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[Morrigi]

They were both awesome movies. And Zombieland. Anyway, Nav'i are much more awesome than DF elves. Really.

[Acanthus117]

Shun the non-believer! shuuun!

The Na'vi were hippy weaboo people, while DF elves are badass (relatively) cannibals who fight with wooden sticks, knowing full well that they can just pick up iron shit to defend themselves and also abduct humans to learn about tactics, but they don't do so to preserve their chosen code of ethics and morals!

Don't get me started on Zombieland.

[pbheadtemp]

If we do are best to ignore any anti-dwarf themes in the movie... It is a good action/love story... except its kinda lacking in charactor development... which... there is a shizzload of in all the deleted scenes... which is rather depessing really.

I mean... guy gets new life in other world, gets saved by girl, proves himself to girl, kicks ass, gets ass kicked, girl saves him, and they meet again for the first time... (and if that scene didnt make you tearyeyed... your doing something really wrong (prolly killed too many dwarfs, and you have the "doesnt really care about anything anymore trait, you heartless... whatever you are.))  and they live happily ever after (till the sequel)... i mean, its classic.  Hard to go wrong with explosions+<3

I dont like the message of avatar... the "coolest" bits  of the movie was that starship, and that giant bucket-wheel... (that starship... so beautiful... made me teary-eyed... of couse... same with the enterprise, the promethius (RIP  ), and all those ww2 navel ships...) it was a good movie. (and 2.6 billion dollas, A- on boxoffice mojo, and an 83% on rotten tomatos back me up)

[Acanthus117]

money does not equal quality. Avatar is Pocahontas in space. with blue women in place of indians.

[Untouchable]

money does not equal quality. Avatar is Pocahontas in space. with blue women in place of indians.

Inclined to agree with you but seemingly none of my friends get that.

[Acanthus117]

money does not equal quality. Avatar is Pocahontas in space. with blue women in place of indians.

Inclined to agree with you but seemingly none of my friends get that.

HIGH FIVE BRO

[pbheadtemp]

do you think its even slightly possible that no one has seen that "pocahontas avatar" thing yet? I am honestly very tired of hearing about it.

one thing is for certain, it is better than Alice in Johnny Depland... which got like... a 53% on RT.

actually... 83% is rediculously high as far as those critics sites go... I mean, doesnt that mean anything? no, course not, we are all Internet People.

Internet People live in this wierd other world, where everything is connected to everything, and data is kept in these servers located all around the planet and they are only "online" when they turn on thier laptops, and they fade in and out of this world seemingly at will.

[Acanthus117]

But Alice in Wonderland looks cooler than Avatar, IMO. I loved Alice in Wonderland, and besides, just because some dude you've never met says something is good or not good doesn't mean that you should take it as law. I didn't like Avatar. I liked Alice in Wonderland. So what?

[jseah]

There isn't really a way to stand against the viewpoint of the Na'vi without being evil. I think that's well-recognized; there isn't really a gray area due to the way the story is written.

How about humans attempt to negotiate a transfer of technology in exchange for mining rights to a super-rare material, and someone botches the diplomacy and the diplomat left pissed? 
EDIT: I meant that the conflict in the movie is actually rather small relatively, impacting only the local area of Pandora and a relatively small portion of an (arguably) disposable corporation. 

If you take the ultra-long view, the humans are trading interstellar travel technology for a lot of rock. (that powers said tech)
Any good Civ player will tell you that the humans are getting the raw end of the deal.  For what?  Sentiment.  The humans could quite easily have glassed the planet/Tree of Souls from orbit with a "Hammer of God" (just nudge an asteroid into collision course or a shoot a few relativistic telephone poles) and are only witholding from terraforming the hostile biosphere because even the evilest money-grubbing capitalist fancies the blue catgirls. 

Then again, for a highly religious primitive culture, the worth of space-faring technology is lost on them, so yeah. 

[lastofthelight]

See, I think alot of people are missing the point. The Navi do not need space faring technology, they don't need computers, they don't need industrialization. Its not that the point of it is lost on them, its that the point of what they do is lost on us.

Will our technology increase their lifespan? Not really. Alien society and all. Will having space-ships and giant plasma screen tv's make them more happy? Not really. What can our technology do for them? It can give them a 40 hour workweek. Wow! I'm sure they'd rather spend 40 hours a week working rather then the 8-10 that most such tribal societies spend working!

Its their world, not ours. And we had nothing to offer them. I find the sentiment, as expressed above, that they were too ignorant to realize the value of what we were offering them to be...naive.

[jseah]

I would rather think it is the other way around. 

Humans are offering racial immortality. (of sorts)

The Na'Vi are screwed if/when a meteor hits the world, solar flares erode the magnetic field holding the mountains in the air, etc...  or failing all that, the sun(s) burns out. 

If you have space faring tech, and not just any old spaceship but a feasible interstellar drive, your race (and whatever biological lifeforms you bring with you) is effectively immortal short of an interstellar war wiping you out.  And even that is freaking difficult, the survivors or desperate disaspora will create immeasurable colonies that become practically impossible to physically track down and exterminate.  (should anyone be even attempt to try such a monumental task for minimal gain)

Furthermore, to bring a potentially xenophobic society (can't predict cultural reactions.  They might be...) into the interstellar medium risks a future extinction for humans.  After all, if they accept the tech and later some racial divide causes a war and humans lose, we die.  Compared to the current situation of "only humans have starflight", we are going from basically 0 risk to one (still small but) much much higher.  It's an off-chance, but the risk increase is orders of magnitude from negligible. 

