More serious Avatar thoughts
Jan. 10th, 2010 08:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
annathepiperIt occurs to me upon reflection that I had better also address the fact that even if I didn’t care about them as a viewer while I was watching the movie, with my writer hat on, I do need to care about the various tropes that the movie deals with, and why it really would have been better if they hadn’t been there. I’m breaking this out into its own post since it covers the not-squeeful, more thoughtful reaction I have to the film.
The biggest one being, of course, what 
james_nicoll
It’s especially apparent with Jake’s big “this is our land” speech at the end, when he’s rousing the Na’vi to war. That was pretty much the most cringeworthy aspect of the entire movie, and underscored the whole Colonialism thing. I don’t know if I could have done a better job with it. I’d like to think that there could have been a better way to handle that whole speech, though. I can’t help but compare it against the masterful rousing speeches Theoden and Aragorn throw around in the movie version of Return of the King–but then, we’re dealing with the words of Tolkien there, and we’re not dealing with a Colonialism plot.
Mulling how else the plot could have been bolstered to decrease the Colonialism flavor of the plot, and this is leading me in directions of thinking about alien species as portrayed in SF books I’ve read, like Julie Czerneda’s. Her recent trilogy about the origins of the M’hiray is coming to mind as something that could have wound up being a Colonialism plot and didn’t, since the Om’ray are certainly “savages” by the standards of the Trade Federation, and yet the interaction they have with the humans is very clearly kept on a footing where the human characters in the cast are on an equal footing with the primary Om’ray characters. It helps as well that there are other sapient, non-humanoid species in play there who have just as much influence as the humans do.
I don’t know if such a situation could have improved the plot of Avatar, but I would certainly have appreciated more indications that the Na’vi weren’t just the “ignorant savages” that most of the humans on Pandora clearly perceived them to be.
I think the movie’s definitely still worth seeing, but I do have to keep all of this in mind as well. You have to take the zomg-awesome parts of it as well as the deeply disappointing parts, really, as you would with any other work. I’m finding myself thinking of the James Bond books, for example, which have a whole lot of awesome in them, and a whole lot of abhorrent racist and sexist attitudes as well.
So yeah. There’s beauty there but there are also flaws, which keeps me from diving as headlong into squee as I would have liked. But hopefully I’ll be able to keep this in mind and remember it when I write my own stories, and learn how to do it better.
And oh yeah, last note: “unobtanium”. SERIOUSLY, Cameron? Did you have to call it “unobtanium”? *headdesk*
Mirrored from annathepiper.org.
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Date: 2010-01-11 05:44 am (UTC)One thing I don't know, b/c I haven't seen the movie and I haven't seen it addressed in any of the reviews I've read - do the native people know Jake is imported from a white (disabled!) body? How is that handled - does no one care, or is there initial suspicion and then he wins people over, or ??
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Date: 2010-01-11 06:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-11 06:04 am (UTC)see, they are on "Pandora" to mine "unobtainium" [and i FALL DOWN everytime i hear it] and there is a conversation between Grace and CEO guy [or Jake and CEO guy, can't remember] and what did CEO *say*?
follow this. Pandora is the "only" planet with it. and the "highest concentrations for 200 klicks [kilometers] is the local Na'vo's "home tree""
not the ONLY. not the HIGHEST EVER. just the HIGHEST in *THIS* particualar fucking PART of the planet.
you can NOT fucking tell me that there is no way the fucking corporation could and WOULDN'T have been going for the easy and NON-MESSY stuff first! it MAKES NO SENSE that they would go after the ONLY deposit that we [audience wise] knows is inhabited. the CEO makes it clear that there are many other sources of "unobtainium" but that that weren't all at least 201 kilometers away just weren't as "rich" as that one spot.
and i call BS. if it had been the ONLY spot, maybe. i do have to wonder why there was MILITARY there, since it was a PRIVATE corp - my understading at first was that the military was supposed to be back-ups to the diplomates [like "Grace" lol]. and then, they military was going and hitting a targer for what i STILL don't think are legal reasons.
that's where i was having issues - not just "whitey come save the savages" although that was ALSO annoying - but with the INSANITY and lack of LOGIC AND REASON for any of it!
sigh.
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Date: 2010-01-11 06:08 am (UTC)In the first scene where Jake is questioned by Neytiri's father, they specifically ask him what he is among his own people and he tells them he used to be a Marine, and clarifies that this is a "warrior". There is definitely suspicion; his primary rival for Neytiri at one critical point accuses him and Grace (who have both come back to them in avatar bodies) of being "demons in false bodies".
And yeah, this is me trying to be as fair as possible with this thing, and acknowledge both the squee-worthy parts of the movie as well as the fail. It's a difficult thought process, but worth it, I think!
