Avatar review thread

[Nephtys]

I thought the purpose of the wtfbattleshipcopter was mostly for transporting the robo-suits? Since it had a drop bay that could hold two dozen of them. I guess the big weapons make more sense as an afterthought to a big transport.

Those robot suits anyway are probably more analogous to humvees than tanks in purpose. Their utility power-lifter role and means of allowing a normal person a decent chance of surviving the native wildlife makes sense. And they're more all-terrain than a wheeled vehicle. This further supports why they had the big glass canopies.

[NecronLord]

This thread is degenerating into basically RDA wank scenarios; yes, they had limited stuff, that's blatantly telegraphed in the movie. If you can't live with the idea that a paramilitary security force might have limited equipment in the field, well, there's no helping you. If one's going to have 20/20 hindsight and say that stuff was inadequate, you should know better. Any more long posts full of endless conjecture about what RDA milpeen should have been and I'm locking this thread.

[MKSheppard]

Why spend fuel on fixed wing aircraft that are going to be giant overkill on anything they encounter? Let alone building runways.

C'ept they already did build a pair of runways. You see them briefly as the SSTO comes in to land. They are short yes, but certainly long enough for STOL aircraft to take off.

And you realize how fucking stupid your statement is? I've been collecting Aircraft SACs for quite a while and here's a nice sample:

UH-1N Huey
1,200 SHP turboshaft (it's actually two engines bolted together to become one)
Combat Radius of 81 nautical miles on 191 gallons of fuel and 1.48 hours in the air.

YL-26 Fixed Wing Liason Aircraft
2 x Piston Engines of 255 hp each (510 hp total)
Combat Radius of 427 nautical miles on 145 gallons of fuel and 6.5 hours in the air.

[MKSheppard]

What capabilities do fixed-wing aircraft give to your mining operation?

Being able to deliver personnel to remote areas further and faster than with a helicopter, more cheaply and efficiently? It takes 191 gallons of fuel to keep a UH-1N Huey in the air for 1.48 hours. It only takes 18 to 36 gallons of fuel to keep a fixed wing "grasshoper" observation aircraft in the air for four hours.

[PeZook]

Being able to deliver personnel to remote areas further and faster than with a helicopter, more cheaply and efficiently?

Uh...how are they going to land in that remote area?

It takes 191 gallons of fuel to keep a UH-1N Huey in the air for 1.48 hours. It only takes 18 to 36 gallons of fuel to keep a fixed wing "grasshoper" observation aircraft in the air for four hours.

Observation can be done far cheaper and more efficiently with drones, without having to pay 100 million per plane to ship a pilot over.

[NecronLord]

And you realize how fucking stupid your statement is? I've been collecting Aircraft SACs for quite a while and here's a nice sample:

UH-1N Huey
1,200 SHP turboshaft (it's actually two engines bolted together to become one)
Combat Radius of 81 nautical miles on 191 gallons of fuel and 1.48 hours in the air.

YL-26 Fixed Wing Liason Aircraft
2 x Piston Engines of 255 hp each (510 hp total)
Combat Radius of 427 nautical miles on 145 gallons of fuel and 6.5 hours in the air.

Suurrrre... They can potentially scrap the choppers and replace them with fixed wings and save fuel?

That assumes they don't need the choppers. Which they fairly obviously do. Any costs for fuel, maintenance, pilots, etc on the fixed wings will not replace those for the rotorblade things, they go on top.

Anyway. Like I said, one more random post about how the RDA should have done shit, and this locks. I've not seen an actual review of Avatar in here for literally weeks, so, yeah. Thread off topic, totally hijacked. Ended. You want to continue, make a 'stuff the RDA should have had' thread.


Anyone actually wanting to post a review of the film can PM me and I'll open it up again.

[NecronLord]

Shep has a review of the film to post. Therefore, unlocked for it and comments. RDA-failings specific discussion to be avoided please.

[Shroom Man 777]

I just hope the shitfest gets discontinued. This fucking thread just won't die!

