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The Science of Avatar
Jamie noted a bit on
The Science of Avatar running on Ain't it Cool, written by a professor of astrophysics who has worked on searching for planets and SETI. I believe I might be the last person on earth who hasn't seen it; here's hoping I can find 3 free hours over the holidays.
I haven't seen it because all of my friends have torrented the damn movie, some even watched horrible cam rips with a foreign language and no subs.
Nobody wants to go to the cinema any more.
Fuck you, torrents.
First, Pandora does have an oxygen atmosphere, or how else could you explain the burning torch that Jake Sully lights up in self-defense against the wulf-like creatures at night?
Second, the floating mountains are explained by assuming that the rock is made up of superconducting material ("Unobtainium") and that the flux they keep talking about is actually a strong magnetic field. Superconductors tend to hover in magnetic fields, you know.
--- Eat my sig.
I haven't seen it, and I'm not planning on it. You can't just take Dances with Smurfs and call it something else! That's not kewwwwwwwwww'!
I refuse to watch it. I am not going to vote with my pocketbook that plot, craft, and character development don't matter, and that all that matters is effects. This sort of thought has made the bulk of Hollywood movies complete crap. I'm lucky if there is one or two movies a year that aren't nauseatingly bad.
Now get off my lawn.
Sheldon
Unobtanium was silly - the entire theater laughed out loud on that one. I look at it as Cameron respecting the viewer's intelligence. This is a story about people, and the conflict between races, etc. The reason humans are there isn't important - just that they aren't leaving unless forced. I think Unobtanium - that is, something so obviously ridiculous - is Cameron's way of saying "yes, I know it's a silly premise but let's move on". Like "dilithium"
Would you have preferred some elaborate BS? Because I'm sure they thought of it and chose this instead.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
written by a professor of astrophysics who has worked on searching for planets and SETI.
Thought I recognized the name - wasn't he part of this team?
#DeleteChrome
If Cameron knew it was a silly premise, why not change the premise? Why not create something intelligent that challenges viewers? This will certainly be hugely popular either way, right? Why this notion that for something to be entertaining it has to be devoid of any thinking? It is this mentality that is quickly turning America into a nation of drooling retards. Skip this garbage and go pick up a copy of Blade Runner or 2001 if you want to see what sci fi really can be.
To the haters: You can't win. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
er... Unobtanium is a word that's been used for sometime now, like before I was born. Knowing the word already and then hearing it in the film I felt that either the character was making fun of how amazing this metal was, or that James Cameron was poking fun of the "made up material/substance" we so often see in sci-fi to explain things. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unobtainium
I've seen the film, in IMAX 3D (gave me a two day headache) - and I guess I missed the giant stone arches near the end of the film.
But, somebody who worked on the film anonymously emailed the writer of the article to explain some of the problems they saw. Namely: the gas giant rotating faster than it possibly could. And there is speculation that the floating mountains contain unobtainium, which is a room temp superconductor.
The mountains were formed on the land, and "broke off" sailing upwards over the magnetic pole of the planet. They are repelled by the magnetic field underneath them, counteracting gravity.
This is very silly, as minor magnetic perturbations would make the mountains flail about wildly, just as trying to hold a magnet up in the air with another magnet is very difficult.
Also, he doesn't address what properties of unobtainium exist that would likely "save Earth". Why would a rock that was a room temperature superconductor save Earth? You couldn't build nuclear power plants from it. Perhaps it has properties that make it 1000x more powerful than uranium? None of this gets addressed.
I found this very plausible given what we know about superconductors: The Hallelujah Mountains are floating islands that circulate slowly in the magnetic currents like icebergs at sea, scraping against each other and the towering mesa-like mountains of the region. On Pandora, the magnetic effect causes huge outcroppings of Unobtainium to rip loose from the surface and float in the magnetic vortices. The stone 'arcs' you saw in the film supported this, where the minerals actually deposited along strong magentic lines, leaving those huge 'skeleton' looking structures.
I can only assume the large deposit under the tree is either too deep down to have torn lose from the surface, too spread out or sparse to tend to rip out, or it is held into place by the huge root system of the tree itself. Given that a tree that large would take eons to grow to that size, the deposits may have formed there during that time due to some sort of cataclysm, or some other natural process. The movie never explains exactly what Unobtainium is other than it's obvious natural magnetic properties. The piece floating on his desk leads more towards semiconductor properties at room temperature.
Too bad Cameron didn't think of something like "bardeenium" to honor John Bardeen, two-time winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics, co-inventor of the transistor and co-creator of the BCS theory of superconductivity. He would have honored a truly great (and unappreciated) physicist and eliminated a jarringly stupid bit of terminology from his movie.
