Dulce et Decorum Est

I just got Halo 3, and I haven't finished it yet, but I gotta say, this is how you do military science fiction. Indeed, this is how you do military fiction, period. So much better than, say, Avatar (Cameron's thing, I mean, not The Last Airbender), which my parents saw, and I never will, not if there's money changing hands anyway—I tried to convince them to pay for Princess and the Frog and then sneak into Avatar, but they refused.

Let us list the ways Halo succeeds, first.

• Neither side's perfect, but one of them's definitely in the wrong (the Covenant, I mean; the Flood's not so much a "side" as it is "Satan"). Not only is this actually often the case in real wars, but it's absolutely essential to storytelling. If what TV Tropes calls the "Obligatory War Crime Scene" is essential to your idea of good war fiction, well, I don't know what to say—since I try to avoid the F-word in this blog.


• Despite the Covenant clearly being in the wrong, and defeating them being a good thing (it's hard not to soundly endorse the things the humans yell, when you've just fought a bunch of Brutes), their basic human...ish... rights are never denied, and they're not really painted as irredeemable (though you get the definite impression the Covenant's redemption is gonna involve the Elites busting a lot of heads). "There was honor in our Covenant once," as the Arbiter says, "and there shall be again." War is properly waged for the sake of peace.


• Master Chief is not some "maverick": he is a soldier, who takes orders and does his damn job. And the game does a very good job of showing that he'd be dead if not for his support—it's got vastly fewer "you've got to go in all by yourself" missions than any other FPS I've ever played. Actually, you can get by (on Normal at least) with letting your comrades take out a lot of the opposition; it's probably a better strategy to have the Spartan concentrate on things that need a half-ton genetically-engineered cyborg anyway.


• The Covenant races have so much damn depth, it's almost shameful, for other SF series I mean. Consider how Grunts panic without commanders, for instance, or the way Brutes charge you once they lose their armor, or the way Brutes howl when they spot you, to attract their allies—there was more work put into these species than many much more "highbrow" works. I especially like how the Covenant are influenced by ecological niche, but not determined by it—Brutes' pack mentality actually translates into them being more individually ambitious, because achievement raises their status in the pack.

Also, the production design and cultural setting more than make up for the fact the story's not breathtakingly original. It's as firmly a genre piece as, say, a Zatoichi movie—but, like a Zatoichi movie, it's actually all the better for it. It handles all the elements just about perfectly; though I personally don't care for the "apocalyptic parasitoid plague" element, manifested in the Flood, it's handled superbly, by the simple variation of their guiding collective intelligence, the Gravemind. A thing like that makes a lot more sense when it's a sapient, cruel, telepath, than if it's just a mindless swarm.

On the other hand, is Avatar. Let's enumerate the ways it epic fails.

1. Not only are the Na'vi perfect, the humans are only a little anthropophagy away from being Brutes.


2. It violates the cardinal rule of military science fiction: the sides have got to have a reason to have actual wars, and these ones really don't. The humans are portrayed as very, very evil—so how come they don't just firebomb? Guess what: unobtainium is a rock. Rocks tend to survive firebombing. Failing that, the Na'vi, with their warrior-honor culture, would probably be easy prey for the slick corporate lawyers of Generic Evil Megacorp, LLC.


3. The literal deus ex machina: the damn planet is literally alive, à la the Gaia Hypothesis, and sends its whole ecosystem against the humans. That's cheating.

There's also two other issues with Avatar, one independent of genre, and the other a general SF complaint. First is just how incredibly cliche and predictable everything is, especially the dialog, and it can also be said that pretty much every environmentalist, anti-military, white-guilt canard that exists is in this film. And they're not woven together into a genre-piece triumph, the way Halo is; they're just sorta thrown at the wall to see if they stick.

Second, actually calling it "Unobtainium" is like calling the stolen art in a detective story "the MacGuffin": it's the kind of shame that can't be borne, but can only be cleansed by hara-kiri. All they had to do was say something about magnetic monopoles—those have funky gravitational properties, and form the basis of Kzin gravity-planers.