You side with the humans.. who show up to a place - a place that the inhabitants have known as home for generations - and just.. take it by force?
The movie may lack shades of gray, which could be a failing, but you still aren't supposed to choose black.
The movie doesn't give you enough information to choose anyone, really.
I think what bothers me most about Avatar is that, by Cameron's own admission, it contains many heavy-handed messages about imperialism and ecology and cultural tolerance . . . . but wraps it all up in a giant, incomprehensible mess.
In this movie, shit just *happens* because that's what the script said.
Did you watch the extended edition? There's a lot more about the human motivations and escalation of the conflict.
And incomprehensible? What parts of the movie did you not understand?
I did not care for this movie. Where do I collect my ivory tower?
Just make sure to post in this thread every so often about how you disliked the movie, even if you aren't saying anything new. You'll get that and your "Look at me, I Dislike Something Popular" badge in short order.
RandomEngy on
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Q: I watched the extended edition in theaters and felt very ripped off, and I dunno if anyone can remember back that far, but I fuckin LOVED this movie and evangelized it for quite awhile.
Is the new cut better than the lameass theatrical extended edition?
Well I'd say that the extra stuff isn't that exciting on its own: it just makes the movie fit together a bit better. Like, if you felt like rewatching the movie, you might as well see this one but don't expect another scene on the level of the thanator mech knife fight. I did enjoy the documentary and a few of the deleted scenes. Kind of disappointed that there's no audio commentary though.
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AtomikaLive fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered Userregular
So your claim is that all stories must have moral ambiguity?
Because that's frankly bullshit. Many things are not morally ambiguous. This is true in real life, and it is thus true for fiction as well.
In an instance where moral ambiguity is inherently implied, it deserves to be addressed. Just about every conflict in the history of ever has had some moral ambiguity; very few times has the side of evil just came out and said, "yep, we're evil! Kill everyone!"
This entire movie is a hamfisted white-guilt Noble Savage riff, and that's a meme that has been proven so very wrong for quite a long time now. So to base an entire film upon it and claim, "hey, what moral ambiguity?" puts the writing and intellectual approach in this film at the comprehension level of a small child.
Well the 16 minute one had the scene with the marines being killed by the Na'vi first, so it added a nice bit of realism to the home tree attack. As well as Sully's extended rant on "this is what they do, when people are sitting on something you want, you make them your enemy" - that line actually made sense when they added the extra dialogue questioning whether the company was intentionally provoking an incident in order to justify attacking home tree.
I felt that the retaliation scene shouldnt have been cut, it made the humans seem crazy bloodlusty and ignored the Na'vi bloodlust.
So your claim is that all stories must have moral ambiguity?
Because that's frankly bullshit. Many things are not morally ambiguous. This is true in real life, and it is thus true for fiction as well.
In an instance where moral ambiguity is inherently implied, it deserves to be addressed. Just about every conflict in the history of ever has had some moral ambiguity; very few times has the side of evil just came out and said, "yep, we're evil! Kill everyone!"
WWII.
Civil War.
Pretty much any war with a clear aggressor.
This entire movie is a hamfisted white-guilt Noble Savage riff, and that's a meme that has been proven so very wrong for quite a long time now. So to base an entire film upon it and claim, "hey, what moral ambiguity?" puts the writing and intellectual approach in this film at the comprehension level of a small child.
1) This movie is not playing Noble Savage straight. It is subverting it all over the place. Mainly because Pandora is actually closest to a transhumanist utopia, and thus not remotely "savage".
2) There is nothing "proven wrong" about white guilt.
I think you just don't like the message the movie is telling.
HamHamJ on
While racing light mechs, your Urbanmech comes in second place, but only because it ran out of ammo.
WWII.
Civil War.
Pretty much any war with a clear aggressor.
Because the Soviet Union was the greatest thing since sliced bread and the Union never did horrible or insanely stupid shit that cost thousands of lives.
Well the 16 minute one had the scene with the marines being killed by the Na'vi first, so it added a nice bit of realism to the home tree attack. As well as Sully's extended rant on "this is what they do, when people are sitting on something you want, you make them your enemy" - that line actually made sense when they added the extra dialogue questioning whether the company was intentionally provoking an incident in order to justify attacking home tree.
It's not exactly all that far-fetched as a scenario. The Banana Massacre of United Fruit proved that a corporation was quite happy to use army forces to kill protesters with machine guns. With their wives and children. During Sunday Mass. Over the issue of fruit.
We'd like to think we're more "civilized" since then, though apparently private military contractors are still worth about $100 billion US per year. And those were people. People tend to be less sympathetic to those different from them--imagine how they'd feel about very tall, very dangerous, quite alien bipeds who clearly weren't human. Over some mineral that's worth more than god.
As I've said before, yeah, people will do shit bloodthirstier than anything in Avatar if you pay them enough. Not everyone--but then again, not everyone is set to be a mercenary on another planet. I'm far less convinced by the notion that a corporation would be capable, at reasonable cost, to bring the huge amounts of incredibly expensive military hardware we see in the film for an economic venture, especially a publicly-traded one like RDA, than the revelation that human beings will kill for an obscene paycheck.
Especially given the alternative, namely no alternative: you signed up to be a mercenary. You will be on this planet for a few years. And it's full of alien things, besides the Na'vi, who will turn your femur into a toothpick. Have fun listening to your conscious while you pass through the digestive tract of a six-legged space-bull. That's a pretty big incentive to get more violent if you needed one.
A million+ German kids managed to kill almost every single thing they saw in large parts of the Soviet Union, and I'm guessing Belarus wasn't full of six-legged sabertooth wolves the size of Cadillacs. And most of them had to do a great deal more than pull a red switch while staring through a computer display.
