RealityPrime

I thought I could avoid it, but after reading my friend Raph’s thoughtful review, I had to chime in too. Spoilers, etc..

Let’s start with the word. Cameron subtly reprimands the modern use of the word Avatar (embodiment of a person in a virtual environment: 3D, 2D, or text) in favor of the original meaning (embodiment of a god in human form). The human/god forms in ancient lore were distinguished from mere mortals by their blue skin. Cameron flips that around on us and makes the natives blue.

[Neal Stephenson also played with this idea in his use of the word to imply the users of a virtual world were like gods, or at least the spirits inhabiting the virtual bodies, although it was the virtual bodies that seemed to get all the magical powers.]

I bring this up because the movie, like most mythology, makes no freaking sense on an intellectual level. It must be appreciated on a more mystical/humanistic/experiential level, if at all. That doesn’t mean it’s worthless — just the opposite — but one must significantly disarm one’s intellectual reflexes to appreciate it. For many people, that’s frighteningly all too easy to do, but then there are the rest of us reading and writing reviews…

In this case, the movie plays like the most vivid dream any of us has ever had. People do things for completely inexplicable reasons most of the time (lame explanations notwithstanding), but they do them in such a magical and seductive setting it’s hard to complain. So people complain instead about the tired and timid plot. But it’s not just the plot that’s both confused and unrealistic, it’s just about every human decision in it.

Don’t believe me?

In reality, if giant rocks full of magic superconductor are just levitating for the taking, it would seem to be easier to tow one away than dig the stuff out from under giant self-defending trees (unless the intense magnetic flux in the rock-scapades rips the very hemoglobin out of your blood, in which case let’s not go there in overgrown helicopters either, okay? We’ll just scoop them up from orbit on long tethers…)

In reality, if a rock was worth $20M an ounce, the corporate head honcho wouldn’t leave his billion dollar lump of coal just floating on his desk in a camp full of mercs with guns and spare space shuttles. Don’t tell me they couldn’t sneak it back to earth in some laundry, or at least that they’d try. In fact, how long would it take before the mercs decided their measly cut wasn’t enough and held the planet hostage, declared autonomy or whatnot?

In reality, if the military sent a novice spy into a shiny new body and into the native’s camp where there was even the slightest chance he might give away the secret battle plans after he fell in love with the sexy alien princess, don’t you think they’d be watching his datastream or video memos before the big reveal? In reality, they’d have a real-time kill-switch and round-the-clock monitors watching his every move — through his own eyes and ears no less. In fact, they wouldn’t even have told him the real plans, but probably tested him with a fake agenda early on to see how easily he’d turn.

In reality, if it takes a 1-ton MRI machine to read your biologically-based thoughts and muscle stimuli, then it takes something on the order of a 1-ton MRI machine around the avatar’s biological body to apply the transmitted control signals and send more stimuli back to you. Unless, of course, the avatar’s technology is not entirely biological and yet somehow built into the body itself, in which case one wonders how the signal survives when all other EM fields are perturbed by flux. In reality, if this worked, it would be better to stay in orbit and control the avatars very remotely.

And in reality (and in another Cameron film in fact), given the choice of going into battle with combative natives in a high-risk-zone vs. simply lifting the shuttle high into orbit to drop its bomb, which would real people have done? Nuke ‘em for orbit, it’s the only way to be sure…

Hell, at least in Aliens, Burke had a reason for being so stupidly homicidal — not just the money but covering his bureaucratic ass because he was the one who sent the friggin’ colonists to their deaths in the first place! He’d do anything to not get caught and then make enough money to buy forgiveness from mama corporation. Now that’s some realistic human decision making.

And lest we claim the environmentalist theme is the one truly believable subtext, are we really going to reduce all of modern environmentalism to simply saving beautiful people in pristine places? That’s so Teddy Roosevelt.

Pandora had (apparently) only six, maybe seven kinds of higher animal life, one of them looking like photoshopped big-eyed blue waif supermodels. The rest of them would sooner kill you than let you mentally rape them with your fiber-optic pony tail that all Pandorean life seemed to evolve with (however, the Na’vi lost their chest breathing and extra legs for some reason, and added breasts for no reason). The plants spend their hard-won energy putting on a fancy light show (to attract the equivalent of bees?) while fickly disappearing with the slightest touch. Lame. And the arguably top planetary species, the mystical tree god that remembers everything and who’s mere gymnosperm knows the hero is a hero before anyone else does, abandons its core religious tenets and gets lots of stuff killed when it simply could have brokered a deal to cough up some minerals and maybe start an astounding eco-tourism / avatar-vacation business to boot — save everyone and make a handy profit. Tell me that’s even remotely realistic!

So let’s face it. The movie was all a dream, a modern myth in graphic form. However it was a beautiful dream. I’d see it again. So good work, Cameron.

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