Also, here is a very nice picture of the Venture Star and the space ships and the SSTOs and stuff. It's HUEG!

[MKSheppard]

I saw Avatar on Blu Ray for the first time a few nights ago.

Yes, I know that I'm pretty late to the show for a review, but back when it was in theaters in December, when I decided that yes, I wanted to see it -- it had moved out of the theaters which had rear-windowed captioning (I'm Deaf/Hard of Hearing); and so I had to wait for it to come out on home video.

(Rear Windowed or Open Captioned theaters generally show a movie for only a few days or at best a week, and then they move to a different movie for that theater.)

So my review:

-------Overall-------------

Avatar is a very excellent eye-candy movie. It certainly would look even better in IMAX or on the big screen; and it's certain to find many a home in people's blu ray libraries, plus whatever replaces blu ray -- so that people can show off their new sound system or their new big screen television.

People might bring it out every couple of years when they want some brainless fun; but it won't become a classic like Cameron's Terminator 1/2, Aliens, or The Abyss.

Part of the problem is it has many of the tired leaden themes that began to ruin Star Trek beginning in the Next Generation Era as it tried to stay hip and revelant to whatever was perceived to be the hot social issues of the day.

Remember when they had that episode about warp drives damaging the fabric of space?

Sure, it happened; then went away, and nobody ever mentioned it again.

Avatar's like that episode. It tries to hit just about every issue it can think of in a scattershot fashion; and just doesn't score very well on any of them as a result.

If Cameron had tried to stick to a single theme or two, and inserted a lot more shades of gray into the universe; it would have been a lot better.

Give you an example of why shades of gray are needed:

EVERYTHING in this movie is black and white. And when I say Black and White, its on the scale of a black hole and a supernova.

The humans are set into caricatures of themselves -- the gruff military man who hates scientists -- the scientist who hates military men -- and the corporate exec who just wants to get this problem done with so that the stock price goes up. Oh sure, there is a slight crossover character or two -- like the brave helicopter pilot who isn't all military; but for the most part, all the humans stay into these three themes.

Meanwhile, the Na'vai are pretty much every caricature about Native Americans tossed into a blender with some good old fashioned Gaia mysticism thrown in to sweeten the pot to make it more 'revelant' to modern people/issues. They ALL adhere to the same system -- there are no outcasts who don't give a fuck about the cycle of life and stare at the stars instead....

---The First Act----

It was an excellent first thirty minutes; with zero gravity cryotube fun, spaceships moving through space towards a gas giant's moon. Realistic SSTO drop shuttles, with huge intakes for scramjets.

The way every vehicle in the movie was designed so that it did look plausibly real.

The small details, such as the cargomaster/liftmaster walking through the cargo bay shouting "everyone, put on your masks!" while giving a safety brief on Pandora; the digital pattern utilities that the troops wore.

And how everything looked like it could actually be built with technology today, or technology at least a little more advanced than now (the holographic displays).

The three way tension between the military, scientists, and corporation was nice; because at that point it was still the normal tensions between the kind of Type A (shoot it! shoot it!) personalities and the Type B (look, maybe if we do nothing it will go away) personalities that would be attracted to either discipline.

Nobody had started to take massive stupid pills...yet.

Unfortunately, this was the best part of the movie; and ended with the initial contact between Jake in his Avatar form and the Na'vi.

----Cameron's Stupid Pills that begin in Act Two---

This has become a problem with Cameron, as some other reviewers have said.

He puts together a strong first act that builds up the world, makes you believe that it actually exists...and then once that is done, loses interest and sort of half-asses it.

Aliens

This worked -- sorta because the Colonial Marines did not believe Ripley's story about giant beasties that spit acid and thought it was just another bug hunt. By the time they realized this was not the case; things had gone really south in a bad way.