On the other hand, it's not just the humans. I wouldn't have been surprised if it turned out the Na'vi enjoyed hunting humans and turning their skulls into tiny liquor glasses for sport, if it weren't for the fact that the humans have helicopters and machineguns.
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Linespider5ALL HAIL KING KILLMONGERRegistered Userregular
Well the 16 minute one had the scene with the marines being killed by the Na'vi first, so it added a nice bit of realism to the home tree attack. As well as Sully's extended rant on "this is what they do, when people are sitting on something you want, you make them your enemy" - that line actually made sense when they added the extra dialogue questioning whether the company was intentionally provoking an incident in order to justify attacking home tree.
It's not exactly all that far-fetched as a scenario. The Banana Massacre of United Fruit proved that a corporation was quite happy to use army forces to kill protesters with machine guns. With their wives and children. During Sunday Mass. Over the issue of fruit.
We'd like to think we're more "civilized" since then, though apparently private military contractors are still worth about $100 billion US per year. And those were people. People tend to be less sympathetic to those different from them--imagine how they'd feel about very tall, very dangerous, quite alien bipeds who clearly weren't human. Over some mineral that's worth more than god.
As I've said before, yeah, people will do shit bloodthirstier than anything in Avatar if you pay them enough. Not everyone--but then again, not everyone is set to be a mercenary on another planet. I'm far less convinced by the notion that a corporation would be capable, at reasonable cost, to bring the huge amounts of incredibly expensive military hardware we see in the film for an economic venture, especially a publicly-traded one like RDA, than the revelation that human beings will kill for an obscene paycheck.
Especially given the alternative, namely no alternative: you signed up to be a mercenary. You will be on this planet for a few years. And it's full of alien things, besides the Na'vi, who will turn your femur into a toothpick. Have fun listening to your conscious while you pass through the digestive tract of a six-legged space-bull. That's a pretty big incentive to get more violent if you needed one.
A million+ German kids managed to kill almost every single thing they saw in large parts of the Soviet Union, and I'm guessing Belarus wasn't full of six-legged sabertooth wolves the size of Cadillacs. And most of them had to do a great deal more than pull a red switch while staring through a computer display.
On the other hand, it's not just the humans. I wouldn't have been surprised if it turned out the Na'vi enjoyed hunting humans and turning their skulls into tiny liquor glasses for sport, if it weren't for the fact that the humans have helicopters and machineguns.
I know that by their nature the Na'vi are pretty homogenous, but I'd like to see that competing viewpoint. You'd think that any creature foreign to the Pandora ecosystem would be somewhere between fair game and abomination at best-their world view should pretty much embrace the genocide of the miners, period. For having a place for everything in Pandora in their way of life, the Na'Vi seemed pretty a-okay with getting chunks of land cleared and bases being erected and whatnot, made by outsiders not even in their solar system. I mean, I know they weren't, but it should've been, like, imperative-level to kill the miners, day one, the first time the hatches popped, warriors should've been there getting killing done, no questions asked, period.
When you think about that, it kind of blows your mind that the Na'Vi were as tolerant as they were of the avatar hybrids.
Well the 16 minute one had the scene with the marines being killed by the Na'vi first, so it added a nice bit of realism to the home tree attack. As well as Sully's extended rant on "this is what they do, when people are sitting on something you want, you make them your enemy" - that line actually made sense when they added the extra dialogue questioning whether the company was intentionally provoking an incident in order to justify attacking home tree.
It's not exactly all that far-fetched as a scenario. The Banana Massacre of United Fruit proved that a corporation was quite happy to use army forces to kill protesters with machine guns. With their wives and children. During Sunday Mass. Over the issue of fruit.
We'd like to think we're more "civilized" since then, though apparently private military contractors are still worth about $100 billion US per year. And those were people. People tend to be less sympathetic to those different from them--imagine how they'd feel about very tall, very dangerous, quite alien bipeds who clearly weren't human. Over some mineral that's worth more than god.
As I've said before, yeah, people will do shit bloodthirstier than anything in Avatar if you pay them enough. Not everyone--but then again, not everyone is set to be a mercenary on another planet. I'm far less convinced by the notion that a corporation would be capable, at reasonable cost, to bring the huge amounts of incredibly expensive military hardware we see in the film for an economic venture, especially a publicly-traded one like RDA, than the revelation that human beings will kill for an obscene paycheck.
Especially given the alternative, namely no alternative: you signed up to be a mercenary. You will be on this planet for a few years. And it's full of alien things, besides the Na'vi, who will turn your femur into a toothpick. Have fun listening to your conscious while you pass through the digestive tract of a six-legged space-bull. That's a pretty big incentive to get more violent if you needed one.
A million+ German kids managed to kill almost every single thing they saw in large parts of the Soviet Union, and I'm guessing Belarus wasn't full of six-legged sabertooth wolves the size of Cadillacs. And most of them had to do a great deal more than pull a red switch while staring through a computer display.
On the other hand, it's not just the humans. I wouldn't have been surprised if it turned out the Na'vi enjoyed hunting humans and turning their skulls into tiny liquor glasses for sport, if it weren't for the fact that the humans have helicopters and machineguns.
I know that by their nature the Na'vi are pretty homogenous, but I'd like to see that competing viewpoint. You'd think that any creature foreign to the Pandora ecosystem would be somewhere between fair game and abomination at best-their world view should pretty much embrace the genocide of the miners, period. For having a place for everything in Pandora in their way of life, the Na'Vi seemed pretty a-okay with getting chunks of land cleared and bases being erected and whatnot, made by outsiders not even in their solar system. I mean, I know they weren't, but it should've been, like, imperative-level to kill the miners, day one, the first time the hatches popped, warriors should've been there getting killing done, no questions asked, period.
