Avatar review thread

[NecronLord]

It annoys me that there hasn't been a peep from all the continuity flaw wankers about the mind transfer in Avatar. You know the ones, the people who whine about how transporters kill and clone people and how an upload of a human 'can never be the same person'. Well guess what, not only is it pretty implausible that an alien tree can connect to and read a human's memories at all, the copying process is also going to be horribly inaccurate, much moreso than any plausible technological means. If you whine about uploads, transporters etc you should be whining ten times as hard about how Sully actually died and there is just a cloned Na'vi who thinks he is Sully. But no, apparently throw in some 'psychic' bullshit and organo-naturalist feel-good chanting and it's all good. Hey, does this mean that if we put a '100% organic' sticker on the transporter platform and play tribal music in the uploading suite you'll be ok with those too?

Maybe because unlike transporters, no one is wanking to it? People are much less inclined to care - Trekkies have this nasty tendancy to go on and on about treknology. Similarly, transhumanists lecture at interminable length about uploading and things. The impetus to look for flaws to shut them up is much greater. No one feels a need to point this out about the pods in The Fly, Stargates or transmats (Doctor Who) in the same way either, you know. Because none of the fans of those are nearly as obnoxious as the ones you mention. Your unsaid assumption is that people point this out because they're terrified luddies that think everything invented since the plough is the devil's work, while in fact, people explicitly point out what they percieve as drawbacks because the other side are treating it as so serious. It has nothing to do with being natural, and everything to do with the other side's fans seriously advocating it. The "continuity flaw wankers" undoubtedly think this is equivalent, but really, why are they going to bring it up out of the blue?

And more than a few people who actually think about it would be inclined to attribute Eywa to Precursors/ancient Na'vi/Vorlons/Other Sufficiently Advanced Aliens¹, which would make it a highly sophisticated technological means by default. It is interesting that Neytiri's mum immediately comes up with this, it's obviously something the Na'vi have done before for whatever reason.

¹ Paul Hughes' corollary to Clarke's Law springs to mind; "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from nature."

[Ryan Thunder]

It annoys me that there hasn't been a peep from all the continuity flaw wankers about the mind transfer in Avatar.

Jake Sully is dead, and they have some kind of wierd echo of him wandering around in a different body.

I just didn't feel a need to bring it up.

[[R_H]]

The link technology used with the Avatars is also interesting. I wonder why RDA even allowed scientists as independant minded as Dr. Augustine to go to Pandora. I don't quite understand how Cameron was trying to criticise mechanised warfare though.

[NecronLord]

I don't quite understand how Cameron was trying to criticise mechanised warfare though.

Explain this thought further?

[[R_H]]

I don't quite understand how Cameron was trying to criticise mechanised warfare though.

Explain this thought further?

I'd be happy to. I was reading the Avatar page on Wikipedia and came across Themes and inspirations

Cameron has acknowledged that Avatar implicitly criticizes America's War in Iraq and the impersonal nature of mechanized warfare in general.

In the article referenced, Cameron states

The hero is with the Na'vi when the humans attack their homes. The fusillade of gas, incendiary bombs and guided missiles that wreck their ancient habitat is described as "shock and awe", the term popularised by the US military assault on Baghdad that opened the Iraq war in 2003.

The humans' military commander declares: "Our survival relies on pre-emptive action. We will fight terror, with terror." One of the more sympathetic characters preparing to resist the human invasion bemoans the need for "martyrdom".

One theory for the box-office success of the Star Wars films in the 1970s and 1980s was that, in their depiction of a plucky guerrilla insurgency against a vastly better equipped superpower, they enabled a generation of Americans to refight the Vietnam war on the side of the underdogs. The same idea holds true for Avatar. The War on Terror references are more complex than simply equating the US with the villains in the film.

After the Na'vi homes collapse in flames the landscape is coated in ash and floating embers in scenes reminiscent of Ground Zero after the September 11 attacks.

