Avatar review thread

[Anguirus]

This is also good:

"polluted earth" does not hold together in view of that immense a capability to get things done.

There aren't very many ecologists or climate scientists that I know who think that cleaning up pollution and creating sustainable living conditions on Earth is a problem that will go away by THROWING TECHNOLOGY AT IT. Or power.

But hey, you go ahead and invoke that Singularity.

[Nyrath]

Well, I thought I had it wrong, and I was right about that at least (self deprecating )

But at least you made the effort. Most don't even bother.

On the other hand, doesn't this mean that there have to be antimatter production facilities in the Alpha Centauri system? On site refuelling of a beam core antimatter pion drive doesn't seem very feasible otherwise, really- and that means two things, first that there's a significant human industrial presence in the system in general, not just on Pandora-

Yes. From
http://www.pandorapedia.com/doku.php/isv_venture_star

Air, water, and food must be replenished at Pandora, and the ship refueled there with locally-manufactured anti-matter and hydrogen and deuterium harvested from Polyphemus.

[Blayne]

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/ ... 333-Avatar

Moviebob's review.

So ... commentary? Criticism? A summary of the review? Why did you post a review nearly two months old now?

Apologies, I felt that his review was spot on my gripping about the Navi's continued existances aside I felt the movie was good and engrossing and that MovieBobs reviews goes into alot of detail of WHY the movie is good and then ends at a funny dig at its premise.

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

I don't think Avatar is hard SF, any more than- actually, this is a pretty close example; Babylon 5 was. There may be hard- SF elements in an overall mix, but the totality tends towards mysticism and plot for plot's sake, allegory and parable.

Too far for my taste, actually; I liked the ship, and the bioengineering capabilities that went into producing the Avatars in the first place (aside; how the hell could they do that and not understand what it was they were producing, not notice that Na'Vi brains had an access port?), but the politics of it were just laid on with a shovel.

And I do find it personally impossible to square the situation as we-the-audience were meant to see it, poisoned world, greed is good, corrupt corporates and vicious mercenaries as opposed to noble savages and back-to-nature heroes, good guys and bad guys delineated with almost no subtlety at all, with a triumph of technological optimism like Venture Star.

Remember Silent Running? Biodomes in space...if the antimatter cracker works the way I think it does (solar powered energy-to-matter), the solar panels and the engineering skills needed to build them- you could have biodomes a thousand miles across, replace entire rainforests- although, obviously, not all at once. Weather control becomes a practical possibility, as you would have actually more energy than exists in a storm to counter it with.

And really, I'm having a hard time trying to grasp what your position actually is. "We're Screwed"? I can't think of very many- or actually, any- non technological means of decontaminating a polluted world. It's basically terraforming on a very small scale. Given the choice of dying off in massive numbers or doing something about it, doing something sounds good to me. That something is highly likely to be technological, unless you can come up with primitive means of condensing particulates out of the air, stopping algal blooms, soaking up heavy metals in soil and making glaciers grow again?

Eco- pessimism, revulsion against technology- yes, it's out there. How well does it square with the existence of starships?

[Simon_Jester]

Basically, we're objecting to Chekhov's Dyson Sphere. The existence of that ship should have consequences that were nowhere to be seen in the rest of the movie.

Yes. The only excuse is that what we saw was on the fringes of civilization: they're only there because the the magic rocks.

They may be busily beavering away at the terraforming of Mars and Venus, or they may not be; no way to be sure. The protagonists literate and educated enough to know don't talk about it. All we see is the magic-rock mine orbiting another star, which is only of interest to this budding interplanetary civilization and their (inferred) million square kilometers of solar panels because they have no other source of magic rocks.

The consequences were nowhere to be seen in the rest of the movie because they're all about five light years from where the movie takes place. Very convenient, and quite reasonable. I don't like that idea of an antimatter synthesizer around Alpha Centauri, though; as ECR points out, it has lots of implications.

Flogging this dead horse until it is a bloody smear on the pavement, I did some measurements on an image of the ship.

From the engine tips, the habitat module subtends an angle of about seven degrees. To shield the module, you need a plate of tungsten or something dense that casts a gamma-ray shadow over the module. The closer it is to the reaction site, the smaller it can be. (Actually it will probably be more like a cylindrical plug than a plate, that is, taller than its diameter). For instance, if the shadow shield was only ten meters from the reaction, it would have to be four meters in diameter in order to shadow the habitat module.

