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Avatar review: military mistakes
Jan. 18th, 2010 08:12 amWe saw Cameron's Avatar in 3D over the weekend. It is a very visually spectacular movie, and worth seeing for that alone. Its even more enjoyable if you can turn your brain off for most of the final hour, especially if you have any idea of how a modern military operates, since its apparent that Cameron didn't bother consulting with anyone who actually does.
Some examples of holes in the plot:
( Spoilers behind the cut... )
For the pathetic people keening over how Pandora is so much better than Earth, other than the obvious "its-just-a-movie-people", they're also missing that its exactly the technology they wish didn't exist that made the images they're seeing possible...and in a lot of their cases, even a century ago, many of them would have died by their current ages without the medical advances and other technology we have today. Further, for those romantics who wish they could live on Pandora, in all the visual fireworks they forgot that Pandora is an extremely hostile environment; one can be sure that even the Na'vi don't have particularly long life expectancies. To use another quote from Hyperion, "its a well-preserved ecosystem, but not one to take a stroll in."
Then again, my reaction to Edward Burtynsky's Oil exhibit when I saw it was "Wow, its great we have all this neat technology to enable us to have a standard of living that our grandparents could only dream of!" I think we could use a little more appreciation for the gifts our predecessors left us, and a little less pining for a utopia that never was.
Some examples of holes in the plot:
( Spoilers behind the cut... )
For the pathetic people keening over how Pandora is so much better than Earth, other than the obvious "its-just-a-movie-people", they're also missing that its exactly the technology they wish didn't exist that made the images they're seeing possible...and in a lot of their cases, even a century ago, many of them would have died by their current ages without the medical advances and other technology we have today. Further, for those romantics who wish they could live on Pandora, in all the visual fireworks they forgot that Pandora is an extremely hostile environment; one can be sure that even the Na'vi don't have particularly long life expectancies. To use another quote from Hyperion, "its a well-preserved ecosystem, but not one to take a stroll in."
Then again, my reaction to Edward Burtynsky's Oil exhibit when I saw it was "Wow, its great we have all this neat technology to enable us to have a standard of living that our grandparents could only dream of!" I think we could use a little more appreciation for the gifts our predecessors left us, and a little less pining for a utopia that never was.