Cameron, who was born in Canada, said he had been "surprised at how much it did look like September 11. I didn't think that was necessarily a bad thing".

Referring to the "shock and awe" sequence, he said: "We know what it feels like to launch the missiles. We don't know what it feels like for them to land on our home soil, not in America. I think there's a moral responsibility to understand that.

"That's not what the movie's about - that's only a minor part of it. For me it feels consistent only in a very generalised theme of us looking at ourselves as human beings in a technical society with all its skills, part of which is the ability to do mechanised warfare, part of which is the ability to do warfare at a distance, at a remove, which seems to make it morally easier to deal with, but its not."

[open_sketchbook]

I don't think he was trying to criticize is so much as to point out that it's not cleaner or more civilized than any other warfare; warfare is always brutal and horrible but we can forget that when we're shooting missiles from beyond the horizon and we never see them land. Shock and awe sounds more like just intimidating somebody and a lot less like horrible death you never see coming even though the latter and everyone talks about it like it's the former.

It basically inverts the moral framework from the War on Terror and shows that it's not just "the savages" (as many people see those in the Middle East) that use terror as a weapon. I mean, what is Shock and Awe but another word for "terror attack"?

EDIT : Not that I think that terrifying people is a bad thing if it suits our goals, or that I think that we shouldn't kill people from beyond the horizon; I think that long-ranged explosive killfucking is awesome and that it should be standard response to minor irritants.

[Junghalli]

It annoys me that there hasn't been a peep from all the continuity flaw wankers about the mind transfer in Avatar.

Could be that what we saw onscreen could be interpreted as continuity of consciousness being maintained throughout the procedure, with the whole "tunnel of white light" effect. I doubt most people put that much thought into it though.

[dworkin]

Having just seen the movie my first impression is that they're all plants, well plant symbionts. Navi culture is mainly a by-product of being the thinking brain dog of Gaia, um Ewya. The plant gets the advantage of made to order ecosystem which moves it's genes around very efficiently and rapidly. If the Navi don't practice exogamy (by war or peace) considering the ease with which the other tribes were found I'ld be very surprised.

Of course this means that during the film we probably met the residents of Home Tree during a brief population upswing. I imagine that Ewya instigates wars, err periods of heightened territorial aggression between the different tribes much like the Piggies/Trees from Speaker for the Dead. I mean, what were all those warriors (not hunters) for? Could be that Pandora was due for it's regular 'War Season' when the humans got caught in the middle?

As a movie, I liked it a lot. We learned why the humans were there with a minimum of fuss. We learn why the various characters make the choices they do also quickly and easily.

Personally, I hope that no sequel is made. I can easily see Avatar going the way of Highlander or The Matrix. With sequels attempting to explain things that don't need explaining and doing it badly.

[Starglider]

Could be that what we saw onscreen could be interpreted as continuity of consciousness being maintained throughout the procedure

Broken concept anyway since consciousness isn't continuous on a scale below large factions of a second (while a lot of sci-fi teleport and scan methods work on millisecond or microsecond scales), but if you're ok with that then you must necessarily be ok with any sort of mind transfer that briefly runs both brains in parallel. Which is something, I suppose, compared to 'oh noes I am a specific lump of goo in a skull I can never be anything else'.

Personally, I hope that no sequel is made.

No contemporary studio is going to invest that much in a movie, and not attempt to leverage all the IP and name recognition into a string of sequels (and related franchise).

I can easily see Avatar going the way of Highlander or The Matrix. With sequels attempting to explain things that don't need explaining and doing it badly.

From what I've seen, the sequels are supposed to look at other parts of the planet (e.g. underwater) and possibly other moons in the system. How that ties in with the inevitable face time for Dances With Wolves Marine and Blue Tail Girl I don't know.

