Just Saw: Avatar

I basically have to agree with what everybody else on the internet is saying: it's too long, the plot is predictable, the characters are flat, and it's totally worth it. Viscerally enthralling, intellectually stupefying. Go see it in Imax 3D, and try to turn your brain off before you enter the theater.

*Spoilers ahead*

I'm not the first one to point out that what the people in this movie do makes no sense, but here goes my hyperbolic overanalysis anyway:

First of all what struck me was "why is this planet entirely under the control of one corporation?" Is there no competition in the future? Is this the East India Company all over again? "Here guys, here's a planet to exploit, have at it." Not only are there no rival commercial forces on Pandora, there apparently isn't a single person on the planet who's not there on behalf of The Corporation. The exec in the movie repeatedly mentions that he'd rather not exterminate the natives cuz it's bad for publicity, what publicity? There's no media anywhere on the planet, or government agents, or scientific researchers (besides the ones in the employee of The Corporation).

And for an all powerful monopoly, the people running The Corporation are awfully short-sighted. The exec tells Jake at one point that there's nothing the shareholders hate more than a bad quarterly report. It takes six years to send stuff from Pandora back home. Given the massive amount of capital poured into planet, it seems pretty clear that investing in Pandora doesn't start paying off for a generation or so. Any enterprise willing to undertake such a large-scale, long-term project would have to have a unusually patient corporate culture (maybe that's why they're the only ones there). And yet the guy in charge of it all acts like he just got kicked out of a frat house. When Dr. Augustine tells him that the planet itself is apparently a giant supercomputer worth more than all the unobtainium it holds, he asks what they've been smoking, and proceeds to blow up large chunks of biocomputational mainframe.

But the irrationality of the humans is small compared to the nonsense of the Navi natives. One of the things I liked about the movie is that, unlike in most other sci-fi films, the aliens are not just inexplicably humanoid, but justifiably so. Their evolutionary trajectory developed parallel to our own: tree-swinging land dwelling omnivorous mammals with complex hierarchical social organization and symbiotic relationships with other animal species. Their religion and rituals are a pretty accurate depiction of life in human tribal societies. Despite all this excellent biocultural anthropological background, though, the Navi are just yet one more fictional depiction of the Rousseauian Noble Savage who's At One With The Forrest and don't need none o' that technology jibber jabber. Every human society that has the opportunity tries to modernize itself, but the Navi have no need for our silly education, medicine, and abundant food supplies.

Jake at one point says that "We have nothing that they want." I know something they might've liked, how bout fewer dead babies? Or longer life (with nanotechnology as advanced as to allow the sort of cybernetic connections depicted in the film, the humans should've been basically immortal, but nevermind)? Or no more famine? Or not having to shit in latrines? All of this is of course swept under the rug in Avatar, the Navi live in a primitive utopia where none of the ills of premodern society exist, cuz they've learned to respect mother nature.

Sure, maybe the Navi were able to cultivate an equilibrium state where their population was Goldilocks just right and they mostly avoided disease, famine, and tribal warfare, say, by making sure every male and female made one reproductive paid bond and having exactly 2.3 children, but the body dimorphism of the male and female of the aliens suggests that sexual competition is alive and well with the Navi. The male Navi are bigger and stronger than their female counterparts, just as with humans, suggesting that the better hunters and more powerful leaders got more nookie and had more surviving children (just watch the girl Navi practically cum in the seats when Jake descends from the sky in his hot new red pterodactyl), leading to the sort of constant downward social mobility and population growth that evolution controls by starving and infecting pestilence upon the weaker members of society.

The Navi are remarkably similar to primitive humans right before the dawn of the agricultural revolution, with their sexual marketplace and technological proficiency they were well on their way to building harems, invading neighboring lands, founding empires, raping the earth, and paving it over with superhighways and strip malls (Go Progress!). The Corporation wouldn't have had to bother exterminating the Navi, they could have sold them a truck-load of small arms and ammunition for all the unobtainium they had to offer and just sit back and watch as they killed themselves off. But that's a movie without a hero to root for. Might as well just watch the news.

P.S. Am I the only one who couldn't stop looking at alien crotch for anatomical comparison?