Avatar (movie) – initial impressions
Just saw “Avatar” the movie with blue aliens. Here are my initial impressions of its war handwavium score (not the actual score, just a gut check)
SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS
It’s hard to tell, but I think the combat scenes show a fairly even mix of good guys (blue aliens) and bad guys (conquering earthlings) getting killed on screen. I’d have to get the DVD and count each one to get the real tally, but just from a gut reaction watching the movie on the big screen, it seems fairly even. There are lots of killing scenes, but I think it’s a balance of black hats and white hats, so the final score would be near zero for that aspect of it.
I believe I am going to have to invent a new item for scoring fiction that Avatar made me aware of: military victory delivered by god.
The main character, Sully, decides to fight the big, bad, fully mechanized invading military. And he decides to fight this military using nothing more than soft, fleshy, twelve-foot tall blue people riding soft fleshy horses and soft fleshy pteradactyls.
Needless to say, Sully and his band of spear-throwing, bow-and-arrow shooting warriors get their asses handed to them by heavily armored vehicles firing projectile weapons with a range of a kilometer and a rate of fire measured in the hundreds of rounds a minute.
But when all seems lost, the cavalry comes in and saves the day. The ending is a deus ex machina. God from the machine. The aliens worship a diety that they describe as the planet itself and all the life that lives on it. And towards the end of teh movie, it is revealed that the planet is actually some sort of biologically networked organism that stores people’s memories and their “souls”.
But, this turns out to be only part of the planet-god’s powers. When Sully and his band of warriors are about to be exterminated, the planet itself decides to send in the cavalry, in the form of wave after wave of animal to fight the heavily armored humans with guns.
Sully had no strategy, and the planet-god appears to have little strategy either, other than “war of attrition”.
But Sully goes to war with no planning, no strategy, no tactics, with not enough manpower, not enough weapons, and not enough armor, and really little more than the gut feeling that his fight is the noble fight and somehow it’ll all work out.
And that doesn’t really comply with the “just war” concept. In a “just war”, you must have a good probability for winning before you start the war. If you can’t win, then you’re just going to kill a lot of people, and end up losing anyway.
Sully, who used to be a member of marine recon, should have had some notion of what his odds of spear chuckers versus machine guns would be. Even an idiot should have some notion of what the odds would be. And the odds would be slim to no chance of victory.
But Sully launches the war anyway, and gets a lot of people killed. And he would have lost the war had it gone by his own planning, but victory was delivered by God, because their fight was the just fight, the noble fight. At one point, the spiritual second-in-command of the tribe said the planet-god doesn’t take sides, only maintains the balance. But apparently, the planet-god decided things were so unbalanced that it took sides and stepped in.
For that, Avatar gets an additional 20 points to whatever other points it may end up accumulating.
Overall, I’d say the movie was worth the full evening price, an A-. But that’s because the story of Sully coming of age in the Na’vi tribe seems to be the main story, and the stupid deus ex machina military victory at the end was sort of a sub-plot I can somewhat overlook.
I think the scene where Sully is doing a voice over talking about how they went around to all the tribes and got the warriors to help them fight would have been a good spot to insert a scene where they show Sully talking with the warriors about strategies. They wouldn’t need dialogue, they could have had Sully continue his voiceover so no dialogue would be needed. And then they could have implemented some tribal strategies. Throw some big boulders off the tops of those flying mountains onto the helicopters below. Some punji sticks for the troops on the ground. Maybe the Na’vi don’t use traps for animals, but I don’t think they would be unaware of how to make animal traps. Anything that resembled a plan could have evened out the fight a little bit rather than have a massacre.
But I think the writer, James Cameron, was going for the big surprise at the end. When all seems lost and so many warriors have died, surprise, the empathic planet will help you if you are fighting the good fight.
Ugh.