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[bloodyrosemccoy]

First off, I want to thank James Cameron for complicating my life, since I am also re-watching the entire series of Avatar: The Last Airbender, which is a mouthful to specify.

The movie was … well, for the Highest-Budget Highest-Grossing Movie Ever, with elements Relevant To My Interests,* there is no getting around that the story was basically a giant, special-effects-laden, two-hour-and-forty-two-minute rehash of FernGully: The Last Rainforest. You want race relations with aliens,** check out CJ Cherryh or Poul Anderson or someone of that ilk.

I’ll give it one thing, though—the worldbuilding was magnificent. I get as big a charge out of seeing a constructed world onscreen as I get out of hearing people converse in constructed languages. The worldbuilder in me who is satisfied with deliciously extrapolated ecosystems and what-ifs was all over this movie. Even the culture gets some bonus points—I have this image of James Cameron waving a stack of cash at a team of anthropologist consultants demanding “Make me a race of noble savage blue people!” and the consultants valiantly trying to give some verisimilitude to the Na’vi anyway.

Basically, if I had my way with the movie, it’d be a documentary. No plot except maybe Sigourney Weaver doing field anthropology or something.

I know, I know, it’s as much wishful thinking as wishing the Prime Directive were something that people would actually follow, but I can dream, can’t I?


*Special effects, worldbuilding, and blue people, for a start. Also my well-aged fancrush on Sigourney Weaver, and my burgeoning one on Zoë Saldaña. But “DOES IT HAVE ALIENS IN IT?” is the trump card.

**This actually really drives me nuts, that writers and readers of sci-fi so often equate race with species, to the point where they use the words interchangeably. There are indeed parallels, but there’s also, quite literally, a world of difference between humans and alien species. You don’t get a different evolutionary psychology (the real kind, not the pseudoscientific Stephen Jay Gould’s Strawman kind) or a different-shaped brain when you’re talking about two groups of humans. With aliens, well, we come back around to the GOOD sci-fi writers.

Comments

[sofish-sasha.livejournal.com]

One thing that bugged me was that Neytiri and Jakesully were so on the same page when it came to making out. Kissing isn't done in the same way everywhere on Earth, so why would a different species in a galaxy far, far away on a different planet do it the same way humans do?

Also, the connector thingies at the end of the Na'vi's braids? Wouldn't it have made a lot more sense for that to be at the end of their tails? Or do a portion their hair grow into a braid all by itself? I do not understand! D:

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

Would a haircut be the equivalent of a lobotomy? There's a reason brains are encased in skulls and eyes have bony sockets. Hangin' the major sense organ out where it could be snagged on any random bit of forest doesn't make a lot of sense.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I've wondered that, myself. I kinda figured the braid was to protect the nerve bundle, but that had better be some badass hair.

Maybe it's more like a very small tail and the hair just grows around it? Or gets braided around it? Or ... hell, I dunno, this has been bugging me for days.

Either way, when they're not using it, I'd expect it to be able to at least curl up or something.

[queenlyzard.livejournal.com]

Yup! Both of those things got to me, too. Along with a number of gripes about the worldbuilding, I admit. Granted, kickass animation has its limits, but I spent most of my time thinking that there was a massive shortage of species on Pandora, particularly insect life, and also what's with the flying rocks and how do vines end up spanning massive chasms like that... and so on. But it was beautiful all the same.