existential dilemma for the human race to a couple of us. That sort of a situation messes with the mechanics of the story in a way I don't think it was intended to.
Obviously, there's not enough clear information in the film to decide one way or another on some of these points, so we're getting clashing assumptions and interpretations. A lot of the arguments are effectively if-then statements. In my view, if there is an existential dilemma presented to it, humanity has rights which it does not absent that dilemma insofar as ensuring its survival and the survival of individual humans. If an Unobtanium shortage would cause a major, if not catastrophic, breakdown in the global distribution of goods, food included, then it is more important than if it merely keeps the trains running on time. And so on.
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I would like to point out that, for all of the remarks about quarterly statements, the fact that Unobtanium shipments are capped out at a set level for the time being at a couple of hundred tons/year. Selfridge jamming production through the roof for the sake of doing so brings RDA no benefit unless:
A) The market price is fixed; or
B) RDA can find a way to "swallow" any excess consumption.
A glut of Unobtanium would simply cause a run on any unobtanium contracts (if they exist and are publicly traded) or otherwise cause pressure to lower prices on an expected production increase. Bear in mind that while RDA has a monopoly, it is also clearly a regulated monopoly (as shown by their inability to simply shut off any bad press despite being light years away from Earth...Wal-Mart has had an easier time keeping the unions out/under control than these guys seem to have had with the media, not to mention the leash they're on, weapons-wise). Producing more than just under 350 tons per year (the shipping capacity for unobtanium...12 ships, 14-year cycle) just doesn't make sense.
Even absent that, there's another little problem:
Each Hometree is located above a rich deposit of unobtanium, putting the Na'vi in quite the quandary when it comes to the RDA's interests in the value of said mineral. In Avatar, the Hometree of the Omaticaya clan was obliterated by the RDA's security forces, forcing the remaining Na'vi to relocate.
Source:
http://james-camerons-avatar.wikia.com/wiki/Kelutral
I am prepared to set this aside upon request (it's a wiki, after all, and no sources are listed), but this both seems to confirm the link between Unobtanium deposits and the big trees. This also raises two obvious follow-on questions:
1) Do the trees exist over most (or all) substantial deposits? By "substantial", I mean "practical to mine". It's not worthwhile to dig a big hole to get twenty grams of the stuff.
2) Are those trees inhabited like the one in the film?
As to mining around the trees, it is quite possible that mining around the tree might not be possible without triggering the tree's collapse into the mine if they have to get close to the tree while mining it. Just a possibility there.
Finally, as to the deposits in the mountains...there's enough trouble running Jake, Grace, etc. out to a base in the mountains (radar is dead, they're on VFR, compasses don't work, etc.) that mining them is even more of a morass. Also, given that these
are floating mountains, lifting the equipment onto them may be a stretch, and avoiding the loss of that equipment if a mountain breaks up due to mining might be impossible. This might well be a case of the corporate office being able to say "We looked at it and it didn't work."
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