When you think about that, it kind of blows your mind that the Na'Vi were as tolerant as they were of the avatar hybrids.
If I had to speculate--which is fun, so I will--I'd say it's because they don't enjoy the luxury. When the RDA folks showed they could take machineguns to school, the game probably changed to "Fuck, they're going to kill us all." Even if that wasn't necessarily true and what RDA really meant was "We use machineguns to resolve disagreements, whereas you might try and bash eachother with bows."
I mean, some things are pretty clear to me personally. Contrary to the whole "awe lovey-dovey peaceniks" view that seems to be popular both among people who like and hate the film, it looks like Na'vi are not unfamiliar with war among their own kind.
Obviously, they're familiar with violence. Their planet is fucking violence incarnated. The reason we don't see that many old Na'vi is probably the same reason we don't see many old special forces commandos or bounty hunters--it's a dangerous life, and you can only become so acclimated by it. The fact they worship it just suggests that they're in awe of their violent planet which, hey, I would be to whilst running from something with a razor-sharp jaw the size of travel luggage. Plus the whole transbody experience for which no human analog exists.
They have pretty large settlements, but they live far away from each other. That, and the fact that they train warriors seems to suggest that they do, in fact, make war against each other. Even without property that isn't held collectively, they still have plenty of reasons--I'd guess blood feuds, grievances over contested hunting areas (hunting is incredibly more area demanding than agriculture on Earth), or even things like religion ("No, my specific interpretation of Enya is correct! Die, heretic!"). We just don't see them fighting because they normally don't can't that often (what with them not having attack helicopters or machineguns), or because humans are really goddamn scary and distract from that fact.
And they do train warriors. That's an established fact. I assume they had them before the humans showed up a few years back. All this seems pretty clear to me without any sort of outside factor. It could be all mistaken, but I'm operating under the assumption that the Na'vi are occasionally similar to humans way before the industrial revolution.
The fact that Na'vi tribes have distinctive names--and presumably, identities--plays into the idea of war too. They seem homogenous to a human observer, naturally, the same way the different Amerinidian populations in North America considered themselves very different from one another--and they were all the same Red men to the Europeans and African slaves. The once-every-few-years raiding wars that end indecisively aren't all that visible or impressive compared to people showing up from another planet and bringing with them gigantic airborne weapons platforms and mechanical walkers. RDA's mercenary army probably did as much damage in its first attack on the Home Tree as a few centuries of warfare between conflicting tribes. Of course, the Na'vi don't seem to have chemistry, and thus, explosives--if they did, it'd be a different story.
On the other hand, the film really needed to show more Na'vi using captured weapons. The cultural disposition against using foreign technology would be outweighed by the fear of local extermination in a society where local life is 90% of your world.
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Linespider5ALL HAIL KING KILLMONGERRegistered Userregular
edited November 2010
hh.
cool.
I've been reading up on the Opium Wars http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars so it's given me a hardier view of culture clash, particularly in cases involving sought-after materials between uppity, highly-advanced invaders and well-entrenched, stuck up traditional forces. Shit's a real eye-opener, let me tell you.
WWII.
Civil War.
Pretty much any war with a clear aggressor.
Because the Soviet Union was the greatest thing since sliced bread and the Union never did horrible or insanely stupid shit that cost thousands of lives.
I'm not sure what that has to do with the war itself. And even if it did, I'm not sure what's ambiguous about that.
I think you are making a mistake in attempting to define Navi behavior in terms of human cultural norms.
Navi probably went to "war" with each other when Eywa thought it was necessary to scale the population back or shake up genetic/cultural stagnation.
There almost certainly wasn't any "religious" conflict because it could be resolved by them just asking Eywa.
The Navi didn't attack the humans because Eywa seems to favor integration over extermination. As long as humans were at worst a nuisance, it was prepared to simply observe.
HamHamJ on
While racing light mechs, your Urbanmech comes in second place, but only because it ran out of ammo.
Yeah, I'll be the first to acknowledge that if I have to speculate about the Na'vi, I do it from the context of human societies in the past. The fact that they have the ability to communicate in a broader sense than human beings at any point in history is going to change things up more than if you gave every single human access to the internet in 50 A.D.
I still think there'd be reasons for inter-tribe warfare besides population control (in a society which would have a pretty high mortality rate among the very young, I bet) or the desire to transplant populations. The ability to interpret one another thoughts doesn't rule out blood feuds or material conflicts of interests or simple ambition--terms that their planetary supercomputer only serves to 'warn against the consequences', but doesn't care who wins or loses--"no taking sides", after all. And the same network has limitations--it couldn't organize a region or continent-wide alliance between multiple tribes for something that was very much in their interests (old fashion discussion was needed for that).
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AtomikaLive fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered Userregular
WWII.
Civil War.
Pretty much any war with a clear aggressor.
Because the Soviet Union was the greatest thing since sliced bread and the Union never did horrible or insanely stupid shit that cost thousands of lives.
I'm not sure what that has to do with the war itself. And even if it did, I'm not sure what's ambiguous about that.
I'm baffled that you can say aloud that the Civil War was an unambiguous conflict. Or even WWII, for that matter.
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Linespider5ALL HAIL KING KILLMONGERRegistered Userregular
edited November 2010
Sometimes I wonder if people confuse a decisive victory with the war itself.
Furthermore, if Cameron had wanted the movie to be gray or ambiguous, he would have done so.
