Slashdot Mirror
James Cameron Announces Four Sequels to 'Avatar' (egyptindependent.com)
An anonymous reader writes: In a surprise appearance at CinemaCon, James Cameron announced plans for "a truly massive cinematic process" -- four new sequels to his 2009 blockbuster Avatar, plus a Disney theme park. "It's going to be a true epic saga," Cameron told the audience, promising that Avatar 2 would be released in Christmas of 2018, followed by three additional sequels, for a total of five Avatar-themed movies. Cameron's original sci-fi blockbuster earned $2.8 billion, though at least one Slashdot user argued that its overall message was that technology is bad, "strange because the movie is among most technically sophisticated ever."
And then all of Slashdot argued against him ... Seriously, what authority does one slashdotter have?
https://entertainment.slashdot...
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
Avatar has been rather unfairly maligned, IMHO. Yes, they did some copouts - most notably:
* Making the na'vi more humanlike than the earlier concepts so that audiences would emphasize with them more
* The "white man comes in and saves the natives" plot aspect
But the depth that Cameron went into for the backstory - most of which never showed up in the movie - was impressive. Including something that viewers made fun of about the movie - the term "unobtanium". In the Avatar universe, science had continually been frustrated by all of the potential technologies that could be achieved with a good room-temperature superconductor; long before it was discovered on Pandora, they had jokingly taken to calling the concept unobtanium. When it was actually discovered, the name stuck, reinforced by the difficulty of actually getting it back.
For the biology, Cameron brought a botanist who developed evolutionary trees, developed the mechanism for plant communication, and advised the crew on how botanists would go about studying the environment. For the Na'vi language they brought in a linguist from USC. The Venture Star was based on the Valkyrie interstellar spacecraft concept. And on and on. The level of detail that they went into was impressive, such as how being on a moon orbiting a gas giant would cause unusual color changes over the course of a day, and the effects that this would have on the indigenous populations' culture.
In the backstory to the Avatar universe, the moon quickly gathered scientists' attention because of its abnormally intense magnetic field. Unobtanium is a room-temperature superconductor. Superconductors become flux-pinned in magnetic fields, so floating islands are actually a natural repercussion of such an environment. With plants growing in an environment where they can readily incorporate a superconductor into their biology, extensive usage of electrical messaging between cells would be a very natural evolutionary adaptation. Here on Earth, plants communicate between each other with far lower bandwidth messaging mechanisms available to them, such as pheromones (for example, acacia trees signal to others when they're being eaten so that they can produce more bitter/toxic compounds). The concept that an emergent inter-plant neural network could occur would be not at all unrealistic in such an environment. And if plants have evolved such a network, then it would be to animals' advantages to evolve to tap into it as well - to manipulate it, to gather information, to call for mates over long distances, etc.
I think they did some excellent worldbuilding, but it was poorly served by a lot of poor decisions in the scriptwriting. Even the general plot could have been fine if they had handled it better. Examples:
* Why should a bond between animals be one-way, with the animal becoming basically just a servant of the Na'vi? It would have been interesting if the na'vi riding it became more like the animal as well, taking on the animal's interests as well. If the bonds tend to be characterized by one dominating the other, then why should the Na'vi inherently be at the top of the chain? Surely there would be manipulative parasites, for example. Perhaps the toruk is so dangerous to bond with because it convinces its rider to give up and be eaten.
* They could have had Sully at least *try* to use the Na'vi language more. Maybe this "slow student" won't be giving speeches, but after all this time, he hardly seems to put forth the effort, just an occasional word here and there - yet that doesn't seem to bother anyone much. I know, I get it, it's easier for the audience to hear English than read subtitles....
* Part of the problem with the "white man saves the day" plot is that it's insulting to indiginous peoples, that they can't save themselves and need some white savior who simultaneously assauges "white guilt". But they didn't have to go this way. They could have merely taken an easy copout and not cast
"Well, then fire it up and show me what this..." (sigh)
Avatar was enjoyable enough as optical stimuli but its simplistic moral landscape limited it to not much more than that.
I would have been more compelling if there had been more moral complexity than white Earth men come and abuse gentle and innocent indigenous people in order to extract their minerals.
It reduced both sides to a ridiculous caricature of good versus evil and drained it of any interest.
More compelling would have been some kind of desperate reason for Earth men to be there (some kind of end-of-civilization crisis on Earth) and if the indigenous people had been more complex than they are.
I'm not sure any population ever has been all good, shiny and happy like those blue people. How about internal factions with their own vicious conflict?
As someone else pointed out the msg of Avatar isn't anti technology but more opposed to the kind of neofeudal corporatism that we're all headed into, where the nation state operates at the behest and at the interests of the major multi-nationals. It's interesting seeing a similar msg coming through in such as Mr. Robot and Continuum.
Most successful movie of all time at the time was a "flop"? I think you don't need to look far to find an ignorant shit.
Learn to love Alaska
I think you're not giving the white guy enough credit. Any time you're fighting an enemy, especially if that enemy is very different from you, any intelligence (inside information) you can get on that enemy is extremely valuable. The Na'vi aren't stupid, but they're also not a technological species (and arguably because they didn't need to be; they have a great lifestyle as they are as they haven't overpopulated and outgrown their food supply as we humans did before we invented agriculture; basically they live in paradise). They don't have the kind of experience with warfare and combat that we do, and they sure as hell don't have the weaponry we do. But they do have real skills and talents, and then got themselves the most valuable asset of all: a defector from their enemy. There's a big reason the US encouraged defection from the USSR during the cold war: there's no better source of information.
And even if it's not a "defector" per se, history is chock full of examples of outside talent "helping the natives" be much more effective than they could be on their own. Due to skill, contacts, knowledge, experience, and yes, intelligence in both the broad and narrow sense.
It's no accident that Scottish mercenaries show up time and time again leading the locals to yet another victory. Or on the subject of "defectors" why not Arminius himself, that through having grown up in Rome as a hostage, gained intimate knowledge of how the romans thought and fought, and being a "king" at home could unite the local quarrelling tribes long enough to isolate and defeat in detail three whole roman legions. Or why not Lawrence of Arabia, as a more modern, and romantic example. (In fact, being an outsider is actually a great help when it comes to aligning internal factions, as you are not one of the factions to begin with, you can appear neutral in the local conflicts.)
So, no, that a professional solider, who know the enemy intimately (because he is one of them) can increase the effectiveness of the locals manyfold, locals who are emphatically not professional soldiers, is not surprising at all.
If that wasn't true, the US wouldn't have a whole arm dedicated to the task of training and leading the locals. It is the US Army special forces main task to this day.
Stefan Axelsson