Still though, the last half of the film would have been substantially improved if the USCMC had simply kept one person onboard the ship -- and when the Marines missed their regular scheduled call in, zoomed in on Hadley's Hope with the Sulaco's sensors, found the smoldering wreckage of both the APC and the Drop ship, and prepared a rescue mission.

You could still have tension and strand our intrepid heroes in Hadley's Hope for the remainder of the movie -- because it would just be a single guy on the Sulaco preparing the drop ship for launch -- he has to fuel it up, arm it, and run the system checks all by himself; rather than having ten other people doing different tasks at the same time.

"Look, I can get down there in six hours, minimum. Five if I skip some safety checks."

"We don't have five hours. The atmo processor is going to blow in five hours."

"...I'll see what I can do."

The Abyss

The opening five minutes was a bit dodgy -- why would a US ballistic missile submarine chase an unknown bogey into a underwater canyon or mountain range?

But I'm willing to accept initial dumbness to set up the stage for the story, but can anyone tell me why Deep Core had to rely on the Mini Submarine equipped with a grappling arm to detach and attach the umbilical?

That's a single point of failure; and you don't want those when you're operating at those kinds of depths. Any sensibly designed Deep Core would have had an emergency explosive bolt release system for the umbilical -- because the engineers would insist on it for safety reasons.

"We don't need a explosive release system for the umbilical."

"What if the support ship loses it's thrusters?"

"We can play out more umbilical."

"What happens when the umbilical spool reaches it's limit?"

"Uhhhh...."

Being cut off from the surface world (I would imagine a lot of DeepCore's power came from the support ship) would still allow you to maintain tension, especially if you make it so that they can't send down another umbilical until the sea state topside calms enough...and that might not happen for a while.

Hell, you could even have them delay firing the explosive bolts on the umbilicial, because doing so means they have to ship in a whole new umbilical head -- so let's try not to do that until absolutely necessary.

So you can still have Deep Core be dragged a short distance -- enough to knock out some critical parts before they decide the danger is great enough to do that step.

Avatar

Okay. Let's go through it by the numbers:

1.) We know that this unobtanium is valuable enough to justify this relatively massive infrastructure investment in Alpha Centauri -- which is not cheap, because Cameron did not use any unobtanium FTL drives; but rather stuff that would feasibly work -- which takes five years to go from Earth to Alpha Centauri.

From the ground scans, we know that Pandora is full of the stuff.

So why is it so critically damned important that we need that deposit under the tree?

I know it's the biggest deposit within 200 klicks -- but this is a very high return to investment material; so you can still make megabucks from the low deposit sites, before you need to mine the big deposits.

Even if we need to mine the deposit; do we even HAVE to destroy the Great Tree?

Simply dig a pit down several hundred feet, and then proceed to horizontally drill a mine shaft towards the deposit under the tree? You wouldn't be able to recover ALL the Unobtanium, due to the fact that you don't want the tree to collapse into your mine and cause a huge crater; but you'd be able to recover significant amounts.

2.) They could have enlisted the help of the Na'vi themselves in their mining operations -- there should be significant crossplay between the two species; instead of "the humans stay in their mechanical colony, while the Na'vi stay in their living trees".

Not EVERYONE in the tribes is going to be all "lets commute with the earth and nature"; there will be outcasts who instead of studying the intricate byplay of nature, actually instead look to the skies and study the orbital mechanics of their gas giant, it's moons, and the other stars in their constellation.

There could be Na'vi who instead of sticking to the tried and true stone arrowheads of generations bygone, are interested in metal arrowheads; since they can penetrate deeper into some of the nasty beasties that live on Pandora.

And of course they'd be outcasts, because instead of finding a piece of stone on the ground -- a gift from the planet -- they have to find bits of metal and then prepare it; either by digging up the metal, or then heating it up so that you can beat it into shape. And wouldn't fires be a no-no in Na'vi society if they live in big, highly flammable trees?

But no, every Na'vi is a space hippie.