Explaining away a failing as a stylistic choice is pretty hat-on-ass retarded.
There is such a thing as an artistic choice, and there is such a thing as an objective lacking, and never the twain shall meet on purpose.
What you're offering is like a coach calling a 3-yard out route when you need fifteen yards to score, and then telling everyone after he loses, "hey, I just wanted three yards."
So your claim is that all stories must have moral ambiguity?
Because that's frankly bullshit. Many things are not morally ambiguous. This is true in real life, and it is thus true for fiction as well.
art tries to depict or reflect life in some way and well I don't know what existence you have but life is always complicated and nuanced.
ambiguity isn't necessary in a story no, but it's necessary to tell a good story, which isn't what cameron does. He makes spectacles which are usually a great deal of fun to watch. Real life never boils down to good vs. evil.
I wish people were as in favor of obvious moral ambiguity in the narrative of Star Wars as they were in this, which is a retelling of the very common narrative, "Colonization of distant place for profit." It'd have made those films and etc. a lot better.
Or, for that matter, the video-game narrative, "Russians and/or communists are landing in the midwest, taking over America." We'd get more World in Conflict without the half-assing and less Red Dawn.
This entire movie is a hamfisted white-guilt Noble Savage riff, and that's a meme that has been proven so very wrong for quite a long time now. So to base an entire film upon it and claim, "hey, what moral ambiguity?" puts the writing and intellectual approach in this film at the comprehension level of a small child.
1) This movie is not playing Noble Savage straight. It is subverting it all over the place. Mainly because Pandora is actually closest to a transhumanist utopia, and thus not remotely "savage".
Ham this is a terrible attempt to rationalize a poorly thought out ecosystem.
I wish people were as in favor of obvious moral ambiguity in the narrative of Star Wars as they were in this, which is a retelling of the very common narrative, "Colonization of distant place for profit." It'd have made those films and etc. a lot better.
The fact that they didn't address that has given the original trilogy an awesome campy retrospect.
I wish people were as in favor of obvious moral ambiguity in the narrative of Star Wars as they were in this, which is a retelling of the very common narrative, "Colonization of distant place for profit." It'd have made those films and etc. a lot better.
The fact that they didn't address that has given the original trilogy a head-shaking campy retrospect.
I've never found camp "awesome" myself. Mostly because camp, even at its hammiest, is fundamentally unimpressive, and thus, not at all awe-inspiring. It's the reason I find TIE Fighter or speculative thinking about Star Wars to be more enjoyable than anything from the original films.
I'm not sure what that has to do with the war itself. And even if it did, I'm not sure what's ambiguous about that.
Stalin was getting his horrible mass murdering on at around the same time Hitler was.
I wish people were as in favor of obvious moral ambiguity in the narrative of Star Wars as they were in this, which is a retelling of the very common narrative, "Colonization of distant place for profit." It'd have made those films and etc. a lot better.
Or, for that matter, the video-game narrative, "Russians and/or communists are landing in the midwest, taking over America." We'd get more World in Conflict without the half-assing and less Red Dawn.
Avatar doesn't have lightsabers for people to go gaga over.
This entire movie is a hamfisted white-guilt Noble Savage riff, and that's a meme that has been proven so very wrong for quite a long time now. So to base an entire film upon it and claim, "hey, what moral ambiguity?" puts the writing and intellectual approach in this film at the comprehension level of a small child.
1) This movie is not playing Noble Savage straight. It is subverting it all over the place. Mainly because Pandora is actually closest to a transhumanist utopia, and thus not remotely "savage".
Ham this is a terrible attempt to rationalize a poorly thought out ecosystem.
It's only "poorly thought out" if you don't bother to actually think about it and just dismiss it instead.
Frankly, a lot of people seem to be claiming there is no depth to Avatar because they weren't beat over the head with the pretentious displays of "depth" like in some other movies but instead have to actually engage with the world to see the possibilities.
Pandora is not a natural environment. It is a well tended garden. No one in the film tries to argue that if humans were just more enlightened that in itself would somehow give them magic nature harmony powers. It's made pretty clear that the difference is actually one of biological ability. Which, naturally, lends itself to only one real condition. Change human nature, and by that I mean actual physical human biology. That's why the protagonist ends up forsaking his human body. The conclusion is indisputable transhumanist.
I wish people were as in favor of obvious moral ambiguity in the narrative of Star Wars as they were in this, which is a retelling of the very common narrative, "Colonization of distant place for profit." It'd have made those films and etc. a lot better.
The fact that they didn't address that has given the original trilogy a head-shaking campy retrospect.
I've never found camp "awesome" myself. Mostly because camp, even at its hammiest, is fundamentally unimpressive, and thus, not at all awe-inspiring. It's the reason I find TIE Fighter or speculative thinking about Star Wars to be more enjoyable than anything from the original films.
Star Wars is a Mythic story. There's really no moral ambiguity in Myth, except that divinities turn to come off as dicks. But that is a problem of our modern sensibilities, really, because in most myths the gods being dicks was not really a moral problem.
Which makes him evil, but does not make the war anything but just and good.
Those horrible things he did to the Germans in WWII were just and good now? The bombings of civilians such as at Dresden were good?
Certain specific actions which crossed the line and violated the rules of war may have been evil, but that does not effect the justified nature of the war.
Also I generally would not consider bombardment of cities to have been unjustified.
EDIT: But this is kind of offtopic.
HamHamJ on
While racing light mechs, your Urbanmech comes in second place, but only because it ran out of ammo.
