James Cameron's AVATAR series - Page 57

You don't seem to realize that anyone can create a plot that perfectly follows the monomyth and it's still a shitty story. If it was that easy, don't you think there'd be a lot more bestselling authors out there? We could all just open J Campbell's book, change a few aesthetic details here and there, and be bestsellers right?

Campbell's world is poorly thought out. The protag's entire purpose for going to Pandora is to try to get money/spine repair. This is a world where a single company has the material wealth to fund the colonization/strip mining of a planet. That implies a gigantic leap in general wealth of human civilization.

Now, how can a spinal repair be SO expensive in a world that much richer? If you look at the average per capita wealth of a citizen compared to the GDP of the nation, you'll see that it doesn't make much sense for a material culture that wealthy to have a person unable to pay for a spine repair. Yes, there are differing levels of prosperity around the planet, but Jake Sully obviously came from one of the more economically prosperous nation-states (if there even are nations on Earth anymore). People in general would not stand around and allow gov't/corporations to gouge them THAT badly in terms of basic pricing indexes.

In TODAY's world we are very close to a cure for spinal injuries already. Tissue regeneration techniques that have been demoed at the lab-rat level; microprocessor-based electronic bypass; and first-response techniques that prevent a lot of the damage as the accident/trauma occurs.

Now you're telling me in a future where human/alien DNA can be spliced together to form a viable living creature AND bring this creature to life (which are basically god-powers) AND use an MRI machine to telepathically control this alien, they don't have a cheap and affordable way to repair spines?

Sorry, spinal repair/damage prevention is the kind of thing that would be 100% taken care of before a marine ever signs a contract. In fact, it's economically profitable for the gov't/company to do so. It's expensive to train a soldier. It's expensive to maintain them. And it's expensive to pay them disabilities. The economically sensible thing to do is put first-response tech into a soldier's spine so the damage doesn't occur in the first place.

I'd be fine if James Cameron created a world where bio-tech was not advanced and someone got a spinal injury etc. But he didn't. He fills his movie with millions of reasons for why spinal repair shouldn't be expensive, then gives the main character a spinal injury as his raison d'etre. This has nothing to do with a stupid monomyth. This is flat out shitty SF extrapolation.

I can go on with many other facets of the movie that are broken. Take the flying lizards for instance. They're gigantic, flying meat-eating predators. Yet, somehow they've been domesticated by the Na'vi. Do you see many cultures with herds of tigers? No. You don't. Why? It's economically insane. The costs of feeding meat to these fuckers outweighs any amount of meat you'd actually get from training them to help hunt. OK, fair enough, they just ride the flying lizards when they went, otherwise the lizards hunt on their own.

OK, so what competitive advantage do the lizards get for helping the Na'vi and risking life and limb? Oh, that's right. NONE. They just do it coz they were all born with USB cords and getting beat up in one fight makes the lizard loyal to the bitter end. Makes a lot of sense. Further, the lizards are seen to inhabit rock cliffs in gigantic flocks. This makes zero sense as there's no ecology that could support that level of top-tier predators. The caloric density would need to be immense for that to occur. Almost impossible on land, and only possible underwater due to having huge areas of nearly empty ocean with roaming herds of fish/squid etc similar to pastoralism.

Third, if the Na'vi are all connected to the soul tree, and literally share a telepathic link with the land and the other Na'vi people, why do they have a crude tribal society that has a warrior and priest caste and the population is segregated into several competing tribes. It was stated in the movie that the tribes wouldn't unite or help each other until one of them got on a giant orange lizard. OK, now why would they be living in a very human-esque way when they have a completely alien form of communication. When they've got a hive mind filled with all the voices of their ancestors, you'd think some of these barriers of miscommunication and concept of "other" would fade away. When those kinds of barriers to cooperation fade away, you don't see internecine tribal warfare and segregation like the Na'vi world has. Again, James Cameron created a concept of spiritualism then pasted a cliched "native" type society on top of it. The two don't go together. It's hard to justify war to people when everyone's linked together. It's like telling someone to kill their brother. Yeah, they can do it with enough pressure, but highly unlikely, and nearly impossible on a societal level. Propaganda doesn't work when people can just plug into each other.

Then you have the entire concept of monogamy. How would monogamy work in a society like the Na'vi where everything is supposed to be connected and life is sacred? What would be the point of monogamy? That seems like a very stupid facet to add for no reason other than James Cameron wanting the warrior guy to have conflict with Jake. Oh, well we could argue it's the basic tenet of life trying to maximize expression of one's own genes and the social more was built out of that need to regulate sexual competition. But wait, that's an Earth type of trait. Pandora's an alien world. Why is this alien world operating on the same type of logic as Earth-based creatures? Kind of invalidates anyone saying that you can't use Earth-based evolutionary logic and apply it to Pandora. Because James Cameron's does it himself by placing monogamy as a social more into Na'vi culture.

Then there is the economically unfeasible way that the corporation somehow has weaponry perfectly suited to Pandora's atmosphere. If humans can't breath it, that means the gas composition of the atmosphere is different from Earth's. Helicopters are not going to just fly like normal. Rockets are not going to active afterburners and speed off like normal. Not a single aspect of Earth-based weaponry will function with any degree of combat reliability on another planet.

So, somehow, this corporation, while bankrolling the colonization and mining of an entire planet, can also fund the R&D to develop an entire military for the purposes of mining Pandora. When at the beginning of the movie they're not even sure if it will lead to war or not. The entire point of trying for peace is to avoid the prohibitive costs of developing and deploying weapons suited to Pandora. Except, that's not exciting in a movie. No, in the movie, all the actual costs of a war are already paid for and there's just this grizzled Colonel rearing to go kick some alien butt. Therefore, there's no point to developing an expensive avatar program whatsoever and the obviously least expensive route is to wipe out the Na'vi. But no, that's not what a corporation does. They simultaneously create a massive civilian based research/anthropology program to study/interact/perhaps over a decade understand and persuade the natives to leave, while being a mining operation, while being a military R&D company. YEAH, that makes a LOT of business sense.

OH WAIT, but maybe there was a private para-military organization that came and did all the R&D beforehand then just left. So they can sit on Earth and sell their products to all the mining companies leaving to go to Pandora. Except there's only one company on Pandora. And logically, a company would secure exclusive rights before they invested that much money into a planet-sized operation. So an entire corporation would go all the way to an alien planet so they can do R&D, develop weapons, and then just leave, in the hopes that a mining company will go to Pandora and then want to buy their stuff. Right!

Sorry, James Cameron didn't think this shit through at all. He treats it like it's another country on planet Earth and all the economics and usual corporate hijinks that we use in Africa and the Middle East are good enough for a planet light-years away with a totally different atmosphere. He slapped some cliche concepts together that push the buttons of the general movie-goer and called it a day. Killing trees = bad. Killing natives for resources = bad. Native culture = pure, good, healing. I'm fine with whatever theme he wants to create, but he needs to do a better job plot-wise and world-building wise to have these themes actually make sense. He didn't. Everything he put into the plot and world-building was solely so he could create scenes like glowsticks hanging from branches, vast flapping hordes of flying lizards, and a massive tree getting rocketed to death by a helicopter fleet.