Everyone seems to be making the ASSUMPTION the the Na'vi are preindustrial.
1. The Na'vi can link directly to many other animals that are happy to serve them, and and the Na'vi in return care for them.
2. Planet wide network for storage, upload and download of information, long term store, processing, and on demand local grid processing, including the ability to do a total upload of a person.
3. Unobtainium, a planet wide "natural" super conductor that allows for floating mountains.
4. Eywa, the operating system put in place to regulate everything, including guiding the Na'vi to stay in harmony with everything else.
It seems to me that the Na'vi went though their own singularity, and what we see as primitive is the biotechnology leftovers from a older culture, but they have set themselves and their decedents with a ideal environment, the ability to live, have kids, grow old, then upload when the time is right. Use large off-planet element nuclear synthesis to create the unobtainium, (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_of_stability ), and setup the biosphere and the infosphere for long term in habitation by ignorant people. In a head to head comparison of Na'vi vs humans, the Na'vi are superior in almost everyway.
Medicine - Eywa takes care of that much better.
Education - A direct mental link for sharing of information.
Physical form - not much is explained beyond carbon fiber in the skeleton, but onscreen of what Jake goes though is beyond what a normal human can handle.
Information storage, processing & retrieval mostly superior, with the exception of speed given the late start the other animals had in the battle.
Long term care of their wold and sustainability - Although the world seems genetically engineered for the Na'vi,over time some drift has occurred as not all animals retain their friendliness, but in times of crises, can revert back.
Given that this is part 1 of 3, and the hints on screen and referenced to, this is my suspicion. Most people have problems thinking about the singularity as it is so encompassing, enabling, and yet compressing. The Na'vi are just one result of who remains after a biological singularity.
Yes, I understand that it's an inside joke between the audience and the writer.
Why do you think it was an inside joke?
Like GP, I, too, had the impression that the word was simply used by a character in a movie in its proper meaning - he used it to refer to an exceedingly rare and hard to obtain material with not fully explained and otherwise "magical" properties.
Look, the plot is basically Dances with Wolves in Space, but still -- this movie was an example of amazing, expensive effects paired with an actual story.
It's just a guess, but I'd say that Avatar is more likely to be loosely based on the life story of Gonzalo de Aroza and Zazil Ha than being some sort of brazen of Dances with Wolves ripoff. As far as I know Aroza's story has never been filmed which is a pity since it is a better story than what most fiction authors are capable of coming up with these days. That said I agree with you Avatar is an amazing movie.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
The thing is though, not everybody has an awesome projection system set up at home. Once you remove 3D and superior picture size and quality from Avatar, the film has nothing left to offer, unfortunately.
The only thing besides the visuals I heard positive comments on were some action scenes in the third act, but everything else is apparently rather mediocre. It's not even that the plot is simple, I certainly don't expect every movie to be some kind of mindfuck a-la Blade Runner. Something like Crank had a simple and absolutely ridiculous plot, but Avatar's is basically one huge predictable cliche, which also manages to be pretentious as well - it's white corporate imperialist oppressing local noble savages, and the hero decides to defect to the side which of course lives in total harmony (and connection, ugh) with the nature. Fuck.
The characters are flat and aren't developed too well (look, it's the evil corporate guy! And there's the crazy military general!), while the dialog is often just silly ("We're not in Kansas any more" FFS, James!). Why did they try to hid Sam's Aussie accent, couldn't he just happen to be from Australia, or live there with his father on a military base? Even the soundtrack is rather generic.
I'm not saying that the movie is terrible, in fact I think that films are a visual media and thus can be enjoyed as such. However I think that it's going to take much more than that to be the best sci-fi movie of the decade/ever, which is what many are claiming this to be. I'll probably go see it in IMAX, at the very least I'll see how the 3D tech works nowadays since I haven't seen a singe 3D movie yet.
I have just had the misfortune / bad judgement to try to sit through Avatar.
By 40 minutes in I could stand it no more, and starting flicking forwards, within another 10 minutes I'd skipped to the end.
Spoilers?
Nope, you can't give spoilers on something that has a plot thinner than Debbie Does Duluth, there is no story there, period, what there is is CGI.
If you are of an age to remember Roger Dean (Yes album covers amongst other things) then you have basically seen the stuff that the CGI was clearly designed upon, laws of gravity do not apply, laws of physics do not apply, laws of biology and locomotion do not apply.
I'm not talking fanciful creatures and landscapes, I'm talking totally impossible, acid trip inspired creatures and landscapes.
The only spoiler I can think of is, and I kid you not, the basic plot-line centres around a mining operation on an alien planet, mining an ore called "unobtanium"... yeah... the only thing rarer than unobtanium is a decent script.