Besides being off topic, I think any sort of comparison between, say, the Second World War or Civil War--engagements between parties of comparable strength and common tactics--is a pretty lousy analogy for the narrative in Avatar. The film isn't a showcase of a war where both sides are pursuing a strategic resource with helicopters and machine guns--one side fits these means.
There are plenty of cases of disproportionate conflict. The workers striking against United Fruit didn't have machineguns. The Vietnamese didn't have the world's largest air force to drop an obscene number of bombs all over Washington, D.C.. The citizens of Minsk didn't have tanks. The Mujahadeen didn't have assault helicopters. The people encountered by Henry Morgan Stanley didn't have repeating rifles. The Congolese didn't have an organized army to retaliate against the Belgians. Those are all more apt comparisons, and you could find moral ambiguity in them certainly--though frankly, there's not enough for me to think "Hey, you know, maybe those Banana strikers deserved to get mowed down by United Fruit's army grunts during Sunday Mass," or "Hey, you know, I think the Belgians had a pretty good reason to massacre Congolese for not meeting quotas--rubber is damn important after all."
That's probably why I think the case of United Fruit is a better analogy, but that's just me.
Besides being off topic, I think any sort of comparison between, say, the Second World War or Civil War--engagements between parties of comparable strength and common tactics--is a pretty lousy analogy for the narrative in Avatar. The film isn't a showcase of a war where both sides are pursuing a strategic resource with helicopters and machine guns--one side fits these means.
There are plenty of cases of disproportionate conflict. The workers striking against United Fruit didn't have machineguns. The Vietnamese didn't have the world's largest air force to drop an obscene number of bombs all over Washington, D.C.. The citizens of Minsk didn't have tanks. The Mujahadeen didn't have assault helicopters. The people encountered by Henry Morgan Stanley didn't have repeating rifles. The Congolese didn't have an organized army to retaliate against the Belgians. Those are all more apt comparisons, and you could find moral ambiguity in them certainly--though frankly, there's not enough for me to think "Hey, you know, maybe those Banana strikers deserved to get mowed down by United Fruit's army grunts during Sunday Mass," or "Hey, you know, I think the Belgians had a pretty good reason to massacre Congolese for not meeting quotas--rubber is damn important after all."
That's probably why I think the case of United Fruit is a better analogy, but that's just me.
You're right.
HamHamJ on
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AtomikaLive fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered Userregular
This entire movie is a hamfisted white-guilt Noble Savage riff, and that's a meme that has been proven so very wrong for quite a long time now. So to base an entire film upon it and claim, "hey, what moral ambiguity?" puts the writing and intellectual approach in this film at the comprehension level of a small child.
1) This movie is not playing Noble Savage straight. It is subverting it all over the place. Mainly because Pandora is actually closest to a transhumanist utopia, and thus not remotely "savage".
Ham this is a terrible attempt to rationalize a poorly thought out ecosystem.
It's only "poorly thought out" if you don't bother to actually think about it and just dismiss it instead.
Frankly, a lot of people seem to be claiming there is no depth to Avatar because they weren't beat over the head with the pretentious displays of "depth" like in some other movies but instead have to actually engage with the world to see the possibilities.
Ah, the "can't you just enjoy something without trying to think about it?" defense.
I wondered when that was going to show up. Nice to spice it up with a double dose of anti-intellectualism, though.
Frankly, a lot of people seem to be claiming there is no depth to Avatar because they weren't beat over the head with the pretentious displays of "depth" like in some other movies but instead have to actually engage with the world to see the possibilities.
Now you're saying "you have to seek out answers" but all I can hear is "you have to completely make up the answers".
Pandora is not a natural environment. It is a well tended garden.
Are you claiming it's a 'well tended garden' because James Cameron told you to in the director's commentary?
Let's really tease out this 'well tended garden' metaphor. Because gardeners don't generally set up their fruit trees then introduce kudzu to choke the shit they spent all season tending. People have already stated the obvious- hunting is much more land intensive than farming, so I too wonder about things like intertribal conflict, which is only a minor problem considering things like inefficiencies in higher trophic levels which is downright stupid for a superintelligent, planet-sized intelligence to let live with the kind of management it's capable of e.g. directly controlling the speciation of anything on the planet.
No one in the film tries to argue that if humans were just more enlightened that in itself would somehow give them magic nature harmony powers. It's made pretty clear that the difference is actually one of biological ability. Which, naturally, lends itself to only one real condition. Change human nature, and by that I mean actual physical human biology. That's why the protagonist ends up forsaking his human body. The conclusion is indisputable transhumanist.
So all they have to do is enlighten themselves enough to convince the blue man group to jack them into the Pandoranet. But all Jake does is go native and swap one lumpy meat body for another. Yeah yeah, he overcomes the limitations of his gimp legs, but back on Earth they could do that just as well. Previously mentioned- humans are from a higher gravity environment! They'd be like tiny fucking ninjas. Other than needing a mask because of too much ammonia in the air, they'd be stronger, faster, better than Na'vi.
Ah fuck I'd also just repeat most of what Ray Kurzweil says about it.
"Right from the beginning I said, 'She’s got to have tits,' even though that makes no sense"
A well tended garden with shitloads of predators that the Navi have to defend against. Well tended gardens don't tend to have huge amounts of predators that will brutally kill you.
Edit: The problem with the United Fruit analogy is that the chosen McGuffin isn't something like fruit but is insteand something that is supposed to be able to possibly help save humanity. So it would be closer to a war for oil where that place is the only place where oil exists and society would collapse without it.
Are you claiming it's a 'well tended garden' because James Cameron told you to in the director's commentary?
I haven't listened to any commentary so no.
It's the fairly obvious conclusion given what we see in the film.