[Anguirus]

It annoys me that there hasn't been a peep from all the continuity flaw wankers about the mind transfer in Avatar. You know the ones, the people who whine about how transporters kill and clone people and how an upload of a human 'can never be the same person'. Well guess what, not only is it pretty implausible that an alien tree can connect to and read a human's memories at all, the copying process is also going to be horribly inaccurate, much moreso than any plausible technological means. If you whine about uploads, transporters etc you should be whining ten times as hard about how Sully actually died and there is just a cloned Na'vi who thinks he is Sully. But no, apparently throw in some 'psychic' bullshit and organo-naturalist feel-good chanting and it's all good. Hey, does this mean that if we put a '100% organic' sticker on the transporter platform and play tribal music in the uploading suite you'll be ok with those too?

Wait a tick.

1. Are you referring to this site specifically? I don't usually feel drowned in, er, "flaw wankers."

2. Leaving aside the fact that natural selection alone probably wouldn't produce a moon with an ecosystem as generally similar to Earth's OR one with all the "USB plugs" everywhere (because these are clearly premises of the film that throw it as firmly into fantasy-land as, well, virtually any Hollywood speculative fiction), why do you take it as a given a biological copying process is less accurate than "any plausible technological means"? At least (again, for SOME reason) the Pandorans are employing nervous systems generally similar to human ones, so there's less of a "compatibility jump" one would think. It's just being shunted through different nerves (and of course trees don't have nerves, but Pandoran "trees" obviously do).

[Starglider]

1. Are you referring to this site specifically? I don't usually feel drowned in, er, "flaw wankers."

Yes. They crawl out of the woodwork whenever uploading is mentioned. They used to whine about every single mention of Trek transporters as an advantage as well, but not so much recently - maybe just because no one here is still talking up Trek.

why do you take it as a given a biological copying process is less accurate than "any plausible technological means"?

Oh come on, do I really have to spell this out? Nerves are horribly lossy and low bandwidth at the best of times. There is simply no way a web of nerves can pull anything but an extremely lossy and approximate version of a personality out of a brain in what, a minute? For that matter there is no way they could penetrate to the synapse level and do a comprehensive read without killing the subject anyway, so my guess is they sampled 1 in every 1000 neurons, blurred the results together and guessed a lot. When we design technological systems, we design them to spec and generally with a full (or at least adequate) understanding of the systems they're interfacing to. And we test them, rigorously.

At least (again, for SOME reason) the Pandorans are employing nervous systems generally similar to human ones, so there's less of a "compatibility jump" one would think.

It's not a 'compatability jump', it's a yawning chasm. The difference between the human brain and any alien system is going to be vastly greater than the difference between any two computer systems humans have ever invented (of equivalent performance). The alien tree brain is supposed to have done this with exactly one previous attempt and no prior knowledge of human anatomy, in fact no formal knowledge about humans at all. It is actually less plausible than developing a software virus to down the ID4 aliens in the course of a few hours (the one that was uploaded from a Mac in a few seconds, and took down all the alien shields).

No doubt die-hard fans are going to try and justify it with 'psionics' bullshit, but it is still biowank of the highest degree.

[dworkin]

It's not a 'compatability jump', it's a yawning chasm. The difference between the human brain and any alien system is going to be vastly greater than the difference between any two computer systems humans have ever invented (of equivalent performance). The alien tree brain is supposed to have done this with exactly one previous attempt and no prior knowledge of human anatomy, in fact no formal knowledge about humans at all.

I agree, for the Ewya brain to work at all requires it's nerves be unobtanium getting it's freak on. And that's not going to be compatible with humans except for the 'Sex with Aliens is fun' thang.

[Junghalli]

2. Leaving aside the fact that natural selection alone probably wouldn't produce a moon with an ecosystem as generally similar to Earth's

In what way is Pandora's ecosystem implausibly similar to Earth's?

