A Heapin' Dose of Linguistic Lovin'

Avatar was a great movie. It was visually thrilling. 3D was the bomb-est stuff I’ve ever seen. But those are not the kind of comments that make for an interesting movie review. So instead, I thought I’d examine the eccentricities of Avatar and the world of Pandora, its citizens, and its human invaders. This does indeed have spoilers, perhaps in more than one sense of the word.

Where Are the Others?

When Jake makes his first appearance outside of the avatar combination room, there are a bunch of avatars playing basketball, running around, and generally, “chillin’.” Except, none of those people ever show up again. Are they merely part of the NBA-Avatar cooperative efforts, spreading the multicultural love for basketball to aliens and humans alike? The scientists on Pandora get one new parapalegic guy and suddenly every other avatar is layed off? Venturing into Na’vi territory is also apparently quite dangerous, so larger contingents of avatars seems to make quite a large amount of sense. Is the recession really taking such a strong hold even on Pandora? I knew it was a trend.

Interesting R&D Choices

The humans working on Pandora have some very exciting technology. They’ve developed the ability to link a human mind to that of a walking blue copy of the Na’avi people. They’ve created their own Matrix pods without the pain of the neck injection or Keanu Reeve’s voice. But what’s most intriguing about the human science and business interests on Pandora is where they didn’t spend their money. Sure, they’ve got avatars, that’s really awesome, but nobody decided that it was important to spend research and development money on upgrading weaponry. You’d think that in a world with technology as advanced as dropships and avatars, somebody would’ve worked on laser weapons, or fusion weapons, or something along those lines. Even the current US military has, or is working on, those capabilities. While the slightly futurized conventional weapons that the military forces on Pandora use easily overpower the “spears and arrows” strategy that the “uncivilized” savages are implementing, laser weapons would’ve cleaned house like Ms. Doubtfire and avoided the obvious Cowboys vs. Indians parallel (made all the more clear with the loincloths and earth spirits the natives pray to).

So no, they didn’t spend it on weapons, they spent it on avatars. But they also didn’t spend it on upgrading their ships. A few thoughts: the native people ONLY have spears and arrows, so a first priority from a military-industrial standpoint might have been to engineer ships that wouldn’t be susceptible to attacks from those types of weapons. Example 1: Plexiglass. Yes, I have it on my front door, so I feel like the human future military forces on Pandora can throw it on the windows of the ships. Or even just reinforce the current glass. It’s quite hard for a wooden arrow to pierce much of anything if that anything is reinforced by multiple layers. That’s what physics taught me last year! A quick Google search helped me to discover that while Medieval arrows could easily penetrate 1mm of soft iron, even 4mm of the same material would’ve been very challenging to penetrate. So yeah. Earth folks didn’t really think about this one.

Second peculiarity: hovercrafts. Hovercrafts may very well be the vehicle of the future, but why would you craft a … craft that is so easily destroyed by the only flying monsters around? If you were considering that you’d likely be fighting people wielding bows and spears, you wouldn’t leave the spinning blades of the craft open to the attack of said spears and arrows. You also would’ve used something like a fuel-propelled reverse burners, instead of what amounts to multiple helicopter blades put together. You would also probably create some sort of defense on the surface of the plane against said flying monsters. Jet planes would’ve rocked the hell out of the Na’vi.

Where Did They Pick Up English?

All in-going Avatar scientist people must learn the native language. But Jake doesn’t speak it at all. Yet he visits the main native village and low and behold every single person has a tremendous grasp on the English language. This is both surprising and perplexing, because the type of conversational English that is required for Jake to have his chummy run-ins with the evil brother doesn’t seem to have any precedent in the native lands, since they refuse to ever allow any of the avatars to come near. It’s the same reason non-native speakers have difficulty conversing even when they become close to fluency, because they don’t understand all of the slang. Yet the Na’vi seem to have a 100% grasp on all of this, all the while refusing to even talk to the mining company head honchos to say something like “Hey, don’t attack us.”

Where Is the Industrial Machinery?

Pandora only has humans on it so that the unnamed mining company can mine some material that I forgot the name of. Except, no mining buildings or machines that I caught sight of ever appeared in Avatar. It’s like the company which seems to have been operating for years never actually established any construction, mining, or exploratory equipment. All that was ever done was the creation of a large compound and ridiculous military forces. That doesn’t really make much sense. It’s a movie set in a large mining operation where no mining appears to be happening. That would be like setting a movie in China that had no Chinese people. Or setting a movie in the future that didn’t have any Chinese people… Speaking of which:

Racism

Now look, when a movie is trying to avoid overtly racist connotations, it probably isn’t the best idea to have all of the “non-earthly” beings be played by racial minorities. Sure, there are minorities on the side of “evil” too, but those minorities end up siding with Jake and his “native” pals at the end anyways. So in the final confrontation we’ve got ourselves a good old racial throwdown, with the forces of good being made up almost entirely of minorities being “led” by their more cunning and more powerful white leader against the “evil, militaristic” white general, the white business leader, and the throngs of white soldiers. Racist? Yeah, that’s what I thought, it’s really not up for debate with Avatar. As the blog Lawyers, Guns, and Money points out: “[Avatar] transposes the cultural politics of Westerns (in which the Native Americans are animists who belong to a more primitive race) onto an interplanetary conflict and then assuages the white guilt that accompanies acts of racial and cultural genocide by having a white man save the noble savages (who are also racists).” The film culminates with the “savages” getting their shot at the racism fun too by kicking the humans back off the planet. I believe this quote best sums it up:

This is not a vision of a racially harmonious social politic: it is an inversion of the logic of passing that seems acceptable only because it imagines the experience of becoming a person of color as necessarily ennobling. The film argues that once a white person truly and deeply understands the non-white experience, he becomes an unstoppable combination of non-white primitivism and white rationalism which is exactly what happens. In order for the audience to support the transformation of Jake Sully into Braveheart Smurf, it must accept the essentialist assumptions that make such a combination possible … and those assumptions are racist.

But really, at the end of the day, Avatar was an incredible experience, and you should see it. You should just think about all of these things while you do and point them out to your less-thoughtful colleagues. They’ll either be impressed or angry, depending largely on your luck and choice of colleagues.