But maybe only to people who have played Alpha Centauri, I don't know.
Let's really tease out this 'well tended garden' metaphor. Because gardeners don't generally set up their fruit trees then introduce kudzu to choke the shit they spent all season tending. People have already stated the obvious- hunting is much more land intensive than farming, so I too wonder about things like intertribal conflict, which is only a minor problem considering things like inefficiencies in higher trophic levels which is downright stupid for a superintelligent, planet-sized intelligence to let live with the kind of management it's capable of e.g. directly controlling the speciation of anything on the planet.
I'm not sure what your argument is exactly but:
Farming would be pretty antithetical to the entire system. The Navi might start getting ideas. More than likely, the entire point of the Navi was to keep the game they hunted in check. Also possibly providing some kind of independent cognition check for when Eywa didn't know how to deal with a problem. But you don't want that sort of thing getting out of control.
So all they have to do is enlighten themselves enough to convince the blue man group to jack them into the Pandoranet. But all Jake does is go native and swap one lumpy meat body for another. Yeah yeah, he overcomes the limitations of his gimp legs, but back on Earth they could do that just as well. Previously mentioned- humans are from a higher gravity environment! They'd be like tiny fucking ninjas. Other than needing a mask because of too much ammonia in the air, they'd be stronger, faster, better than Na'vi.
Regardless of what we may have learned from DBZ, I'm not sure that would actually work that way.
Besides which, it's .8 g. A 20% increase in strength compared to Earth normal is not going to make you superman.
HamHamJ on
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FencingsaxIt is difficult to get a man to understand, when his salary depends upon his not understandingGNU Terry PratchettRegistered Userregular
edited November 2010
Also, it doesn't explain why they didn't just take one of the floating mountains or whatever.
Eywa can just drive a species, section of species, down to solitary individuals it doesn't like right off a cliff.
Edit: We're left to speculate about its motivations. You think it might want its smartest species to invent space travel and launch a solid state version of itself off to another planet before Alpha Centauri goes dark. Or maybe it's just perfecting chess against itself.
Wait, people are still obsessively whining over the success of, or brashly defending the quality of, this movie?
Come on people. It was a decent film, but nothing to spend a year whining over the merit of.
Previously mentioned- humans are from a higher gravity environment! They'd be like tiny fucking ninjas. Other than needing a mask because of too much ammonia in the air, they'd be stronger, faster, better than Na'vi.
The Na'vi are adapted for that environment. Which means they'll have the optimal size/muscle mass for getting around and fighting in it. Humans might find themselves able to jump higher than they are used to on Pandora, but the natives already can jump that high and are better at it since they're used to it. Plus there's the whole carbon fiber bones thing that makes them able to survive falls from like anywhere.
Wait, people are still obsessively whining over the success of, or brashly defending the quality of, this movie?
Come on people. It was a decent film, but nothing to spend a year whining over the merit of.
It was gone most of the time. I brought it back to discuss the Collector's edition that recently came out.
RandomEngy on
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Did you watch the extended edition? There's a lot more about the human motivations and escalation of the conflict.
And incomprehensible? What parts of the movie did you not understand?
Just make sure to post in this thread every so often about how you disliked the movie, even if you aren't saying anything new. You'll get that and your "Look at me, I Dislike Something Popular" badge in short order.
I hate Michael Bay for this reason.
Is the new cut better than the lameass theatrical extended edition?
In an instance where moral ambiguity is inherently implied, it deserves to be addressed. Just about every conflict in the history of ever has had some moral ambiguity; very few times has the side of evil just came out and said, "yep, we're evil! Kill everyone!"
This entire movie is a hamfisted white-guilt Noble Savage riff, and that's a meme that has been proven so very wrong for quite a long time now. So to base an entire film upon it and claim, "hey, what moral ambiguity?" puts the writing and intellectual approach in this film at the comprehension level of a small child.
I like this movie because it looks spectacular has action and a decent plot that makes sense overall to me
I guess I have the comprehension level of a small child, ho well
I felt that the retaliation scene shouldnt have been cut, it made the humans seem crazy bloodlusty and ignored the Na'vi bloodlust.
WWII.
Civil War.
Pretty much any war with a clear aggressor.
1) This movie is not playing Noble Savage straight. It is subverting it all over the place. Mainly because Pandora is actually closest to a transhumanist utopia, and thus not remotely "savage".
2) There is nothing "proven wrong" about white guilt.
I think you just don't like the message the movie is telling.
It's not exactly all that far-fetched as a scenario. The Banana Massacre of United Fruit proved that a corporation was quite happy to use army forces to kill protesters with machine guns. With their wives and children. During Sunday Mass. Over the issue of fruit.
We'd like to think we're more "civilized" since then, though apparently private military contractors are still worth about $100 billion US per year. And those were people. People tend to be less sympathetic to those different from them--imagine how they'd feel about very tall, very dangerous, quite alien bipeds who clearly weren't human. Over some mineral that's worth more than god.
As I've said before, yeah, people will do shit bloodthirstier than anything in Avatar if you pay them enough. Not everyone--but then again, not everyone is set to be a mercenary on another planet. I'm far less convinced by the notion that a corporation would be capable, at reasonable cost, to bring the huge amounts of incredibly expensive military hardware we see in the film for an economic venture, especially a publicly-traded one like RDA, than the revelation that human beings will kill for an obscene paycheck.
Especially given the alternative, namely no alternative: you signed up to be a mercenary. You will be on this planet for a few years. And it's full of alien things, besides the Na'vi, who will turn your femur into a toothpick. Have fun listening to your conscious while you pass through the digestive tract of a six-legged space-bull. That's a pretty big incentive to get more violent if you needed one.