How long would it last before soaking the cumulative effect of that many gamma rays became a problem?

Too far for my taste, actually; I liked the ship, and the bioengineering capabilities that went into producing the Avatars in the first place (aside; how the hell could they do that and not understand what it was they were producing, not notice that Na'Vi brains had an access port?)...

They noticed, but they didn't then infer that the access port must connect to a planetary supermind. Or they speculated, but had no evidence. I mean, even if you showed me an alien with the organic equivalent of a USB port wired into their brain, I'm not sure I would deduce the existence of something like Eywa... and I have no reason to be predisposed not to believe in it.

And I do find it personally impossible to square the situation as we-the-audience were meant to see it, poisoned world, greed is good, corrupt corporates and vicious mercenaries as opposed to noble savages and back-to-nature heroes, good guys and bad guys delineated with almost no subtlety at all, with a triumph of technological optimism like Venture Star.

Remember Silent Running? Biodomes in space...if the antimatter cracker works the way I think it does (solar powered energy-to-matter), the solar panels and the engineering skills needed to build them- you could have biodomes a thousand miles across, replace entire rainforests- although, obviously, not all at once. Weather control becomes a practical possibility, as you would have actually more energy than exists in a storm to counter it with.

The trouble there is that the Second Law of Thermodynamics plays no favorites.

Some problems cannot be brute-forced; they have to be solved on their own terms, and you have to be willing to put in the effort, make the sacrifices, and take the time to solve them. Ecological crises are likely to qualify, because throwing around more zettajoules to patch up your ecosystem may be counterproductive. Pump more energy into a storm and you may break it up... but you've also dumped a lot of energy into the atmosphere; it has to go somewhere. The next storm is 0.5% bigger, the next 0.5% bigger than that... not fun. Look at the projections of how manmade global warming could supercharge weather problems in places like the Caribbean and you'll see what I mean.

So a civilization that runs up to Kardashev Type 1 or 1.5 may well have plenty of energy and still have wrecked their home planet's environment if they didn't make the effort to preserve it. Restoring it might be possible... but you'd effectively be re-terraforming the planet from scratch, a process that can't easily be rushed. You could be at it for centuries, because you have to restore stripped topsoil with your custom-made lichens and such.

Eco- pessimism, revulsion against technology- yes, it's out there. How well does it square with the existence of starships?

From what we can infer about Earth's problems in-story, I don't think anti-technological messages would work for Earth any more than you do. But I don't see why they should be expected to, given the movie. Pandora is a planet with a functioning ecosystem already in place; there's no need to re-engineer it. Earth is... probably not, and probably does have that need. I expect it to be possible and a lot of others won't, but that's because I'm more optimistic about the viability of terraforming than our experience justifies.*

*Yes, experience. We don't have any, unless you count amateur terraforming... which has proven about as effective as amateur neurosurgery.

[Blayne]

Maybe with a genetic retrovirus magic thingy they can genetically engineer the plants to filter the atmosphere or use a computer program communicating with the sentient forest to do it for them?

[Anguirus]

I don't think Avatar is hard SF, any more than- actually, this is a pretty close example; Babylon 5 was. There may be hard- SF elements in an overall mix, but the totality tends towards mysticism and plot for plot's sake, allegory and parable.

This is totally fair. I do think that the Earth-technology was relatively hard, so your Babylon 5 analogy is actually excellent (Earth was hard-ish in a universe full of magic gravity molesters).

(aside; how the hell could they do that and not understand what it was they were producing, not notice that Na'Vi brains had an access port?)

Who said they didn't? Grace knows before the film even starts what's going on, she only has to explain it to the executive and the colonel.

The line is "Don't play with it, you'll go blind" not "Careful, we don't know what the fuck that even does." Also, a scene excised from the script has Gung-Ho Grunt Man "castrate" Arrogant Tribal Leader Guy by maliciously chopping off his braid, so if we take that scene as a guide then even the fuckwit soldiers know how significant that thing is.

but the politics of it were just laid on with a shovel.

There's a very, very good reason for that.

