Ozmodiar

Avatar wasn't bad, but neither was it great. It was a combination of The Matrix and Dances with Wolves, with suggestions of many other texts (e.g., Starship Troopers [book, not movie], Dragonriders of Pern, Dinotopia, A Case of Conscience, Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, and Tolkien's elves), but mostly it was formulaïc and predictable. To the filmmakers' credit, they didn't dwell on most of the developments that had been telegraphed long in advance, once they actually came to pass.

The morality was pretty straightforward; good guys were all good and bad guys all bad, with those few who switched sides doing so unreservedly. The good guys, the indigenous intelligence, were a blend of Native American and African "noble savagery" living in a genuïne Gaia world. The bad guys were money-driven industrial corporate drones and their mercenaries, all from Earth. The metanarratives were environmentalism and cultural & political imperialism. Here are a couple of other interesting takes on it.

It had a reasonably happy ending, but of course it didn't hint at the aftermath. Any company with the wherewithal to conduct mining operations six light years from Earth would manage to mount a couple of neutron bombs on orbit-to-ground missiles. Then they'd sterilize and monitor a wide buffer zone around their mining sites, such that any life there would be unauthorized and assaulted immediately, which would prevent any effective sabotage campaign by any remaining local bipeds. Then they'd exploit the world until they were finished.

What I particularly liked was the way the alien world and its life were imagined. Basically, everything was bigger there. The intelligent bipeds were at least twice the size of humans, which made the battle and ending scenes impressive. Their arrowshafts, proportional in their bodies, became small-branch–sized missiles when loosed at humans. Humans weren't so much shot as impaled: something like the Uruk-hai arrows that struck Boromir, only...'way bigger. And fewer. And the wildlife, once it got involved, just tossed the human armor and aircraft around like toy trucks and sacks of wet laundry. I have to admit, that was pretty cool.

One thing I didn't like was that the bipeds had four limbs, while all of the other animals had six. I suppose they thought it looked cool (although I thought the extra pair of forelimbs looked awkward on the sexapeds), but it implied some bogus evolution. And those floating mountains — yeah, no.


In contrast, Mission to Mars, which I saw on broadcast television, su-diddly-ucked. It too had a lot of cinematic nods, most especially 2001: a Space Odyssey. The hero, Jake No-neck, had a crooked smile that they showed far too often, and he failed to die at all, let alone horribly. But mostly what bugged me was the craptacular "science":

• Mars' atmosphere is so near to vacuum that aeolian transport of boulders doesn't happen.
  
• Why would the aliens punish a wrong response rather than just ignoring it?
  
• Did they really build an interplanetary vehicle without separate airtight compartments?
  
• Explosions in space don't create pressure waves.
  
• You don't need constant thrust in space to get somewhere.
  
• Things in lower orbits travel faster than things in higher ones.
  
• A greenhouse is of little use if its glass is all covered up.
  
• The Sun's satellites are not all in the same orbital plane.
  
• The Moon does not orbit Earth in that direction (OK, OK, maybe that was the solar system from the "bottom." Yeah, I'm sure that's what the filmmakers intended).
  
• The Cambrian Explosion can in fact be explained without space aliens' involvement.
  

And that's only what comes to mind three days after seeing the movie.