We're basically offering them this trade: "share these rocks with us, and we'll share the universe with you".  The damned rocks and your religion are an incomparably small price. 

All for your bloody rocks.  When we could just take it when the political situation gets worse back home.  What do you think happens when the oil-equivalent mining company goes comes back with a truckload of war casualties and nothing to show for it?  The price of unobtanium will skyrocket, that's what.   And sheer economics will make humans come back, and the greedy capitalist might not be so nice this time...

[Sphalerite]

Honestly, the part I found hardest to buy was the reason for the mining:  unobtainium.  It exists at normal pressures and temperatures, found in a normal planetary crust, and has a density comparable to normal rock, so we can rule out neutronium or strange quarks or other highly exotic material.  It's sufficiently homogeneous and fungible that it can be formed into wires and engineered products, so we can rule out anything having a non-reproducible, highly complex microscopic structure.  It's long-lived and not radioactive, so we can rule out exotic unstable isotopes and assume it's made from the 94 elements we already know of in some novel configuration.  The background material for the movie claims it was formed in a highly energetic planetary collision in an intense magnetic field, which sounds hard to reproduce until you realize we can create metallic hydrogen in the lab and reproduce temperatures not seen since just after the big bang in particle colliders.  The humans of Avatar have reasonable routine interstellar travel via antimatter-powered starships.  There should not be any mundane material they can't make artificially, once they have enough of a sample of it to work out it's composition.

It's a required conceit for the movie to work, but that doesn't stop it from being stupid.  It would have been hardly more stupid if they'd been mining for gold.  The real value of a planet like Pandora would have been in the genetic diversity as raw material for genetically engineered drugs, plants, and animals back on Earth, ecotourism as wealthy tourists make the trip to get away from the ecologically ruined earth, and the very rich elderly pushing to figure out how to reverse-engineer that soul transfer technology as a way to achieve immortality.  That would have made for a much more complex movie that would have been a lot less black and white and would have required the audience to think.  It's probably best that I'm not a movie writer.

[Armok]

See, I think alot of people are missing the point. The Navi do not need space faring technology, they don't need computers, they don't need industrialization. Its not that the point of it is lost on them, its that the point of what they do is lost on us.

Will our technology increase their lifespan? Not really. Alien society and all. Will having space-ships and giant plasma screen tv's make them more happy? Not really. What can our technology do for them? It can give them a 40 hour workweek. Wow! I'm sure they'd rather spend 40 hours a week working rather then the 8-10 that most such tribal societies spend working!

Its their world, not ours. And we had nothing to offer them. I find the sentiment, as expressed above, that they were too ignorant to realize the value of what we were offering them to be...naive.

Yea. The only things of *real* value technology have produced is communications and protection. The biosphere already provides instant mind-to-mind communications and mind uploading (aka immortality), meaning they already have the ultimate in both those areas. There are two more mayor things technology can bring, namely sustaining an higher population and superintelligence, but the human tech does not seem capable of intelligence enchantment in the movie, and without that the usefulness of population growth is limited by dunbars number.

[o_O[WTFace]]

See, I think alot of people are missing the point. The Navi do not need space faring technology, they don't need computers, they don't need industrialization.

We don't need that technology either.  Oh wait 7 billion people live on this planet vs half a billion (max) throughout the rest of history, so 93% of us apparently do need it to live.

They never show the parts where half of all the little blue children die before the age of 5 due to disease and starvation.  Also, they never show the parts where the Navi societies kill each other over resources, yet they must in order to have warriors and warrior legends. 

Also, if you can upload someones mind into the synthetic brain of an alien, you can definitely do some crazy immortality stuff that the movie doesn't show.  How else would they bring back that angry Marine guy for the sequel (I heard they are).  Plus growing alien bodies in tanks in the first place takes some pretty solid medical tech that the Navi wish they had every time someone gets sick or injured.  If I was making the sequel the 2 main character's children would have some painful chronic disease that the humies could treat with a pill and everyone would be like "darn I wish those humies were still here so we could trade them useless shiney rocks for it". 

[jseah]

They never show the parts where half of all the little blue children die before the age of 5 due to disease and starvation. 

Someone said on TVTropes that they have some kind of biological adaption system instead of an immune system that works off that strange One-ness biology they have.  And thus don't get sick. 

Doesn't explain how a pre-industrial society of intelligent beings can hope to escape a Malthusian catastrophe. 

Also, as a civ player I have to agree that 20,000 years of technology in exchange for strategic resources that you can't even use is more then fair. 

Surely you jest, it's more like 4000 years.  Faster if we didn't have the various Dark Ages. (and equivalents in non-european areas)

But yes, that kind of technology gap is not something you turn your nose up at, regardless if you can presently think of a use for it or not.  (and protection from when humans manage to colonize the star system and some extremist group borrows a tugboat >.>)