3.) Further into #2; why is there no cultural cross play? The legends of Beowulf, Gilgamesh, Odysseus, Roland, Robin Hood, etc would be great interplays -- imagine Jake sitting down in the great tree and beginning to tell the tale of Robin Hood (it doesn't have to be super accurate -- everyone knows the basics of the story -- Sherwood Forest, Sheriff of Nottingham, King John, Maid Marian -- that even if they don't have an accurate recall; they can still construct a heroic epic on the fly.) Or even the story of John Henry, the great steel drivin' man of lore.

4.) Why does everything glow in the dark? Even the Na'vi themselves glow in the dark (those spots)

On Earth, you only see bioluminescence in things which operate in the dark or at night -- and Pandora isn't THAT dark.

I can understand there being a valley that is shoruded in darkness 95% of the time, which is isolated from the rest of Pandora and is only reachable via flying lizard. There, you can have everything being bioluminescent.

But everything on the planet?

5.) There were so many sequences in the movie that you knew what was going to happen -- Cameron literally telegraphed them with NEON signs...

Best example is the talk about that Na'vi who united all the clans by managing to fly that super deadly lizard? Oh, certainly, that will not show up later.

The part where Doctor Ripley talks about how many electrical connections they've mapped in the planetary network; and then brings up how many neurons are in the human brain? That will not show up later!

6.) How does Jake somehow manage to learn archery, animal riding, animal husbandry, the language, in a couple months and do it sufficiently well enough to pass an initation rite -- when it takes the Na'vi themselves a childhood of growing up to learn all this?

He should have done something sufficiently important enough or impressive to the Na'vi that they decided:

"Okay, we'll skip the requirement for animal riding, archery, etc in light of you doing something that has never been done before....BUT...you will still need to do the final rite of passage." (aka find a flying beastie)

This impressive thing he does could be him taking in one of those dog analogues that attacked him the first night on Pandora in the wild. It could turn out that they're considered bad by the Na'vi because either:

A.) They're scavengers, and steal kills from bigger animals.

B.) They don't have those universal neural bus ports, and aren't trusted by the na'vi because how can you trust something that you can't mindlink with?

Until of course Jake brings in a PUPPY DOG ANALOGUE FROM THE COLD. ARF ARF. WHINE WARK.

The Second act generally ends after Jake has been initated into the tribe, done the nasty nasty; and the Corporation has decided to burn out the tree. Which is a really sad thing.

We already knew that the Navi were doing a guerilla war against the company (witness the haulers that drive in with arrows in their tires in the opening cinematic sequence), so why wasn't that developed further -- with more gray in it -- instead of it being all black and white over the Great Tree; it could have been over a series of valleys that are important to the Na'vi, and sit astride a major logistics route from the open-pit mine to the main human base?

The Nav'i want the great yellow vehicles to stop driving down that route and scaring the animals in that valley -- it could be the valley where Na'vi warriors are sent as part of their tribal initation rites; while the corporation is getting increasingly tired of having to repair the haulbot trucks (while the Navi can't destroy them, they can still ruin the sensor optics).

The third act is where the aneurysms for me began. I'll detail that in another post.

[Guardsman Bass]

Avatar

Okay. Let's go through it by the numbers:

1.) We know that this unobtanium is valuable enough to justify this relatively massive infrastructure investment in Alpha Centauri -- which is not cheap, because Cameron did not use any unobtanium FTL drives; but rather stuff that would feasibly work -- which takes five years to go from Earth to Alpha Centauri.

From the ground scans, we know that Pandora is full of the stuff.

So why is it so critically damned important that we need that deposit under the tree?

There's really no justification in the movie, other than they got lazy (the fluff says that they tried to mine the floating mountains, but a couple of their miners got killed in the process and they abandoned it).

I know it's the biggest deposit within 200 klicks -- but this is a very high return to investment material; so you can still make megabucks from the low deposit sites, before you need to mine the big deposits.

Even if we need to mine the deposit; do we even HAVE to destroy the Great Tree?