A million+ German kids managed to kill almost every single thing they saw in large parts of the Soviet Union, and I'm guessing Belarus wasn't full of six-legged sabertooth wolves the size of Cadillacs. And most of them had to do a great deal more than pull a red switch while staring through a computer display.
On the other hand, it's not just the humans. I wouldn't have been surprised if it turned out the Na'vi enjoyed hunting humans and turning their skulls into tiny liquor glasses for sport, if it weren't for the fact that the humans have helicopters and machineguns.
I know that by their nature the Na'vi are pretty homogenous, but I'd like to see that competing viewpoint. You'd think that any creature foreign to the Pandora ecosystem would be somewhere between fair game and abomination at best-their world view should pretty much embrace the genocide of the miners, period. For having a place for everything in Pandora in their way of life, the Na'Vi seemed pretty a-okay with getting chunks of land cleared and bases being erected and whatnot, made by outsiders not even in their solar system. I mean, I know they weren't, but it should've been, like, imperative-level to kill the miners, day one, the first time the hatches popped, warriors should've been there getting killing done, no questions asked, period.
When you think about that, it kind of blows your mind that the Na'Vi were as tolerant as they were of the avatar hybrids.
If I had to speculate--which is fun, so I will--I'd say it's because they don't enjoy the luxury. When the RDA folks showed they could take machineguns to school, the game probably changed to "Fuck, they're going to kill us all." Even if that wasn't necessarily true and what RDA really meant was "We use machineguns to resolve disagreements, whereas you might try and bash eachother with bows."
I mean, some things are pretty clear to me personally. Contrary to the whole "awe lovey-dovey peaceniks" view that seems to be popular both among people who like and hate the film, it looks like Na'vi are not unfamiliar with war among their own kind.
Obviously, they're familiar with violence. Their planet is fucking violence incarnated. The reason we don't see that many old Na'vi is probably the same reason we don't see many old special forces commandos or bounty hunters--it's a dangerous life, and you can only become so acclimated by it. The fact they worship it just suggests that they're in awe of their violent planet which, hey, I would be to whilst running from something with a razor-sharp jaw the size of travel luggage. Plus the whole transbody experience for which no human analog exists.
They have pretty large settlements, but they live far away from each other. That, and the fact that they train warriors seems to suggest that they do, in fact, make war against each other. Even without property that isn't held collectively, they still have plenty of reasons--I'd guess blood feuds, grievances over contested hunting areas (hunting is incredibly more area demanding than agriculture on Earth), or even things like religion ("No, my specific interpretation of Enya is correct! Die, heretic!"). We just don't see them fighting because they normally don't can't that often (what with them not having attack helicopters or machineguns), or because humans are really goddamn scary and distract from that fact.
And they do train warriors. That's an established fact. I assume they had them before the humans showed up a few years back. All this seems pretty clear to me without any sort of outside factor. It could be all mistaken, but I'm operating under the assumption that the Na'vi are occasionally similar to humans way before the industrial revolution.
The fact that Na'vi tribes have distinctive names--and presumably, identities--plays into the idea of war too. They seem homogenous to a human observer, naturally, the same way the different Amerinidian populations in North America considered themselves very different from one another--and they were all the same Red men to the Europeans and African slaves. The once-every-few-years raiding wars that end indecisively aren't all that visible or impressive compared to people showing up from another planet and bringing with them gigantic airborne weapons platforms and mechanical walkers. RDA's mercenary army probably did as much damage in its first attack on the Home Tree as a few centuries of warfare between conflicting tribes. Of course, the Na'vi don't seem to have chemistry, and thus, explosives--if they did, it'd be a different story.
On the other hand, the film really needed to show more Na'vi using captured weapons. The cultural disposition against using foreign technology would be outweighed by the fear of local extermination in a society where local life is 90% of your world.
cool.
I've been reading up on the Opium Wars http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars so it's given me a hardier view of culture clash, particularly in cases involving sought-after materials between uppity, highly-advanced invaders and well-entrenched, stuck up traditional forces. Shit's a real eye-opener, let me tell you.
I'm not sure what that has to do with the war itself. And even if it did, I'm not sure what's ambiguous about that.
I think you are making a mistake in attempting to define Navi behavior in terms of human cultural norms.
Navi probably went to "war" with each other when Eywa thought it was necessary to scale the population back or shake up genetic/cultural stagnation.
There almost certainly wasn't any "religious" conflict because it could be resolved by them just asking Eywa.
The Navi didn't attack the humans because Eywa seems to favor integration over extermination. As long as humans were at worst a nuisance, it was prepared to simply observe.
I still think there'd be reasons for inter-tribe warfare besides population control (in a society which would have a pretty high mortality rate among the very young, I bet) or the desire to transplant populations. The ability to interpret one another thoughts doesn't rule out blood feuds or material conflicts of interests or simple ambition--terms that their planetary supercomputer only serves to 'warn against the consequences', but doesn't care who wins or loses--"no taking sides", after all. And the same network has limitations--it couldn't organize a region or continent-wide alliance between multiple tribes for something that was very much in their interests (old fashion discussion was needed for that).
I'm baffled that you can say aloud that the Civil War was an unambiguous conflict. Or even WWII, for that matter.
art tries to depict or reflect life in some way and well I don't know what existence you have but life is always complicated and nuanced.
ambiguity isn't necessary in a story no, but it's necessary to tell a good story, which isn't what cameron does. He makes spectacles which are usually a great deal of fun to watch. Real life never boils down to good vs. evil.
Yeah it does.