This film is made for a mass audience, and it has succeeded very well in this respect. The mass audience in America has a very cavalier attitude about fucking other countries in the ass and taking their shit, as the Iraq misadventure aptly showed the world. Yes, a cabal of military and industrial interests manipulated the media and hoodwinked lots of folks, but if a larger minority of said folks had stronger moral qualms with killing Arabs then it's unlikely the war would have received such support, or perhaps even happened. Then you have America's destructively manipulative foreign policy in Latin America (which Avatar alludes to in one line) which is, naturally, downplayed in the media and in history, and most Americans aren't motivated enough to find out about on their own (I don't excuse myself from this either, I don't know nearly enough about recent history as I should, just enough to be rather ashamed of my own country's belligerent arrogance. We pretty much barreled into Grenada and Panama and started shooting people).

Meanwhile, the mass audience outside America has to put up with American arrogance all the time, rather than indirectly benefiting from it. Obviously, the movie speaks to these people as well. Shroomy is quite right to snap back at American armchair genocidists who appear to have missed the point of the movie as badly as the wackjobs who argue that Alderaan deserved to be blown away in Star Wars.

Of course the political message of the movie is not subtle. It's a bombastic space opera war epic. Being unsubtle means it might actually get someone to think about something. Better movies with subtle and nuanced political messages will be intentionally avoided by that very mass audience. Fuck, I haven't even seen The Hurt Locker yet.

Avatar is not the greatest movie out there by a fucking long shot (see my original, largely critical review) but it does succeed at going what a science fiction story should: reframe a contemporary situation so that people can see and judge it relatively free of their existing political biases. The story is analogous in almost equal measure to the saga of massacre and forced relocation of American Indians and to America's consumption-driven foreign policy today. I hate to invoke TVTropes but I can't say it any better than they do: Some Anvils Need To Be Dropped.

And really, I'm having a hard time trying to grasp what your position actually is. "We're Screwed"?

There's an excellent possibility that we are screwed. I have to hope that we're not.

I didn't mean to pick on you per se, but I'm very upset by the idea that I see around here (not picking on any one person) that we can technomify our way out of the extremely complex chain of events that we are setting off in the biosphere. It bespeaks not only ignorance, but ignorance of how ignorant we are. It is an entirely plausible scenario that in the 22nd century our world could be plausibly described, by a grunt in the throes of hyperbole, as "dead." It will not be completely dead, but we are in the middle of a biodiversity crash that can only be compared to the Permian and Cretaceous extinctions. Even if we take the (horrifying, to my point of view) position that all species that do not contribute directly to human wellness are irrelevant, we are still wreaking havoc on our own ecology in ways that we have historically failed to predict. Fisheries turn into dead zones, the poor starve in Africa, new chemicals turn up in our drinking water, and success stories (like curbing CFC) are a lot rarer than failures even in "developed" nations. How well do you think the world is going to deal with climate refugees? There's going to be a fuckload of them in the early 22nd century no matter WHAT we do now. I was just reading about an archipelago that's disappearing off Alaska and the president is having a hard time finding new homes abroad for his piddly 100K citizens.

When people handwave these problems with something like "the Singularity will find us cheap energy" it makes my blood boil as surely as if you'd invoked the Rapture.

Eco- pessimism, revulsion against technology- yes, it's out there. How well does it square with the existence of starships?

In the setting? Excellently, if the government/megacorp built a big laser satellite instead of a couple dozen water treatment plants. In fact, there's a good chance I'd be furious if the starship fleet of the Earth was under the control of the interstellar equivalent of Blackwater.

[Shroom Man 777]

Cameron should have just stuck to a FTL drive. The Venture Stars ludicrous velocity already puts most scifi starships to shame. Now on top of that it can withstand a laser that probably puts out more energy that several thousand nuclear weapons every second. A FTL drive would a have served the story better by not introducing another gigantic plot hole. FTL would have let the characters travel to Alpha Centauri without such a high tech level that the movies entire premise is invalidated.

Why are we bitch-moaning about the existence of a starship that's only seen on-screen for a couple of seconds, and whose functioning mechanisms aren't even explpained in the film at all? Is it THAT IMPORTANT for the starship to be FTL/STL/BTL/ETL/XTL/HTML or else, ooooh, it is A PLOT HOEL?! Cameron should've totally used a stardrive that violated the laws of physics to attain faster than light speeds, so that this starship we see for a total of several seconds in the movie won't become a gigantic plothole for people to screech at.

0.7 C laser light drives are plausible ?

Plausible for anything but K-II level civilization ?

Okay, you are right, they are implausible.