Simply dig a pit down several hundred feet, and then proceed to horizontally drill a mine shaft towards the deposit under the tree? You wouldn't be able to recover ALL the Unobtanium, due to the fact that you don't want the tree to collapse into your mine and cause a huge crater; but you'd be able to recover significant amounts.

We don't know how close to the surface the Unobtainium was beneath the tree. It's a big tree, remember - if it's near the surface, you might accidentally cause the tree to collapse down on your guys (and bring the tree down, which is a whole other can of worms since they're trying to work with the Omaticaya).

2.) They could have enlisted the help of the Na'vi themselves in their mining operations -- there should be significant crossplay between the two species; instead of "the humans stay in their mechanical colony, while the Na'vi stay in their living trees".

What are they going to offer them? The Na'vi (or at least the Omaticaya) seem to have it pretty easy in their neck of the woods, dangerous predators aside (Jake even says as much in his last report, when he says that they have nothing to offer the Omaticaya to get them to move). There's plentiful food and water, for example.

Not EVERYONE in the tribes is going to be all "lets commute with the earth and nature"; there will be outcasts who instead of studying the intricate byplay of nature, actually instead look to the skies and study the orbital mechanics of their gas giant, it's moons, and the other stars in their constellation.

Why?

You're projecting human behavior on to the Na'vi (who, is has to be said, are a very human-ish alien race). That said, we do know that some of them were curious about the "Sky People", since they attended the school Dr. Augustine had set up.

There could be Na'vi who instead of sticking to the tried and true stone arrowheads of generations bygone, are interested in metal arrowheads; since they can penetrate deeper into some of the nasty beasties that live on Pandora.

Keep in mind that the Na'vi, from what we've seen in the movie, have a very ritualized view of killing and hunting, among other things - remember Neytiri freaking out over the fact that she had to kill one of the wolf-things to save Jake? They're not that eager to be more effective at killing them, particularly when they already get enough food to get by, and seem to have a great deal of security.

But no, every Na'vi is a space hippie.

It is a bit unrealistic for them to all be so devoted (although the neuro-connection to mother nature might explain part of that). The original pilot idea actually had Na'vi who were working with the Avatar-people as guides.

3.) Further into #2; why is there no cultural cross play? The legends of Beowulf, Gilgamesh, Odysseus, Roland, Robin Hood, etc would be great interplays -- imagine Jake sitting down in the great tree and beginning to tell the tale of Robin Hood (it doesn't have to be super accurate -- everyone knows the basics of the story -- Sherwood Forest, Sheriff of Nottingham, King John, Maid Marian -- that even if they don't have an accurate recall; they can still construct a heroic epic on the fly.) Or even the story of John Henry, the great steel drivin' man of lore.

We only get an overview of the time Jake spent with Neytiri and the Omaticaya, including a few highlights (like learning the language, or taming the banshee), so for all we know, he did talk about Earth and other stories. I'd wager it had already happened before, though - presumably Grace Augustine taught some Na'vi children at her school about where the "Sky People" had come from.

4.) Why does everything glow in the dark? Even the Na'vi themselves glow in the dark (those spots)

On Earth, you only see bioluminescence in things which operate in the dark or at night -- and Pandora isn't THAT dark.

I can understand there being a valley that is shoruded in darkness 95% of the time, which is isolated from the rest of Pandora and is only reachable via flying lizard. There, you can have everything being bioluminescent.

But everything on the planet?

The movie doesn't really explain it well, although the fluff says it was a partial adaption to the "twilight" night conditions on Pandora (it never truly gets dark at night) instead of night vision.

5.) There were so many sequences in the movie that you knew what was going to happen -- Cameron literally telegraphed them with NEON signs...

Best example is the talk about that Na'vi who united all the clans by managing to fly that super deadly lizard? Oh, certainly, that will not show up later.

The part where Doctor Ripley talks about how many electrical connections they've mapped in the planetary network; and then brings up how many neurons are in the human brain? That will not show up later!