I'm curious why you say this because to me it looked like they did a pretty good job on making it reasonably alien. Six-limbed four-eyed animals are the norm, flying creatures are vastly larger and more powerful (I'm guessing some a thicker air, lower gravity, and light carbon fiber re-inforced skeletons explains it), there's hints of a fairly alien biochemistry with the carbon-fiber reinforced skeletons and I'm guessing some of the plants have something similar going by the size of the Home Tree, the air is unbreathable to humans, and the whole ecosystem is dominated by symbioses webs with an intelligent plant. The only thing that struck me as much too Earthlike was the Na'Vi.

OR one with all the "USB plugs" everywhere (because these are clearly premises of the film that throw it as firmly into fantasy-land as, well, virtually any Hollywood speculative fiction)

That's a lot more plausible if you stop thinking of what we see as a natural ecosystem like Earth's and start thinking of it as the product of millions of years of symbioses with and manipulation by Eywa. It probably killed off all the animals that didn't have the interface, leaving the lineage that did have it to radiate into every animal we see, and may very well have created it in the first place.

[adam_grif]

After we see radios working 100% fine even through the plot device field, is it possible that the Psilink was in fact not a psychic link at all, but just a radio link to some heavy duty machinery inside the Avatar brain allowing for puppeteering?

[Gandalf]

I saw it with Mrs Ganders on Saturday for our one year anniversary.

By about half way we were just bored to tears.

I mostly sat there waiting for something interesting to happen. None of the characters were engaging, none of the dialogue was interesting, and 3D was headache inducing.

A film can't win of visuals alone.

[Anguirus]

Oh come on, do I really have to spell this out? Nerves are horribly lossy and low bandwidth at the best of times. There is simply no way a web of nerves can pull anything but an extremely lossy and approximate version of a personality out of a brain in what, a minute? For that matter there is no way they could penetrate to the synapse level and do a comprehensive read without killing the subject anyway, so my guess is they sampled 1 in every 1000 neurons, blurred the results together and guessed a lot. When we design technological systems, we design them to spec and generally with a full (or at least adequate) understanding of the systems they're interfacing to. And we test them, rigorously.

We are talking about a fictional system (again, premise of the film) in which nerve-to-nerve contact = telepathy, done in seconds. Of course no biological system we know about can do this, just as no actual technological system can do this.

So your point is that someday, somehow, technology might be available to do this and then this entirely nebulous system will be able to do a better job of it than the fictional (and nebulous) system that we see in Avatar because it will have been tested rigorously.

How exactly does your proposed "system" do a kill-less comprehensive read? Because unless you propose that, you're really just trying to technowank harder than the movie biowanks.

I'm curious why you say this because to me it looked like they did a pretty good job on making it reasonably alien.

I agree that it is "reasonable." But it's not realistic. I am not sure the human imagination could reconstruct a truly alien ecosystem.

That's a lot more plausible if you stop thinking of what we see as a natural ecosystem like Earth's and start thinking of it as the product of millions of years of symbioses with and manipulation by Eywa.

It's not plausible in the least unless you propose a mechanism by which Eywa can accomplish this manipulation before the establishment of the network we see in the film. A brain can't will itself into being.

Personally, I have little/no problem with the movie from an SOD standpoint, but as a grad student studying natural evolution I find the proposals for how such a thing would really come into being rather pie-in-the-sky. You could maybe sketch out in broad strokes how it might happen (which is fantastic for a space opera) but it's really hard to imagine why natural selection would converge on humanoids, or why natural selection would favor the preservation of the networking things on the apex predators, or why a system in which plants = really big neurons would somehow wind up looking enormously like an Earth forest, which is shaped by vicious competition between plants for sunlight.

[NecronLord]

Where the fuck did bullshit complaining about psionics come from? I saw no psionics at any point in the film.

[Shroom Man 777]

I don't know, the mechanism used to remotely project human thought into the Avatar might seem like psionics. It might seem like anything, since there's no explanation as to how it works. For all we know there's a tiny little radioshack inside the Avatars' craniums.

