Reflections on Avatar by Ray Kurzweil
kurzweilai.net
kurzweilai.net
Much of the human technology was obviously modeled after current American military tech, and that was a deliberate choice. This approach allowed Cameron to tap into current feelings and cultural currents. If things had been more 'realistic', then it would have been alien to modern audiences. Really, properly modeling the future would have made the story far more difficult to tell.
It's darned hard to make a story that's universally accessible. 'Avatar' is a pretty decent sci-fi movie that's understandable to people all over the world. It will also revolutionize cinematography and filmmaking from this point onward. Any proper analysis of the film should keep those points in mind.
Nerds want every question answered with a reason, even if that question shouldn't have one. Why is Superman strong? He gets his powers from the sun. Why does he get powers from the sun? Because his skin is a solar battery. Well, why is he still strong at night? Well, he's charged up for years as an adolescent, he has a lot of stored power. Ah ha! Well, in issue #626, the Parasite drained him of all energy before Batman saved him - shouldn't he be back to zero and weak by dawn? No, they say, because of...
I've never sat through Back to the Future and seen a nerd say "but what exactly does a flux capacitor do in order to enable time travel, this movie is so unrealistic!". I think that as long as a minimal effort is given to explain away these points it is satisfactory to most people as long as those points are not essential to the movie: the physics of time travel is not essential to the story of Back to the Future.
However, the more important to the movie, the more time must be spent. Cloning dinosaurs, and specifically how they clone dinosaurs, was pretty important to Jurassic Park. Hence, more effort was placed in explaining this to the audience (they're all girl dinosaurs, fossilized dna, need frog dna, etc etc). This is significantly more involved than "oh we have a flux capacitor for that" explanation. Both are perfectly fine though, since they match their necessity to the movie.
I personally felt that Avatar succeeded at this level of explanation. Aside from "unobtanium" somehow making it past the first edit of the script, the technological/biological stuff was fine: Unoriginal? Yes. Uncomfortably unrealistic? No.
However, I think absolutely everything else about that movie was pretty subpar. The plot was really uninspired. Its sad, so much gloss on top of such an empty story. On top of that, I really was not that impressed with the graphics. I'm sure plenty of people will tell me I don't know what I'm talking about, but when I'm 70 years old and someone asks me, visual effects-wise, what was the highlight of my movie going career, I'm going to say seeing the brachiosaur in Jurassic Park, and probably won't even remember Avatar.
Do any of Asimov's books on "positronic brains" hold up to genuine, in-depth scientific inquiry? He just glossed over the details of their workings. Does this mean they're not sci-fi?
To put it another way—the initial state of the universe when the book starts can be anything you like, with any rules you like. SF is just a strict dedication setting up those rules and following them wherever they may lead. ("Hard" sci-fi additionally requires that those rules be a superset of the rules of our own universe.)
Perhaps in the case of Avatar, the science would be anthropology with a small bite of psychology and history mixed in.
A lot of good sci-fi stories gloss over the details of several sciences (and often violate them in ways that would make a screenwriter turn red) to have the opportunity to examine one specific idea.
Or, to put it more concisely, they tell one story while pretending to tell another.
Because of all the buzz with the "go green" and climate change, this version attracts more people (manuscript freezed before the UNCCC Copenhagen).
[1] http://chud.com/articles/articles/21969/1/PROJECT-880-THE-AV...
Gundam?
Frankly if I was on some mission light years from civilization, I'd like to have something dead-reliable and easy to fix if it breaks.
Complaining that a fantasy movie doesn't make realistic predictions about the future of technology is like complaining that a romantic comedy didn't have enough action scenes.
Raw unadorned reality doesn't lend itself to make great movies.
Once this technology becomes cheap enough, then it'll make economic sense to make really smart movies to chase the long tail of very specific niche audiences, but movies cost too much right now to be able to do that effectively. People who like really smart movies are a tiny niche audience. You have to dumb it down or it'll lose money.
First, I too was disappointed by the simple, anti-corporate picture it painted. But it wasn't 100% black-and-white. There was a short scene in which Ribisi's character is reluctant to attack, and the army guy bullies him into it. I think the story would have benefited greatly just by expanding and amplifying that scene (although it was already a rather long movie).
Kurzweil criticizes that the technology a century hence ought to be more advanced. He says the only revolutionary thing shown in the movie is the avatar tech itself. First, he misses the obvious fact of star travel and the hibernation that it relied on.
But more significantly, I think he misses that while things advance, the form they take tends to ape what we're used to. Thus, our automobiles are very much "horseless carriages". Tablet computers are named that for their resemblance to zillion-year-old stone tablets. Since the tech in the movie was largely part of the scenery and not really highlighted, I think it's entirely to be expected that we wouldn't recognize how advanced it is.
As far as the script goes, my favourite line was Sigorney Weaver's toss-off about the Tree of Souls: "I'd die to get a sample of that". Between that and the obvious dualism intended with the mechanical and natural avatars, there's enough evidence of a thinking screenwriter to justify the film. Too bad it never really comes together.
"The spirits of your ancestors living in the trees" sounds mystical and backward, but "copying your brain to the internet to be saved forever" sounds wonderfully Kurzweillian. Cameron bridges the two, but the technology was too advanced for Kurzweil to identify it as such. :)
One thing I thought was neat about the original Avatar script that got left out of the movie was a closing threat from the Na'vi to the humans: Our giant biological computer has analyzed you and engineered a virus that will destroy you, should you return to Pandora.