Cameron should've used hyperdrives to rip holes in space-time and screw the laws of physics to attain faster than light speeds for his spaceship instead.

Because he has taken it on himself to bitch about everything and anything he can regarding the movie because he didn't get to see the blue people bombed from space.

Grrr! Fucking Avatards! Watch as I scrutinize even pointless aspects of the movie to show you fucking avatards how stoooopid it is! Urrrgh! First I went on about using Su-24 Frogfaces, and now I complain about the propulsion mechanism of starships seen on-screen for several seconds! Today Gotham... TOMORROW THE WORLD!

No idiot. Venture Stars STL drive is entirely nerd fan service. It is totally impossible for a society as seen in the movie to build and operate. No one cares about how the technobabble works. But in the finest tradition of Star Trek writers Cameron fucked it up by inserting an absurd explanation for how they get to Alpha Centauri so fast. He could have said they have unobtainium powered drives, but no they must have a laser that can burn a planets surface to cinders from lightyears away. They also got so much antimatter lying around each time Venture Star refuels it probably uses more energy than entire history of mankind.

Who cares about crap that's written on some "supplemental reading material" that I don't bother to read when I'm watching and enjoying the movie? I think the existence of names like Dr. Lovecraft, which Necron Lord or whoever brought up before, is probably a bigger plothole and a more scathing indictment of "nerd fan service". Fucking Dr. Lovecraft.

Who gives a crap about the propulsion mechanism of a stupid starship that's only seen on-screen for at most a few minutes, anyway? Why is it worth griping about? It's not at all important, it's just a pointless trivial detail nobody gives a crap about, unless if you regard it as significant somehow and worth going on about as some indictment of Cameron and how he was bullshit to have used "hard" elements in his movie. Who cares? Are we criticizing the movie because of useless written material (that nobody cares about, and that nobody has read except for fans and for pedantic people who're out looking for the tiniest morsels to criticize) that's not even IN the movie?

[PeZook]

Yeah, how is the Venture Star's propulsion mechanism a "plot hole"? It's a plot hole when something happens which is unexplained, impossible within the constrains of the movie or illogical. If Selfridge said "We still have enough unobtainium here by the base to last us a thousand years", then it would be a plot hole, because there'd be no reason to and abuse the Na'Vi. If Jake could speak Na'Vi, that would be a plot hole, because he was a grunt. If Earth was at XIXth century tech levels, that would be a gigantic plot hole.

[Simon_Jester]

Maybe with a genetic retrovirus magic thingy they can genetically engineer the plants to filter the atmosphere or use a computer program communicating with the sentient forest to do it for them?

...Ah, you seem to be hopping planets.

Theoretically, both of those are probably possible. But terraforming Pandora's atmosphere would have unpredictable and possibly fatal effects on the local ecosystem (which is a decision too big for the mining company to make on its own initiative), and interfacing with the sentient forest would require them to figure out how it works on a software level... which would be a very complex and expensive project.

[Shroom Man 777]

There's a very, very good reason for that.

This film is made for a mass audience, and it has succeeded very well in this respect. The mass audience in America has a very cavalier attitude about fucking other countries in the ass and taking their shit, as the Iraq misadventure aptly showed the world. Yes, a cabal of military and industrial interests manipulated the media and hoodwinked lots of folks, but if a larger minority of said folks had stronger moral qualms with killing Arabs then it's unlikely the war would have received such support, or perhaps even happened. Then you have America's destructively manipulative foreign policy in Latin America (which Avatar alludes to in one line) which is, naturally, downplayed in the media and in history, and most Americans aren't motivated enough to find out about on their own (I don't excuse myself from this either, I don't know nearly enough about recent history as I should, just enough to be rather ashamed of my own country's belligerent arrogance. We pretty much barreled into Grenada and Panama and started shooting people).

Meanwhile, the mass audience outside America has to put up with American arrogance all the time, rather than indirectly benefiting from it. Obviously, the movie speaks to these people as well. Shroomy is quite right to snap back at American armchair genocidists who appear to have missed the point of the movie as badly as the wackjobs who argue that Alderaan deserved to be blown away in Star Wars.