[Sarevok]

Indeed. At no point were the words psionics or telepathy mentioned in the film. Both Ewya and RDAs biotech wonders are entirely tech based. RDA just happens to understand how said tech works.

[Junghalli]

I agree that it is "reasonable." But it's not realistic. I am not sure the human imagination could reconstruct a truly alien ecosystem.

What was unrealistic about it?

It's not plausible in the least unless you propose a mechanism by which Eywa can accomplish this manipulation before the establishment of the network we see in the film.

Hijacking chemical signals that animals used to communicate among themselves. Heck, for all we know all the animals in the ecosystem are descended from a single species that lived in symbioses with proto-Eywa, and it killed everything else, leaving that species to undergo an evolutionary radiation while killing off all the branches that didn't play well with it. That would nicely explain how it can communicate with and control everything; it just killed off everything it couldn't.

A brain can't will itself into being.

Maybe it evolved intelligence by manipulating its subordinate animals to act in an intelligent manner? I'll grant the thing not being dumb as a rock is probably the biggest stretch.

or why natural selection would favor the preservation of the networking things on the apex predators

Because Eywa doesn't like things it can't control, and poisons them or tells the animals it does control to kill them or something? Not having the interface would then become a huge survival disadvantage.

or why a system in which plants = really big neurons would somehow wind up looking enormously like an Earth forest, which is shaped by vicious competition between plants for sunlight.

We don't know if all the plants are part of Eywa. For all we know it's more like a giant parasite that sucks a percentage off all the plants, so plant competition doesn't bother it as long as it can keep a clear area around its core components (remind me, weren't the sacred trees in clearings?). It may even deliberately keep around competition because it doesn't want to stagnate evolution.

[NecronLord]

It doesn't even need to poison them, just order the ones with interfaces to gang up on the mutants without. Or deny them breeding opportunities.

Of course, it's not certain how Eywa controls critters, how clever she is, how old she is, what degree of control she exerts. Without knowing more, I'm inclined to think she's got the critters programmed to regularly interface with a sacred tree and download an instruction set.

[Starglider]

Where the fuck did bullshit complaining about psionics come from? I saw no psionics at any point in the film.

The fluff, and in particular, the game. The fluff actually has a point though, since (a) the flux vortex jams all comms and sensors but somehow not the avatar link running off a little portable generator, and (b) Sully was able to travel around a whole continent recruiting people, without suffering link dropout, without the RDA being able to trace his signal, while still running off that little portable generator.

I'd also note that there is no way in hell you could get the necessary bandwidth for a full-sensory link with a conventional radio signal, without being limited to line of sight (due to being forced to use microwave frequencies). The only plausible explanation would be a global network of satellite relays in low orbit (which still won't work due to rain fade and vegetation, but hey), but we know that no such network exists because if it did the RDA could trivially terminate Sully's Avatar link after he goes rogue.

[Anguirus]

What was unrealistic about it?

It's just an astonishing coincidence that on the next star over there is a moon with a rainforest with a bunch of near-humans cavorting about in it. Keep in mind that hominids have only existed on this planet for a tiny slice of its history.

As I implied, I don't believe any sci-fi gets it right. Astrobiology is a field in its infancy (not least because extraterrestrial life is not confirmed, just really really likely) but I doubt anyone in the field would predict such physical and cultural similarity between Na'Vi and humans. I also thought that many of the trees, shrubs, and mushrooms looked very Earth-like, though I'm no botanist so I can't pick out species or anything.

Hijacking chemical signals that animals used to communicate among themselves. Heck, for all we know all the animals in the ecosystem are descended from a single species that lived in symbioses with proto-Eywa, and it killed everything else, leaving that species to undergo an evolutionary radiation while killing off all the branches that didn't play well with it. That would nicely explain how it can communicate with and control everything; it just killed off everything it couldn't.