Kurzweil sounds like a child, angry because Cameron didn't let the humans have that advanced technology.
In fact, it's rather Kurzweil who fails to see "beyond" today's technology, and envision a world where technology doesn't look like it does today, but is fused with nature.
And Cameron didn't show that nature can be brutal? Dude, it was full of monsters. The Na'vi could be brutal.
It was a badly written review, and Kurzweil didn't seem to grasp the film at all. He also seems to have a personal grudge with nature. Not cool.
The rhinoceros was huge. A couple bullets, even from the robots, will not stop something that size in it's tracks.
The robots are smaller, flimsier, and seemed to posses lesser firepower than tanks.
Elephants have armor and defense nowhere in their body. The rhinoceros in Avatar looked like they had a veritable carapace to me.
The rhinoceros was about 2 times the mass of the robots (even they seem light, in realty they shouldn't, different composition, eg. man and a humanoid). The gun was at least a .50 cal. With all this advancement in technology, AI should guide the gun to Aim at the knees (technology that exists today, evaluation of damage trough pre-imposted data).
And yes, you're right, it's just a movie.
There's a ton more I want to interject with, but yes. Just a movie.
James Cameron is a white man using technology and corporations to make movies about how white men, technology, and corporations are evil. I lasted about an hour and a half through the movie before the preachiness outweighed the special effects for me. District 9 was better told and even had a more exciting mecha battle.
The dull grey ships and weapons of the military look backwards and old compared to Avatar technology.
You are putting words into his mouth to support your interpretation of those images. I interpreted those images as simply another demonstration of the lack of imagination the movie displays. Whether riding a big flying animal is derived from Greek mythology or from Harry Potter is irrelevant.
Before flinging the first criticism that comes to your mind at him, be critical of your own criticism. Supposing 'the guy know nothing of Greek Mythology' is a vast and unnecessary underestimation of his intelligence and credentials. If you'd bother to look him up, you'd see that he is probably quite aware of the mythological origins of these images.
"... and the flying birds were derivative of Potter creatures, including mastering flying on the back of big bird creatures."
And I am sure Kurzweil knows about Pegasus. All the more the reason his article was bunk!
They didn't show the same restraint with the nature, unfortunately. Why did everything need six legs and four eyes, and why didn't Na'vi hair evolve to be prehensile when they started needing to shove it down the data tubes of irate wildlife?
As an aside, having all those links in the text is very distracting.
For the same reason most animals on earth have 4 legs and two eyes, common genetic ancestry; It was actually a nice touch.
> and why didn't Na'vi hair evolve to be prehensile when they started needing to shove it down the data tubes of irate wildlife
They already had hands, a prehensile hair connection wouldn't likely offer enough advantage to become a primary trait.
two pairs of eyes should give the owner superior awareness of its surroundings.
six legs... the na'vi didn't have 6 limbs. they're an exception. that should have been continued, to maybe 4 arms, like the tree monkeys did.
showing the use of 6 legs isn't a problem. enough things on earth already do that.
humanoids with 4 legs might have worked... they'd have looked less human though. also, i can't imagine why a 4-legged humanoid would ride a 6-legged horse. Kurzweil pointed out that this film is meant to make money, so 4 legs wouldn't have worked so well.
humanoids with 4 arms, that's already difficult from a practical standpoint. what does a 4-armed humanoid use its arms for? the bow and arrow for a 4-armed creature might just be too hard to extrapolate.
For it to be "Christian" symbolism, it would have to be quite a bit more explicit than general themes like gardens and trees. Once you start turning fiction into symbolism you can make anything out of everything.
Christian mythology shares a lot of common ideas with other mythology, according to scholars. The Garden of Eden was a paradisiacal forest where humans lived in harmony with nature, where the Tree of Life gave them immortality, so long as they ignored the Tree of Knowledge (at peril of being cast out). In Avatar, the Na'vi live in harmony with nature in a paradisiacal forest with a Great Tree, afforded quasi-immortality by 'spiritual-uplink' to the tree, and in the complete absence of technology. Then along come the evil, technologically advanced humans who of course have been cast out of their own paradisiacal habitat (or destroyed it).
It doesn't sound like the loosest connect ever to me. one of the characters is called 'Grace Augustine'
I thought this point was particularly well though out.
No profit-driven model of an corporate military campaign to put down a native uprising would send state-of-the-art anything. They'd send on-hand dated military surplus weapons and equipment and troops to fire full auto machine guns, flamethrowers, napalm, white phosphorus rounds, field artillery, and lots of ammo.
State of the art military vs. peasant uprisings are useless. Watch the movie "Zulu Dawn" sometime.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zulu_Dawn
Like the gatling guns on the front of A-10s and A-10s themselves the Air Force kept pulling out of retirement. Some situations just don't require anything more sophisticated than a gatling gun and something well armored and maneuverable to hang a gatling gun on the front of.
For example, Skynet... imho, that will NEVER happen, cause everybody is so fscking scared of it. We'll get to the point where it could have happened, but fear will probably ensure we have safeguards and such.
No, the basic story is taken right from FernGully.
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