This. I don't care if it's about Blue People having their Home Trees exploded, or if its some asshole in N&P going on about American Foreign Interests and the right of their hegemony to rule the world and dictate to lesser countries and lesser peoples in the Third World and elsewhere what to do and how to do it, and how America can have all the carbon emissions it wants but places like China and Beirut can't because of *mumble mumble*. Fuck them. What gives them the right to mine shit from Pandora and massacre natives, or fund regimes in South America and the Philippines to play their stupid geopolitical games, what gives them the right to live in excess at the expense of the squalor and suffering and misery experienced by other people? Might makes right? Because they have bigger guns? Fuck em.

Yet this attitude is accepted and even encouraged in certain circles, and this attitude is not only found here in internet message boards where assholes go on and on about how might makes right and how it justifies fucking people over, it's an attitude that's also prevalent all around us and has been instrumental in American systematic fucking up of lesser nations and lesser people.

People, prosperous (American/Western) people turn a blind eye towards this because they don't give a fuck about the sufferings of an underpaid textile worker in China or some brown-skinned shit in Bakalakadaka Street whose oppressive regime feeds petrochemical fuel to America, or to wherever. Why? Because as long as these prosperous people have their cheap shit and their iPods and their unobtanium, then they're happy and they can hardly care less about the plight of the shitty untermenschen in their walled-in ghettoes in shitholes all over the world.

Cameron wasn't just making some bullshit message about "saving the forest" or whatever. Pandora's message dealt with the systematic bullshit that's pervaded Western society, perhaps even human society, to this day. Yes, the Na'vi look like preachy Native American analogues getting fucked over by Space Americans. But it wasn't just preachy Native American analogues who got fucked over historically, and it wasn't just Space Americans who did it. The Spaniards fucked my place over, the Nazis fucked Europe over, the Europeans fucked Africa over, etcetera. It's recurred throughout history, and it's recurring this very day - and the most guilty party, today, are the fucking Space Americans and their obscene lifestyles fueled by suffering and shit imported from the third world.

When I see people go on about bullshit like orbitally bombarding shitty defenseless spacecat people, or going on about how might makes right and that makes committing atrocities on the Na'vi alright as long as it benefits Space America, all I see is just a fucked up rehash of this little miserable shitpiece.

Of course the political message of the movie is not subtle. It's a bombastic space opera war epic. Being unsubtle means it might actually get someone to think about something. Better movies with subtle and nuanced political messages will be intentionally avoided by that very mass audience. Fuck, I haven't even seen The Hurt Locker yet.

Avatar is not the greatest movie out there by a fucking long shot (see my original, largely critical review) but it does succeed at going what a science fiction story should: reframe a contemporary situation so that people can see and judge it relatively free of their existing political biases. The story is analogous in almost equal measure to the saga of massacre and forced relocation of American Indians and to America's consumption-driven foreign policy today. I hate to invoke TVTropes but I can't say it any better than they do: Some Anvils Need To Be Dropped.

If anything, Avatar and other works need to be MORE UNSUBTLE. I don't think fucking De-Nazification was exactly subtle either, was it?

These assholes who go on about orbital bombardment, Space American Foreign Interest, and Might Makes Atrocities Right, need MORE overtly moralistic preachy shit thrown at their faces and shoved down their throats.

[starfury]

This. I don't care if it's about Blue People having their Home Trees exploded, or if its some asshole in N&P going on about American Foreign Interests and the right of their hegemony to rule the world and dictate to lesser countries and lesser peoples in the Third World and elsewhere what to do and how to do it, and how America can have all the carbon emissions it wants but places like China and Beirut can't because of *mumble mumble*. Fuck them. What gives them the right to mine shit from Pandora and massacre natives, or fund regimes in South America and the Philippines to play their stupid geopolitical games, what gives them the right to live in excess at the expense of the squalor and suffering and misery experienced by other people? Might makes right? Because they have bigger guns? Fuck em.

And the indignity to Complain as you stated when others played the game better then them at their own games, how come they refuse to take responsiblity for said things, Sometimes when Agent Smith said Humanity is a virus upon the planet or Skynet the AI God decided that worthlesss meatbags needed to be removed from the equation or the Cylons and other killer Robots passing Judgement on Humanity they sure failed their test. Frankly not my concern since they had no problem it being done to others and suddenly cry foul over "Superior" Machines decided that they are are irelevent.

[Simon_Jester]

When I see people go on about bullshit like orbitally bombarding shitty defenseless spacecat people, or going on about how might makes right and that makes committing atrocities on the Na'vi alright as long as it benefits Space America, all I see is just a fucked up rehash of this little miserable shitpiece...