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Date: 2010-01-11 06:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-11 06:22 am (UTC)I think that if this plot had been mine, I'd have attempted to show more of the forces than just Trudy saying "screw this, this is inhumane" and refusing to carry out the assault against Hometree. Maybe not enough of them to prevent it from happening--but enough to give Colonel Batshit a hard time and push him farther over the edge into true batshittery. Because surely more of the people on that base should have been thinking, shit, we're sending in all this firepower to take down a big fuckoff tree and the opposing forces have nothing but bows and arrows to come at us? How could that have been considered even remotely moral?
But then, if the interstellar Terran society at this point has gotten that amoral, if I'd have been Jake, I'd have been inclined to bail, too.
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Date: 2010-01-11 06:44 am (UTC)I'm pretty sure those were mercenaries, hired by the company.
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Date: 2010-01-11 07:12 am (UTC)Of course, this is also how you get the ugliest elements of colonialism, where the little men who had no real power back home get to go be tyrants and overlords, and completely go off their rockers. Motivation, shall we say, is everything. :\
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Date: 2010-01-11 07:57 am (UTC)Because it really just takes colonialism and turns it on its head. As well as utopias, aliens, and so on. LOVE that book.
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Date: 2010-01-11 07:58 am (UTC)I love utopia/dystopia, so maybe I'm reading into it wrong, but that's how I've always seen it.
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Date: 2010-01-11 08:01 am (UTC)As for the unobtainium (and I wonder how serious they were being when they called it that, though if you look at the Periodic Table there are some pretty strange ones already), the way the story went was the highest concentrations of the stuff were underneath Hometree. This stands to reason because of the connection the Na'vi has with Pandora and what Pandora actually is: in effect, a living planet. Their connection with Eywa is strong; the locations of the unobtainium are strongest where their Hometrees are.
Based on the plot it seems they did mine less dangerous areas first but saw their mother lode in Hometree and a way to get more at once than they ever could before, therefore pleasing the shareholders. They did give Jake time to try helping them find a peaceful solution first - about three months. Before that, it's established they've been interested in that site for quite some time but none of their efforts to convince the Na'vi to move had worked, so since they wanted it they figured they'd just force the "primitives" out if they wouldn't listen to their version of reason. Even after they were ready to mobilize Jake was given one more hour to convince them their time was up, whether they knew it'd be futile or not.
This kind of stuff happens all the time, all over our own world in various forms. Indigenous people are seen as savages, inferior to the ones who come in with the power and force. In some cases they don't even try to coax them into leaving peacefully first.
Of course, if they don't decide to go for it right there we have no conflict. I think there's more reason behind a lot of the background of the story and the world than you're giving them credit for, whether it makes complete sense or not.
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Date: 2010-01-11 10:43 am (UTC)The effects were great, but the plot was just... unoriginal. Unobtainium notwithstanding. Might as well have just called it doesntexistium.
Still, the presumably primitive state of the world of Avatar leaves so much unspoken. WHY were they so 'backwater'? This is a world that evolved with a literal hive mind, the storage of memories in biological medium where nothing is forgotten. A true Gaia. The Na'vi should have either been far more advanced, or they are far far younger of a race than we're led to believe, practically out of infancy.
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Date: 2010-01-11 02:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-11 03:13 pm (UTC)It's not that the story he told is bad, exactly -- Dances with Wolves won a Academy award or two. But we've seen it already. (I've also seen a one page treatment of Disney's Pocahontas floating around the internet with the names all changed to the characters in Avatar.)
Quite honestly, I do have some problems with that basic story being transplanted a thousand years in our future, because I think to survive, we'd eventually have to twist greed and war into something new rather than a simple replay of Us vs. the Native Americans. But even if we have to have that basic plot, it could have had some interesting twists, or surprising characters, or something.
And that's part of my problem, too -- there are references online to one of the original script treatments for the film (from several years ago) that had some of those interesting twists. I've not seen the original document, and for all I know, it's a myth. But even if that's so, it still proves how simple it would have been to make the film a little less predictable.
I first heard about it here:
http://www.aintitcool.com/node/43429
The comment I found most interesting was this one, where he's talking about some of what was in one of the earlier versions of the script:
Well, in the scriptment there's a Nav'i tribesman named N'deh who acts as a reluctant ambassador to the human camp. Not in the movie. There's a PR videographer character who keeps getting censored. Not in the movie. There's a corrupt "Bioethics Officer" who represents Earth's Green party who's casually on the take but starts feeling really bad about it as Quaritch ramps up the genocide, if memory serves. Not in the movie. There's a former Avatar operator who went nuts after his Avatar body was eaten alive. Not in the movie.
Any one of those things would have registered with me as not your straightforward 'Whites Vs. the Indigenous in Space' plot. But for whatever reason, Cameron didn't go that way (I suspect so that he'd have more time for special effects.)
And then there are what others have commented on (in response to your post) about the convenient conflict structure -- that the unobtainium is *only* obtainable in that one spot. (In which case a sequel could be taken from another part of our history: What We Do After That Deposit of Unobtainium Has Been Stripped.)