Yeah, it's a pretty straight-forward plot. I think it worked, for the most part - a more complicated plot might have gotten in the way of the chemistry between Neytiri and Jake Sully, as well as the appreciation of the scenery.

6.) How does Jake somehow manage to learn archery, animal riding, animal husbandry, the language, in a couple months and do it sufficiently well enough to pass an initation rite -- when it takes the Na'vi themselves a childhood of growing up to learn all this?

He should have done something sufficiently important enough or impressive to the Na'vi that they decided:

"Okay, we'll skip the requirement for animal riding, archery, etc in light of you doing something that has never been done before....BUT...you will still need to do the final rite of passage." (aka find a flying beastie)

I don't think he learned the language that well in the time he's with Neytiri, seeing as how he had to borrow the other Na'vi guy to act as his translator when he rode in with Toruk and gave an epic speech. Most of the training with regards to the banshee seems to be in terms of capturing it, since once he stabs his head-tentacle into its head-tentacle, it just flies to his mental commands.

[Shroom Man 777]

The way every vehicle in the movie was designed so that it did look plausibly real.

Even the walkers?

So why is it so critically damned important that we need that deposit under the tree?

I know it's the biggest deposit within 200 klicks -- but this is a very high return to investment material; so you can still make megabucks from the low deposit sites, before you need to mine the big deposits.

Even if we need to mine the deposit; do we even HAVE to destroy the Great Tree?

Simply dig a pit down several hundred feet, and then proceed to horizontally drill a mine shaft towards the deposit under the tree? You wouldn't be able to recover ALL the Unobtanium, due to the fact that you don't want the tree to collapse into your mine and cause a huge crater; but you'd be able to recover significant amounts.

2.) They could have enlisted the help of the Na'vi themselves in their mining operations -- there should be significant crossplay between the two species; instead of "the humans stay in their mechanical colony, while the Na'vi stay in their living trees".

Awww... Shep! This is totally CONTRARY to what I was expecting, and you are actually saying that it was NOT necessary for the RDA to do the bad things. Man, Sheppy-Pooh. I knew you're a totally sweet thing underneath that gunmetal grey riveted titanium fuselage of yours.

This impressive thing he does could be him taking in one of those dog analogues that attacked him the first night on Pandora in the wild. It could turn out that they're considered bad by the Na'vi because either:

A.) They're scavengers, and steal kills from bigger animals.

B.) They don't have those universal neural bus ports, and aren't trusted by the na'vi because how can you trust something that you can't mindlink with?

Until of course Jake brings in a PUPPY DOG ANALOGUE FROM THE COLD. ARF ARF. WHINE WARK.

Adorable!

We already knew that the Navi were doing a guerilla war against the company (witness the haulers that drive in with arrows in their tires in the opening cinematic sequence)

Hmm... yeah. But was that actual open warfare? The chief and the rest of the Na'vi didn't really seem to be on war footing at all with the humans. It could've been like the dickheaded acts of a few angry Na'vi, less guerrilla warfare and more protesting Palestinians throwing rocks at the IDF or something. No one ever said that they wrecked any of those haulers too.

For all we know it could've just been some dicks vandalizing RDA property, than actual guerrilla war.

[Admiral Valdemar]

In the original script, the key deposits of the ore were located under Home Tree, making the situation more clear cut and removing the need to go out and destroy a valuable uplink to Eywa.

[PeZook]

They ALL adhere to the same system -- there are no outcasts who don't give a fuck about the cycle of life and stare at the stars instead....

That we are not shown them doesn't mean there aren't. Na'Vi society isn't really explored very much beyond the basics of their life philosophy.

And are you seriously suggesting we should be shown Na'Vi "studying the orbital motions of their gas giant"? In a neolithic society which doesn't even have written language? They probably dont even know what that gas giant really is

[NecronLord]

And are you seriously suggesting we should be shown Na'Vi "studying the orbital motions of their gas giant"? In a neolithic society which doesn't even have written language? They probably dont even know what that gas giant really is

That's exactly what Neolithic people did. Not in a scientific sense, mind, and not with understanding of orbital mechanics. But things like Newgrange and Stonehenge are prime examples of just that. Doubtless the Na'vi would pay considerable attention to Polythemus and its other moons.