What, the one that started out "White Man's Burden" and ended "HOW DARE THEY DISAGREE WITH ME? FUCK YOU YOU FUCKING FUCKERS OF FUCKTARDED FUCKERY! I'LL KILL YOU ALL!"?

Yeah, now that I think about it the resemblance is striking.

If anything, Avatar and other works need to be MORE UNSUBTLE. I don't think fucking De-Nazification was exactly subtle either, was it? These assholes who go on about orbital bombardment, Space American Foreign Interest, and Might Makes Atrocities Right, need MORE overtly moralistic preachy shit thrown at their faces and shoved down their throats.

I'm not sure it's possible; people have been trying this since War of the Worlds and it never seems to stick.

[Drooling Iguana]

The problem is that Avatar's message seems to be "When cartoonishly evil moustache-twirling villains attack perfect new-age utopias, that's bad." The thing is, that doesn't really carry over into the real world. I mean, sure, you can agree that RDA exploiting the Na'vi is a bad thing, but when we look at the cultures that are actually being exploited in the real-world we're always going to find some flaw that lets us dehumanise them and allow us to come to the conclusion that we had to destroy them in order to save them, and the people doing the destroying are always able to trot out some excuse that seems reasonable on the surface even if it doesn't hold water under scrutiny.

What we need is fewer movies like Avatar and more like The Seven Samurai, which had as a major plot-point the fact that the villagers that the samurai were protecting could be massive dicks at times, but put forth the message that they were worth protecting anyway. Not only would this have been a far better message, it would have made for a better movie as it would have allowed for characters with some actual depth to them rather than the one-dimensional stereotypes we saw.

Really, my problem with Avatar isn't its message but the fact that this message is presented in such an uninteresting, by-the-numbers way that the whole thing just became tedious, to the point that I was looking at my watch as much as I was looking at the screen during the grand finale. I have a Playstation; if I want to see computer-generated scenery blowing up I can do so at any time. If you want to hold my attention through a movie and make me actually care about its events then you need to give me at least a few characters that I can connect with, and Avatar utterly failed at this.

[Sarevok]

Avatar had likeable characters. Quartich, Jake, Neytiri come to mind. Even supporting cast like the renegade pilot and scientist dude were memorable. While I dont buy the movies message the characterisation and dialogue was top notch. Even when they were being cartoonishly evil (Quartich) or naive (Jake) they were very interesting and lively people to watch. All the time they were faced with complex decisions and you never knew what they were going to do next.

[PeZook]

All the time they were faced with complex decisions and you never knew what they were going to do next.

How was it not obvious what Jake or Quaritch were going to do next?

[Starglider]

The starship power requirements are a serious issue. When on this site have we flinched from drawing sweeping conclusions based on a few seconds of SFX footage? A single company is somehow able to generate and use thousands of times the power generated by the entire world (as of 2010), not just at earth but also at a remote alien outpost. Massive quantities of energy solve a lot of problems, but if it was just that you could credibly dodge the issue. It isn't just that though; they have extremely advanced automated manufacturing that approaches Star Trek replicators in capability. The ruggedised lightweight cut-down plant on Pandora can crank out all the equipment they need from mining spoils. Imagine what the factories on earth can do - and not just that, since relies on fairly mature nanotechnology to work all kinds of other applications should be possible. Including making environmental cleanup much easier (e.g. it literally becomes practical to just suck all the pollution out of the air, hell with that much energy you could just liquify any surplus CO2 and shoot it into space).

It doesn't appear to be a post-singularity society, since we haven't seen any evidence of posthuman intelligence, but it damn well must be a post-scarcity one unless there's a massive global totalitarian dictatorship forcibly mantaining a six-order-of-magnitude wealth gap between the elite and the proletariat. Which is possible, but if that were true then no space EPA, no space democrats, yes to glassing Pandrora.

The starship didn't need FTL, it just needed something that messed with inertia (*cough* Higgs Antiboson Ressonance Generator *mumble*) to bring the power requirements down to something that doesn't imply a complete post-scarcity situation on earth.

[Nyrath]

Flogging this dead horse until it is a bloody smear on the pavement, I did some measurements on an image of the ship.

