The great thing about James Cameron is that if he writes a script that he is going to direct, he makes sure that it is just as bul­let­proof as possible.

I’ve absolutely loved his treat­ments of Ter­mi­na­tor, T2: Judg­ment Day, Aliens (adapted from Rid­ley Scott’s Alien), Titanic and now Avatar.

The fact that I’ve been kick­ing around this idea of mak­ing a blog for this very pur­pose shows you how inspired I was by this movie.

So let’s get to the analy­sis. There were sev­eral ele­ments of this movie worth cov­er­ing in terms of how real they are. Marines and aliens are the two main char­ac­ter groups. So here’s the factuality…

The major char­ac­ter­is­tics and char­ac­ters of the movie worth review­ing are: MARINES, TECH and ALIENS.

REALISM GRADE > MARINES: A

First, as a Marine vet­eran, it’s always a real kick to see Marines por­trayed accu­rately in movies. As far as accu­racy goes for Marine vet­er­ans and other com­bat vet­er­ans of-who-knows-where hired out as mer­ce­nar­ies on a for­eign world, JC gets an A.

As far as the main char­ac­ter Jake Sully (por­trayed by Sam Wor­thing­ton) goes, his role as a para­plegic com­bat Marine vet­eran turned Marine killer and neme­sis, it may seem unlikely, but Cameron puts the joy of liv­ing back into the char­ac­ter of Jake by giv­ing him his legs back, an oppor­tu­nity to be a hero for an exotic beauty (played by Zoe Sal­dana who also played Uhura on this year’s Star Trek) and an oppor­tu­nity to save lives from a men­ace (even if he belonged to the men­ace itself). It’s quite a char­ac­ter evo­lu­tion, but it’s believable.

REALISM GRADE > TECH: A

Prob­a­bly the most impor­tant tech in this movie is that of actu­ally hav­ing these things called avatars which are these remotely con­trolled bio-engineered beings. They have a blend of human DNA and the DNA of a per­son from Navi (which is a very tall cat-like per­son). This tech­nol­ogy is pretty darn unbe­liev­able but this film makes it very con­vinc­ing in the way it is intro­duced which is almost imme­di­ately and through a very voyeuris­tic per­spec­tive of the main char­ac­ter who is par­a­lyzed and can walk again with the use of the avatar. You can’t help but feel moved by the main character’s expe­ri­ence of walk­ing again rather than being dis­tracted by the unbe­liev­abil­ity of the avatar tech­nol­ogy. Regard­less, it’s com­pletely fantastic…as in fantasy-like tech; really damn amaz­ing. I can’t imag­ine being some­one who is par­a­lyzed and watch­ing this movie.

The equip­ment that they use is cer­tainly not too futur­is­tic for a film set in 2254 (not 2154 as I had copied from another source). But, it’s prob­a­bly a real­is­tic fact that when the cost of a bul­let or a fly­ing contraption’s motor is lim­ited by bud­getary con­cerns, they may be a bit more high-tech, but cer­tainly not more expen­sive and thus not state-of-the-art or some­thing you would see in a James Bond film. What else do you expect for grunts at the end of the uni­verse to be pack­ing? And besides, in the Marines we often joke about how our equip­ment was always the worst qual­ity and since these guys are mer­ce­nar­ies, I can’t imag­ine that the Cor­po­ra­tion spends that much money on their gear and ammo.

Cameron really has an affec­tion for the exoskele­tal war­rior exten­sions in the film. I don’t know what got Cameron so inter­ested in turn­ing these hydraulic pos­si­bil­i­ties into such every-day offer­ings, but we see the same thing in Aliens and they are sim­ply adapted fur­ther in Avatar.

Cameron doesn’t seem too fond of robots or androids as they are largely absent here and in most of his other movies except for the Ter­mi­na­tor series. Cameron does have a major android char­ac­ter “Bishop” in Aliens but he is purely bor­rowed from Alien. These seem to the only real autonomous machines in Cameron’s tool­box other than SkyNet. Is Cameron try­ing to avoid the clut­ter of robots and androids found in Star Wars?

UPDATE: On another blog, some­one pointed out that if electro-magnetic com­mu­ni­ca­tion doesn’t work well in a par­tic­u­lar loca­tion on Pan­dora that the main character/avatar can’t work either since they work by remote con­trol. That’s an absolutely valid sci­en­tific fact.