In the end, I loved the visuals, and the world of Pandora, just as much as the next person. I just see the overall thing as one of missteps and could-have-beens. I'm also troubled by so many people who are pretty much saying, 'doesn't matter that there's no story. It's pretty' because it makes me fear for the art of storytelling.
My hope is that, now that we've proven we can use 3-D effectively, the next Big Film will have the SFX *and* an original plot.
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Date: 2010-01-11 03:24 pm (UTC)And this is exactly why I wanted to make this post. Don't get me wrong--I loved the "oooo pretty" things. Pandora was gorgeous and I was very immersed in the experience as I was watching it. There were many things about the characters and specific scenes that I loved.
But yeah, gotta call out the fact that the story is lacking, too. Especially given the tempting glimpses of what-might-have-been you're sharing; man, any one of those could have helped add some complexity to the plot and I'm sorry we didn't get those. Especially the part about the reluctant ambassador.
I've heard rumblings about a novelization of the story. I wonder if we'll get a better version of the story in the novel than we did in the movie.
Unobtainium
Date: 2010-01-11 03:26 pm (UTC)Re: Unobtainium
Date: 2010-01-11 03:36 pm (UTC)One, if there's intended irony here, it's entirely on the part of the writers. Which for me translates to "we're being cutesy and clever here, look at how clever we're being!" Which distracts from the otherwise immersive experience of watching the film. I think I'd have liked it better if the characters were also actually ironic about it--if, say, the actual name of the element was one of the funky unwieldy element names we have further up the periodic table, and the base on Pandora had taken to calling the stuff "unobtanium" just because that was easier to say. The smarmy guy who was speaking for the corporation could have sneered at Jake about how a grunt like him certainly didn't need to give a damn about what the stuff was actually called, or something like that.
Two, it would have taken practically no effort to come up with a name that sounded vaguely plausible. I mean hell, if Star Trek could come up with "dilithium", this film's writers could have done something similar, surely?
Three, this is not the first film to actually use "unobtanium", I've heard. The Core did it as well, and frankly, that doesn't sound like a precedent Cameron really wants to be following here. ;)
Re: Unobtainium
Date: 2010-01-11 03:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-11 07:11 pm (UTC)i'm one of those people who still says "The Planet of Endor" instead of "Forrest Moon of Endor". sorry!
and yeah - my sympathy is entirely with Jake - the whole thing with his brother, in the CARDBOARD COFFIN?!?!?!? i'd run off and join another race, too. and one that appreciated my skills?
it *could* have been great... sigh.
and totally right on the more than Trudy. my contention is that a lot of them *did* back out - those are the ones who never left base. but i could be wrong - because i'm also pretty sure that most of the military were chosen for NOT being the type to question, and for being inherently xenophobic [as that asshole Colonel is]...
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Date: 2010-01-11 08:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-11 08:09 pm (UTC)XD XD XD
It just KILLS my husband that I can do Navi voice really well.
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Date: 2010-01-12 12:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-12 12:44 am (UTC)I don't know how much the movie was really cluttered with special effects - it definitely had its moments - but including so many of the other things would have probably helped push the movie well over three hours. That wouldn't have bothered ME, but I don't think a lot of people have that kind of tolerance for really long movies.
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Date: 2010-01-12 01:39 am (UTC)Another analysis (http://ideas.4brad.com/avatar-isnt-dances-wolves-its-another-plot) lines up with what I feel about what's going on.
Pandora is an Impossible Planet, and it's not so much "What These Savages Need is a Honkey" than "Intelligent Planet Manipulates Stupid Alien to Get Rid of Other Destructive Stupid Aliens"
and I think 'Unobtanium' is just a slang that stuck. I'm sure it has a more accurate name that all the Real Scientists use.
Of course this all requires a sequel to actually show some depth, maybe Jake discovering just why this planet is how it is.
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Date: 2010-01-12 04:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-12 05:18 am (UTC)Meanwhile, the lack of advancement on the part of the Na'vi didn't bug me. I didn't see any reason to believe that they were ancient or that they should be more advanced than they were; another commenter has already pointed out that the Na'vi clearly don't need, or at least haven't needed up until now, to advance past the state they've been in.
Look at the comment
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Date: 2010-01-12 05:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-12 05:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-12 05:30 am (UTC)But I'm hoping!
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Date: 2010-01-12 07:00 am (UTC)Re: Unobtainium
Date: 2010-01-12 07:02 am (UTC)And I said myself that three more lines is all it would've taken to make that internal irony, where the characters say "yeah, they call it that after this old joke" or similar.
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Date: 2010-01-12 07:03 am (UTC)Was where we had first Corporate Guy and then Military Guy calling the natives "savages". Unironically.
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Date: 2010-01-12 09:53 am (UTC)A ratehr despised character, in fact... bad programming :)
http://www.zeldawiki.org/Navi has the whole story.
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Date: 2010-01-14 08:04 am (UTC)Crossing our fingers, on this side of things.
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Date: 2010-01-17 09:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-17 09:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-17 09:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-17 10:27 pm (UTC)