From the engine tips, the habitat module subtends an angle of about seven degrees. To shield the module, you need a plate of tungsten or something dense that casts a gamma-ray shadow over the module. The closer it is to the reaction site, the smaller it can be. (Actually it will probably be more like a cylindrical plug than a plate, that is, taller than its diameter). For instance, if the shadow shield was only ten meters from the reaction, it would have to be four meters in diameter in order to shadow the habitat module.

How long would it last before soaking the cumulative effect of that many gamma rays became a problem?

I dunno. The shadow shield only has to be able to withstand 0.92 year worth of gamma ray bombardment, then it can be replaced at Earth. And these are just gamma rays, its not like they were neutrons or something. No neutron embrittlement, no neutron activation.

[Sky Captain]

Not only that, but also apparently a private company was trusted to operate hardware that could easily wipe out all advanced life from Earth if used maliciously. I suppose there would be all kinds of oversight from Earth governments keeping an eye on the company, but still that implies enormous trust in private sector. If Earth still is divided in factions and a major conflict breaks out then anyone who gains control of that laser battery can easily take the whole Earth hostage.

Barring an environmental mismanagement of epic proportions I fail to see how Earth can be an environmental hellhole. Energy generation clearly is solar and/or fusion based transportation likely powered by clean electricity so those two factors already take out largest source of air pollution. With ludicrous amounts of cheap clean power various industrial processes can be run much more cleanly and efficiently. Toxic chemical waste can be destroyed by reducing it to basic chemical elements that are useful again as raw materials. With cheap power practically anything can be recycled and reused so there is much less need to mine new raw materials out of the ground. Any serious pollution and environment degradation problems they have is likely a legacy from 21st century.
Most of the food in Avatarverse apparently are produced by algae farms so theoretically there could be more land left to nature than on Earth today.

[Darth Wong]

The starship didn't need FTL, it just needed something that messed with inertia (*cough* Higgs Antiboson Ressonance Generator *mumble*) to bring the power requirements down to something that doesn't imply a complete post-scarcity situation on earth.

Fair enough, but as many will point out, we already take it for granted that travel time requirements in sci-fi movies are an area where the authors are simply expected to take shortcuts, hence everyone has at least one impossible technology for moving quickly from point A to point B, without necessarily implying omnipotence in other areas.

[NecronLord]

If one takes the Pandorapedia as canonical, While RDA is administered as a private company, it's supposed to have monopoly by international treaty. Objections about 'one private company' don't hold up, it has no competitors, and doubtless gets to suck on government resources of every major nation. Its supposed to be more powerful than most national governments.

If one doesn't take it as canon, so much as a vague indicator of the thinking, we can toss its mass figure and assume the Venture Star is more plausibly lightweight.

[Samuel]

When on this site have we flinched from drawing sweeping conclusions based on a few seconds of SFX footage?

The travel time is from the supplementary material- without that, there is no reason to suppose the starship goes that fast or uses that much energy. If it took 20years to get to Pandora instead of 7 it wouldn't change the story at all although I imagine the power generation requirements would drop.

[PeZook]

The travel time is from the supplementary material- without that, there is no reason to suppose the starship goes that fast or uses that much energy. If it took 20years to get to Pandora instead of 7 it wouldn't change the story at all although I imagine the power generation requirements would drop.

It's directly stated in the movie they took about six years to complete the trip.

[Sarevok]

All the time they were faced with complex decisions and you never knew what they were going to do next.

How was it not obvious what Jake or Quaritch were going to do next?

Quartich was batshit insane. Jumping out of a burning dropship in a powerarmor suit ? Running outside shooting without mask on ? You knew he was always going to do something evil. But he was extremely full of surprises in how he was going to break stuff and kill things. Same for Jake. The great part of Avatar is that while the characters motivations are transparent there actions frequently leave you going holy shit I never expected that ! It was great to see things like Jake just telepathtically commandeering the red dragon creature. It was foreshadowed before with the skeleton at hometree but I had no idea he would pull it off like that.

[Starglider]

It was great to see things like Jake just telepathtically commandeering the red dragon creature.

Except that the actual struggle wasn't shown; the film cuts from 'Jake jumps' to 'Jake flies in on dragon'.

It was foreshadowed before with the skeleton at hometree

It wasn't foreshadowed, it was telegraphed. Frankly it would have made the Na'vi seem more effective if Tsu'tey had gathered and led the army and Jake just advised them and handled the all important grenade-in-the-air-intake trick. Jake is the lead character though, and dramatic convention dictates that all stops be pulled for his heroic redemption.