Or, for that matter, the video-game narrative, "Russians and/or communists are landing in the midwest, taking over America." We'd get more World in Conflict without the half-assing and less Red Dawn.
Ham this is a terrible attempt to rationalize a poorly thought out ecosystem.
The fact that they didn't address that has given the original trilogy an awesome campy retrospect.
I've never found camp "awesome" myself. Mostly because camp, even at its hammiest, is fundamentally unimpressive, and thus, not at all awe-inspiring. It's the reason I find TIE Fighter or speculative thinking about Star Wars to be more enjoyable than anything from the original films.
Avatar doesn't have lightsabers for people to go gaga over.
It's only "poorly thought out" if you don't bother to actually think about it and just dismiss it instead.
Frankly, a lot of people seem to be claiming there is no depth to Avatar because they weren't beat over the head with the pretentious displays of "depth" like in some other movies but instead have to actually engage with the world to see the possibilities.
Pandora is not a natural environment. It is a well tended garden. No one in the film tries to argue that if humans were just more enlightened that in itself would somehow give them magic nature harmony powers. It's made pretty clear that the difference is actually one of biological ability. Which, naturally, lends itself to only one real condition. Change human nature, and by that I mean actual physical human biology. That's why the protagonist ends up forsaking his human body. The conclusion is indisputable transhumanist.
Star Wars is a Mythic story. There's really no moral ambiguity in Myth, except that divinities turn to come off as dicks. But that is a problem of our modern sensibilities, really, because in most myths the gods being dicks was not really a moral problem.
Which makes him evil, but does not make the war anything but just and good.
Certain specific actions which crossed the line and violated the rules of war may have been evil, but that does not effect the justified nature of the war.
Also I generally would not consider bombardment of cities to have been unjustified.
EDIT: But this is kind of offtopic.
There are plenty of cases of disproportionate conflict. The workers striking against United Fruit didn't have machineguns. The Vietnamese didn't have the world's largest air force to drop an obscene number of bombs all over Washington, D.C.. The citizens of Minsk didn't have tanks. The Mujahadeen didn't have assault helicopters. The people encountered by Henry Morgan Stanley didn't have repeating rifles. The Congolese didn't have an organized army to retaliate against the Belgians. Those are all more apt comparisons, and you could find moral ambiguity in them certainly--though frankly, there's not enough for me to think "Hey, you know, maybe those Banana strikers deserved to get mowed down by United Fruit's army grunts during Sunday Mass," or "Hey, you know, I think the Belgians had a pretty good reason to massacre Congolese for not meeting quotas--rubber is damn important after all."
That's probably why I think the case of United Fruit is a better analogy, but that's just me.
You're right.
Ah, the "can't you just enjoy something without trying to think about it?" defense.
I wondered when that was going to show up. Nice to spice it up with a double dose of anti-intellectualism, though.
That's not actually what he's saying.
Yeah it's like the opposite of what I said.
Are you claiming it's a 'well tended garden' because James Cameron told you to in the director's commentary?
Let's really tease out this 'well tended garden' metaphor. Because gardeners don't generally set up their fruit trees then introduce kudzu to choke the shit they spent all season tending. People have already stated the obvious- hunting is much more land intensive than farming, so I too wonder about things like intertribal conflict, which is only a minor problem considering things like inefficiencies in higher trophic levels which is downright stupid for a superintelligent, planet-sized intelligence to let live with the kind of management it's capable of e.g. directly controlling the speciation of anything on the planet.
So all they have to do is enlighten themselves enough to convince the blue man group to jack them into the Pandoranet. But all Jake does is go native and swap one lumpy meat body for another. Yeah yeah, he overcomes the limitations of his gimp legs, but back on Earth they could do that just as well. Previously mentioned- humans are from a higher gravity environment! They'd be like tiny fucking ninjas. Other than needing a mask because of too much ammonia in the air, they'd be stronger, faster, better than Na'vi.
Ah fuck I'd also just repeat most of what Ray Kurzweil says about it.
"Right from the beginning I said, 'She’s got to have tits,' even though that makes no sense"
Damn, I might make that my sig.
Edit: The problem with the United Fruit analogy is that the chosen McGuffin isn't something like fruit but is insteand something that is supposed to be able to possibly help save humanity. So it would be closer to a war for oil where that place is the only place where oil exists and society would collapse without it.
I haven't listened to any commentary so no.
It's the fairly obvious conclusion given what we see in the film.
But maybe only to people who have played Alpha Centauri, I don't know.
I'm not sure what your argument is exactly but:
Farming would be pretty antithetical to the entire system. The Navi might start getting ideas. More than likely, the entire point of the Navi was to keep the game they hunted in check. Also possibly providing some kind of independent cognition check for when Eywa didn't know how to deal with a problem. But you don't want that sort of thing getting out of control.
Regardless of what we may have learned from DBZ, I'm not sure that would actually work that way.
Besides which, it's .8 g. A 20% increase in strength compared to Earth normal is not going to make you superman.
Edit: We're left to speculate about its motivations. You think it might want its smartest species to invent space travel and launch a solid state version of itself off to another planet before Alpha Centauri goes dark. Or maybe it's just perfecting chess against itself.
Come on people. It was a decent film, but nothing to spend a year whining over the merit of.
The Na'vi are adapted for that environment. Which means they'll have the optimal size/muscle mass for getting around and fighting in it. Humans might find themselves able to jump higher than they are used to on Pandora, but the natives already can jump that high and are better at it since they're used to it. Plus there's the whole carbon fiber bones thing that makes them able to survive falls from like anywhere.
It was gone most of the time. I brought it back to discuss the Collector's edition that recently came out.