Thoughts on “Avatar”

Today, I had to see what all the buzz was about. Me and my wife saw Avatar in 3D before she had to go to work. The  3D was a nice effect, but after over two hours of that, I had pretty bad motion sickness getting out of the theater. I think I’d enjoy the movie more minus the nausea.

spoiler alert ** do not continue if you don’t want the plot revealed (this is really intended reading for people who watched the movie anyway, not a proper review; I don’t do movie reviews)

I’m not a movie critic, but an appreciator of Sci-Fi, so I’ll focus mostly on the alien biology and “anthropology” of the aliens themselves. The movie had all the things that make American movies frustrating – the overused noble savage against technology plot (think Dances With Wolves or Ferngully… anyone remember Ferngully?) and the handlebar mustache-twisting (figuratively) villain that you can never find in real life. Yes, people are greedy, incompetent or just plain wrong about the world around them, but people aren’t motivated by evil (‘What about Hitler?,’ you ask? Yes, file Hitler under wrong about the world around him – deeply wrong about what is right but he fought for what he believed to be right). The movie also had what makes American movies great and particularly well suited to their often blue-collar audience – wish fulfillment. Who doesn’t want to be 10 feet tall, blue and run around an idyllic wilderness half-naked and ride alien Pterodactyls? Oh, and the guy lands himself a hot alien chick. Double-score. There’s also the interconnectedness – with nature and with the tribe, that modern Americans lack severely. People secretly yearn for that as they spend more and more money to be further and further from dirt and from their relatives.

I could go on and on about inaccuracies, but what’s the point? Sci-fi is about changing reality, holding certain fantastic things for granted and, outside of that, have an internally consistent universe. I could just grant all sorts of sillinesses and that, by wild coincidence, the aliens on Pandora happen to be astonishingly humanoid (maybe they are of Terrestrial origin or vice versa – panspermia) and I think I will. What interests me, though, is the biology of the planet. How and why the synergy between all life forms on Pandora happened is an interesting question. I find myself wondering if the Navi began having that bio communication port in their ponytails and bred various animals and plants to interact with it, in much the same way dogs, though slightly dumber than wolves can understand human language better (I am told). It’s hard to imagine life evolving towards standardizing on a way of exchanging information, but then again bacteria have just that (with plasmids) and benefit greatly. The Gaea Hypothesis holds that natural selection has applied not just to individuals, but to the ecosphere herself. Indeed, we metazoans are symbiosis of countless eukaryotic cells (and, for that matter, prokaryotic cells) which earlier in evolutionary history would have only existed singly and for their own purposes. For this synergy to have happened, however, all the cells must come from the same genes. That is key. So, for the world of Pandora to exist, the rest of the ecosphere and at least the Navi themselves must share DNA to some degree. Maybe there is rogue genes or viruses that infect all of life with cooperation genes. Maybe that connection port is a sort of zoological plasmid they share?

Also of interest and an area where the movie lets me down is the religion of the people. Indeed, very seldom is religion treated fairly and realistically in sci-fi or fantasy. It’s often superficially glazed over without people putting their minds into the believers themselves. If you ask me, it’s one of the more fascinating aspects of a culture and playing with hypothetical religions (and asking why they don’t exist) is probably one of the next great frontiers in the world of sci-fi. What you see in the movie is essentially a Christian attempt at Paganism, crossed with Earth (or Pandora)-worshipping deep green religion. When you die, you go to heaven, but heaven exists in the ecosphere’s data storage. There’s a God, but she’s a woman who doesn’t take sides (except in the epic battle in the movie). It’s even interesting how what they believe in is fully naturalistic, but I’m afraid the movie captures the typical liberal naive idealizations about tribal peoples’ spirituality. Yes, people who live in nature love and worship nature, but it is a very different kind of biophilia than what is found among us cosmopolitans. Nature isn’t a relaxing vacation – it is everything. It is all the good and all the bad in the world. To understand how their beliefs really would have been, one need only look back in time and keep in mind “God fearing Christian” – Pagans are Nature fearing Pagans! Jór provided for her worshipers and protected them from outsiders, but she also greedily demanded human sacrifice – as countless well-preserved bog bodies will attest – on threat of more famine and harsher storms. It makes sense that the “Great Mother” protected the Navi, knowing that Humans would do to her what they did to their “mother” but this also means that she is prepared to keep the Navi in check by disease and famine, should they live beyond her means. If you want to see how more beautiful it is with the dark side left intact, see any of Miyazaki’s movies. He makes nature out to be what she really is – both beautiful and scary. He adds the supernatural element for entertainment and effect, but there’s something real about his surreal worlds.

My wife was irritated at the ending. Why did he choose to live with the aliens? He’s from such a different world. My thinking is it’s going to be an adjustment, but what would have made me feel better is if they exposed wrongs and injustices within the tribe. Their extreme idealization of these noble savages actually makes their culture less appealing. If I could see the ways in which we know cultures that emphasize connectedness and tribal solidarity also squelch the individual or that the Navi too are capable of wrongheadedness, their culture would appeal so much more to me by seeming real. That’s what I wanted to see. Their world would be more beautiful if it was less like a paradise and more like something that almost could be, with even its pitfalls laid out before me. That’s what I wanted to see. This movie is Earth-worship without the soul. But the graphics were awesome. I definitely recommend seeing it.