No Zytrons In Range

So I just watched the trailer for James Cameron’s Avatar.

View it at IMDB– Oh wait, there’s an annoying long ad you have to view before the trailer. Try viewing it at Apple– Oh wait it requires QuickTime. Well, let’s try viewing it at YouTube– Hey look, it just starts playing without any bullshit. Attention Internet company big-wigs: this is why people like Google!

So anyway, according to the trailer, a bunch of space marines with headless robots land on this planet. They volunteer one of their guys to transfer his brain into the body of one of the natives, who are blue elf creatures named the “Na’vi” which is obviously a Native American analogue. They have little tails. He’s released to live among the blue elf dudes, possibly to spy on them, and over a period of time he comes to appreciate their culture more than his own. He also meets some blue elf chick with a bow. When the space marines start to attack the blue elfs, he joins the elf side and leads them in battle with the marines.

So it’s Dances with Wolves.

Separated at birth?

Oh, but also the blue elfs train giant cats and ride dragons, apparently. That would be cool, if they didn’t look like blue elfs.

One of my buddies brought up that having the aliens in your movie be, basically, Native American elfs is pretty goddamned uncreative. Especially since this movie has a budget of over $300 million. Obviously none of that money went into hiring somebody who can come up with a creative and original alien race– hell the guys working for Lucas came up with like a dozen more creative and original alien races in the cantina scene alone! Seriously.

My original theory was that, due to the dragon riding and giant cat taming, the aliens in this movie were just way to obviously bad ass compared to the space marines, and so the space marines lost any sense of threat. So Cameron redesigned them to be elfs, and added cute little tails, to offset the bad ass-ness. (Note: this is also probably why he would add headless robots to the marines, so they kick more ass.) Good theory, but probably not true.

My second theory is that someone involved with this movie thought to themselves, “we need the audience to make an emotional connection with the Na’vi… I don’t think people will make a connection to something that doesn’t look or act human.” To that, a brief rebuttal:

Think about it.

Oh, and when we have guys in a movie riding dragons? Please make the dragons bigger than that. It just doesn’t satisfy the “wait a minute, this looks totally wrong” test if you have a human-sized guy riding a dragon with a wingspan of maybe 15 feet. Let’s see some dragons on film that are actually big enough to carry people around, not these wimpy ones.

The following two bulletpoints are really going to shock people who know me:

• I watched G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra last night
• I thought it was actually an ok movie

So here are some comments.

Rating:

G.I. Joe is rated PG-13 by the lovable, huggable, MPAA. Here’s an short list of things you can show in a PG-13 movie, apparently:

• Decapitation
• Decapitation via head explosion
• Woman getting pierced all the way through her torso, all the way through the tablet PC she was holding by a sword (oh, and the tablet was a Panasonic Toughbook model, so you know it was a forceful blow)
• Man falling through high-voltage lines and being burned to dust

Of course, in all of those scenes, there’s no blood because kids are too stupid to realize violence is happening when there’s no blood, right? Gee, the MPAA totally fucking up a movie rating? Unthinkable!

Product Placement:

I’m not some slick Madison Avenue advertising dude, so maybe I’m way off-base here when I say that I would assume product placement is more effective when the good guys are using the product. Although, I’m sure my new-found knowledge that psychotic brain-washing mad scientist Dr. Mindbender uses Norton Internet Security on his torture computer will influence my purchasing decision next time I need anti-virus.

Cisco gets off easy by having product placement for a technology (holographic tele-presence) that’s used by both the good and bad guys in the movie, although the product is far too useful and creative (and easy-to-use) to actually come out of stodgy Cisco.

Hummer’s use by the bad guys, in a car chase that involves billions of dollars of damage and dozens, if not hundreds, of fatalities– maybe that was an environmental message?

Sci-Fi:

Surprisingly, the sci-fi element of the movie isn’t completely and utterly ludicrous. The tele-presence system mentioned above is a safe prediction for the next twenty years. Some guy already build a prototype of the stealth suit.

There are some problems, though. Nano-bots, really? That’s waaay out-there considering the stuff seen in the rest of the movie. They could have used something more believable, like a portable EMP or Fallout 3-esque mini-nuke. And they never explain why you need a particle accelerator to “weaponize” nano-bots.