1) What is proto-Eywa?
2) How does a SINGLE species kill EVERYTHING else? Natural selection doesn't work the way you think it does (some populations can explode and slaughter a lot of other species but not remotely close to everything).
3) What advantage do the "proto-Eywans" gain that outweighs the energy cost of growing these "bio-links" that is SO overwhelming that they brush aside all competitors?

The bio-links strike me as some pretty crazy "over-engineering" for natural selection, since the most plausible scenario that comes to mind (plants conveying accurate status information to their pollinators) could be accomplished just as easily with the bioluminesence they already exhibit. (As for other forms of communication, real life handles an amazing amount of communication through chemical, visual, and sonic modalities. It's unclear to me what the linkups accomplish that the simpler and less costly modalities cannot.)

Because Eywa doesn't like things it can't control, and poisons them or tells the animals it does control to kill them or something? Not having the interface would then become a huge survival disadvantage.

I would expect that a little network of plants and animals that tries to kill everything else is going to do little more than kill itself off. The bio-links would have to cost a significant amount of energy to grow and maintain, which is a disadvantage. They are also a potential vulnerability (note that in the shooting script Tsu-tey is "castrated" by a human, and is physically and emotionally crippled immediately).

I'll grant you that in the ecosystem we see in the film, natural selection would maintain the bio-links in a lot of those animals (especially if they are used for mating purposes) but as for how they got to that point? Better not to think about it.

However, let's engage in a little invasion ecology. Say that there's an isolated island on Pandora that has none of the Eywa-connected plants and animals that we see in the film. How does the Eywa-system penetrate this? If a plant gets there, it is devoid of its pollinators, and its invested possibly even more energy into interacting with specific, "compatible" pollinators than most Earth angiosperms do. If an animal gets there, it has to try to fulfill a niche while devoid of its major advantage (network compatibility) and competing against animals that don't play by Eywa's rules. I'll bet that if it hangs on, it loses those tendrils right quick, just as cave fish lose their eyes and we primate fruit-eaters lost our vitamin C gene.

We don't know if all the plants are part of Eywa. For all we know it's more like a giant parasite that sucks a percentage off all the plants, so plant competition doesn't bother it as long as it can keep a clear area around its core components (remind me, weren't the sacred trees in clearings?). It may even deliberately keep around competition because it doesn't want to stagnate evolution.

Fair enough. However, you still have not proposed a Darwinian way to create and maintain "Eywa." Why do these trees need to communicate? Remember, all communication systems cost energy, and these super-specialized neural link-ups even more so. Moreover, it's unclear how Eywa would wreak its will. It' s not at all clear from the film that it can give orders other than "charge" and "link up with the blue chick."

[Anguirus]

"Why do these trees need to communicate?" That was poorly phrased. Trees on this world communicate with each other all the time, using mostly chemical modalities. What evolutionary imperative gives you sessile, photosynthetic, enormous organisms that communicate with each other lightning-fast? If this evolved in response to some massive threat (say, herbivores analogous to Earth sauropods, or some kind of super-locust) then why is it still maintained in the apparent absence of the threat?

[PeZook]

It's just an astonishing coincidence that on the next star over there is a moon with a rainforest with a bunch of near-humans cavorting about in it. Keep in mind that hominids have only existed on this planet for a tiny slice of its history.

Yeah, Cameron should've totally made a movie where a bunch of Earth scientists arrive in-system, spend three years taking measurements and readings and talking science, find nothing but dead worlds and blast off home congratulating themselves on the amount of data collected.

As I implied, I don't believe any sci-fi gets it right. Astrobiology is a field in its infancy (not least because extraterrestrial life is not confirmed, just really really likely) but I doubt anyone in the field would predict such physical and cultural similarity between Na'Vi and humans. I also thought that many of the trees, shrubs, and mushrooms looked very Earth-like, though I'm no botanist so I can't pick out species or anything.

Surely the movie would've been ten times better if Jake Sully fell in love in a giant ten-eyed slug and her way of life. They could then mate and reproduce cross-sexually while professing their love via a complicated pheromonal language!

Brilliant!