SECOND UPDATE: Cameron is noted for hav­ing made an inter­est­ing com­ment about how it is that Sigour­ney Weaver’s char­ac­ter treats her human body badly and that she must care more for her avatar’s body than her own.

REALISM GRADE > WORLD: B

The world of Avatar takes place on Pan­dora, a moon of Polyphe­mus around the very real star Alpha Cen­tauri. Polyphe­mus and Pan­dora are not real bod­ies. I didn’t know this, but the real Alpha Cen­tauri is a binary star that is part of a triple-star group. There are no con­firmed plan­ets around it, but there is a sus­pi­cion that there are and that there could be life-bearing plan­ets. Unfor­tu­nately, accord­ing to Wikipedia, the like­li­hood of a gas giant (depicted as Polyphe­mus) is not likely.

While it’s easy to say that Pan­dora is NOT a world that can be believed with float­ing moun­tains and a bio­lu­mi­nes­cent access to ances­tors at the heart of the plot, the float­ing moun­tains are really not explained (though they prob­a­bly will be in the director’s cut as is often the case with many inter­est­ing ref­er­ences made in the the­atri­cal release for Cameron’s movies; I think we will find in the director’s cut that the “unob­tainium” is an anti-gravity mate­r­ial which is why it is so expen­sive and hard to find–and it explains float­ing moun­tains and elec­tro­mag­netic dis­rup­tions) while the “bio­lu­mi­nes­cent access” ele­ment is explained to a point. The expla­na­tion of the “bio­lu­mi­nes­cent access” alone is cer­tainly novel and is a more clin­i­cal expla­na­tion for how native people’s here have fig­u­ra­tively and some­what lit­er­ally related to Nature; so, that’s inter­est­ing enough. Sci­en­tific? Meta­phys­i­cal? Holis­tic? Truth­ful? Well, why not? There have been plenty of these kinds of are­nas in sci­ence fic­tion where the meta­phys­i­cal have become sci­en­tific fact inside a fic­tional telling, so since there isn’t enough proof AGAINST it, it’s allowed.

But the float­ing moun­tains with­out a more solid expla­na­tion bring the grade to a B.

UPDATE: Also, an expla­na­tion by Cameron him­self of the float­ing moun­tains can be found at Stu­dio 360. He does explain that just like the small sam­ple of “unob­tainium” float­ing on a dish that these moun­tains also float for the same reason.Also here:

REALISM GRADE > ALIENS: A

While we must accept in sci­ence fic­tion the pres­ence of aliens as a dis­tinct sci­en­tific pos­si­bil­ity, the ques­tion is to how believ­able they are. These aliens in their world are cer­tainly wor­thy of praise: they are a great tem­plate for any­one look­ing at how to fic­tion­ally design and illus­trate an alien world. The ecosys­tem they live in, the diver­sity of species and the flora and fauna are just amazing.

Cameron is exem­plary at this. He always has been. If you look at how he took the alien from the movie Alien and then adapted it into a more and more advanced alien hive with a queen, you know what I am talk­ing about.

REALISM GRADE > OVERALL: A

Over­all, the movie is exem­plary in many fash­ions. It should be acknowl­edged that Cameron has more per­sonal and first-hand expe­ri­ence with exotic life forms than most non-scientists with his documentary/opinion piece Aliens of the Deep. If you’ve seen it, you know what I mean. I’m sure that his por­trayal of Pan­dora was deeply influ­enced by his own encoun­ters with Earth’s extremophile aliens.

This movie will be hailed for years as on-par with Star Wars as one of the best sci­ence fic­tion movies ever.

UPDATE: First, this movie has passed the $1 bil­lion mark in terms of box office and this is only a cou­ple weeks into its release. It is not expected to bypass Cameron’s other movie which is the biggest box office win­ner in his­tory. It’s inter­est­ing to note that Cameron has replaced George Lucas and Steven Spiel­berg as box office moguls. Look­ing down the road, the only other film­maker who seems poised to do this is JJ Abrams. Will there ever be any­one who can make a movie big­ger than Titanic?

Post Footer auto­mat­i­cally gen­er­ated by Add Post Footer Plu­gin for wordpress.