One might think that multimillion dollar budgets + CGI + Roger Dean would create something of great aesthetic beauty at least, even if it were great beauty utterly devoid of a plot, but sadly, that isn't the case.
If they had rendered still scenes, yes, you'd have some great poster art or album covers, but the instant they went for motion it just ruined the whole thing, Roger Dean was never meant to be in motion.
Frankly the whole film smacks of a bunch of CGI geeks being given an unlimited budget and no rules, the desktop publishing equivalent of producing a parish magazine that uses 11,000 different fonts and every single piece of clip art on disk.
The semi-cameo role of Sig Weaver and the whole space mining theme (all of which is revealed in the first 10 minutes) means that you simply can't watch Avatar and not be strongly reminded of Alien (1) and this is yet another fatal wound for what is an already dead and decomposing corpse of a movie.
Alien had real (huge) sets, and the visual effect was stunning, not just because of Giger, but because of depth of focus, Avatar was done with green background and motion cap in someone's garden shed, plus a moonshot's worth of computers running CGI, and it looks utterly fake and feeble.
I have no idea what cinemas charge nowadays, it is irrelevant when films are as truly, horrendously awful, and this film was. It did not cost me a penny, and of course no popcorn, travelling time, shitty adverts or previews, and I managed to skip through the whole thing in 50 minutes, and I want those 50 minutes of my life back.
The new (a couple of years old at least) series of Captain Scarlet (also done in CGI) is quite honestly nothing less than three or four orders of magnitude better than Avatar on every single level imaginable.
As for the Avatar lead species, the hominids themselves, think the illegitimate love child of Jar Jar Binks and Pikachu, yes, really, that implausible, ridiculous, and vile. Kill it, kill it now, with (digital) fire.
I have a revelation for you.
Hollywood is dead.
Really, for less money than it would cost to take two kids to see this steaming pile of crap, you could go out and buy Crysis, which will provide about 40 hours of gameplay (sans god mode), a far better plot, a far more immersive and entertaining experience, and better and more realistic physics.
Seriously, whatever you do this Christmas, do not get talked into sitting through Avatar, do not get talked into paying for anyone else (kids) to see it, and, if you value your kids minds more than marshmallow, do not let your kids anywhere near it.
I am NOT joking.
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the creatures have eyes. That seems like a pretty odd thing to develop on a different planet.
Not really. The eye has actually evolved independently more than once on this planet. Given the evolutionary advantage, it would be surprising if eyes did not evolve on other planets.
And separately, what would be believable is that if eyes develop, most large creatures would have the same number
Large animals on earth have differing numbers of nipples, in an alternate evolutionary history, why not eyes?
Even if something so utterly like us could develop somewhere else (which itself seems incredibly unlikely, given the infinitude of possibilities), why would it be the dominant life form?
I didn't see anything in the movie that suggested the navi were dominant.
Maybe you should repeat to yourself "it's just a movie, I should really just relax". Go see it in IMAX. When you're that visually stimulated, you won't really care about the nitpicks. And if you do, there's plenty of opportunity for MST3K style riffing. If you don't see it in IMAX, it's probably not worth seeing at all though.
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Like I said, we have not seen enough other planets to say whether it's rare or not. Hell, nine out of uncountable billions, does not mean we can say with any probability of accuracy that life is rare. Even if we limit life to carbon/oxygen based organisms, we cannot.
It's not a science fiction fantasy to think life exists on other planets, in other forms other than our own. It IS out own arrogance that lets us think that we are so "special" as to be the only thing in the universe that matters or counts as life. Our own state is the only state that can be considered life. That kind of thinking will get us into trouble when/if we get out there.
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I saw the film in 3D, which incidentally is the only way to see it -- accept no substitutes -- and while I was amazed overall at the technology, I was somewhat chagrined at the shockingly pedestrian plot
Honestly, this movie didn't need a plot. I'd be just as happy to sit for 3 hours watching that 3D CG with no setting at all. I'm thinking something like this, in IMAX 3d of course. Special effects on a big screen is the ONLY reason to actually go to a theater anymore, if I want a movie with a plot, I'll get a DVD and pause it when I need to, rewind and rewatch important scenes etc. Why doesn't Hollywood accept it and stop slapping crappy plots onto what could otherwise be really awesome pieces of abstract art?
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That's true to an extent, but at the same time, those previous technological advances only improved story telling. They didn't replace it. If they use the computer graphics to merely supplement a good story with good acting and a well thought out script, there won't be any reason to resist. But if Avatar is any indication of what is to come, that won't be the case.