[Shroom Man 777]

In the original script, the key deposits of the ore were located under Home Tree, making the situation more clear cut and removing the need to go out and destroy a valuable uplink to Eywa.

That IS what it was in the movie. The valuable uplink to Eywa (Tree of Souls) had no unobtanium in it. All it had was a fuckload of angry indians.

[SAMAS]

In the original script, the key deposits of the ore were located under Home Tree, making the situation more clear cut and removing the need to go out and destroy a valuable uplink to Eywa.

That IS what it was in the movie. The valuable uplink to Eywa (Tree of Souls) had no unobtanium in it. All it had was a fuckload of angry indians.

It was a deliberate preemptive strike. Hit them before they hit us, and demoralize them by destroying a major uplink.

[Shroom Man 777]

I know.

[weemadando]

OK, having now seen Avatar (watched it at home on DVD) I have the following to say.

That was shit.

Let's ignore the stupid Pocahontas plot and all that.

And lets even ignore the terrible acting.

In fact, we can even ignore the horrible vehicle design, the fact that the Na'vi interact with their world by sticking their dick into every creature out there, or the Zion Rave Scene's where everyone is rubbing dicks together. We'll ignore all that.

Let's look at one fucking thing: The fact that when the big greedy corporation is shown evidence that the entire ecosystem and especially the plants are part of one massive organic neural network capable of storing whole consciences (or so it would seem), rather than going: "FUCK YEAH!" and calling in even more scientists to exploit this resource that will no doubt be far more valuable in the long run than unobtainium instead decide to destroy it all.

Let's not go into how stupid the mercs are. What was the point of putting in a ground force in the big assault, especially one with soft, squishy and exposed grunts? Why give the order to scatter when the best option would have been to remain a tight pack and present a wall of lead to anything attacking?

And if you've got orbital imagery of all the clans gathering around the big tree that's your target, why not drop a fucking satellite onto it from orbit rather than committing your whole force to an area where you know that your biggest advantage (tech) will be made redundant.

But I guess I'm just missing hte message, that we're all terrible people and should commit seppuku to let gaia and the first peoples of the world come back.

[adam_grif]

Oh good, here I was worried that the thread might not hit 50 pages.

[PeZook]

Grace presented evidence to Selfridge?

[weemadando]

Grace presented evidence to Selfridge?

The spiel on the trees, combined with her (at least 6 years of) other research findings, and Sully's observations on how the Na'vi all interact with the wildlife and the life tree things make for a more than compelling enough case.

[PeZook]

Yeah, but it didn't seem like Selfridge ever saw any of that evidence. It may be because he's a prick who's only concerned about running the mining operation smoothly, or just that Grace never bothered sending him any reports because of their, ah, "special relationship".

The entire exchange looked like a last-ditch attempt to dissuade the RDA dickheads from going ahead with their brilliant demolitions plan.

[Vympel]

Probably already posted, but funny:-

http://www.howitshouldhaveended.com/vid ... 2889043001

[Admiral Valdemar]

Probably already posted, but funny:-

http://www.howitshouldhaveended.com/vid ... 2889043001

Fuckin' a!

Although Ando is right, the biggest value of Pandora, aside from fucking sentient aliens(!) and the superconductor ore, was the network encompassing the whole moon. Why didn't the future version of GSK or Pfizer tell RDA to take a hike? Actually, I bet Weyland-Yutani would have done this the right way. And by right way, I mean making money off exploiting the local flora and fauna AND minerals.

[erdbeerbowle]

In fact, we can even ignore the horrible vehicle design,

Not trying to be an ass, but can you elaborate on this part a bit? I'm hardly hardly an engineer, but I've been wondering myself on just how realistic/practical those ducted-fan helicopter things are.