That would be hilarious.
Anyway, I had some thoughts on Avatar, occasioned by a recent viewing of...as much of it as I could stand. They're sort of random, so I'll put 'em in an unordered list.
- I've discovered that not even trying to riff on Avatar can make it bearable. Much like "Hobgoblins", Avatar is so bad, whole sections of it simply forbid the Satellite of Love treatment. And I'm a MSTie of long standing, I actually force my relatives to watch "Santa Claus Conquers the Martians" with me every Christmas Eve (it's my birthday, so they have to). Yes, the version with Joel and the Bots, I'm not a monster.
I think what makes it unriffable is its offensive, aggressive badness. It's like if Coleman Francis had tried to make Red Zone Cuba an incisive commentary on JFK, except with enough Noble Savage cliches to gag a buzzard. - And what is it about Cameron, that his female characters are so completely unlikable? Ripley has some human moments, but Sarah Connor? I hear he set out to make her hateful, and he succeeded admirably! Max in Dark Angel is mostly just annoying (googling to double-check her name reveals her surname is Guevara—tell me, Cameron, why not Goebbels, who didn't personally murder nearly as many defenseless people?), but all the others are obnoxious. If there's an aspect of "Original Cindy" that wasn't calculated to make you want to stab her in the larynx, I don't know what it is.
Avatar has two women you're supposed to hate, or else Cameron sucks at his job. Sigourney Weaver's character is a reprehensible woman, a shrill self-righteous hag with a ludicrously inflated sense of her own intelligence (newsflash, you chimp, the whole point of science is you don't have to be smart to do it...unlike military strategy). Admittedly her disdain for the military is justified, but that's because this is a Mary Sue story and the people who dislike the Sue have to be one-dimensional, so all the people who oppose the holy perfect Na'vi are chicken-milking lobotomites. What isn't justified is her psychosis-level lack of interpersonal skills. Lord knows I'm not the most personable of individuals, but Weaver's character in Avatar makes me look like if Thomas Aquinas and Francis of Assisi could have babies.
Meanwhile Neytiri is the reason genocide was invented. No, really, she's a complete bitch, who takes her worldview for granted and expects everyone else to do the same; the only reason she's not the villain is the director takes her worldview for granted, too. And the reason I say she's the reason genocide was invented is, if she's what the Na'vi women are like, and their children will grow up to be like her, killing their women and children suddenly becomes a lot less of an atrocity. Yes I'm exaggerating; my point is, I hate her, a lot. Also, I realize Zoe Saldana isn't much of an actress, but Neytiri's accent in English sounds exactly like Kida from Disney's Atlantis. - Speaking of Weaver's character, am I the only one who's tired of that "Holy Virtuous Scientist Being Used By Evil Corporate or Military Villain" thing? Understand: the best a scientist can say, if they work for an organization like the one in Avatar, is, "I'm a grant money whore. I turned whatever tricks they asked me to, because I needed the money for my pet projects." And that's the absolute best; Oppenheimer and Mengele were just ego-tripping, and some of the others did it emphatically because science was, for them, the ideal to which petty "ethics" can be sacrificed, just as patriotism might be used to justify military excesses. Sure, you can make a case for the military involvement being a corrupting factor—"my atrocities are for the war effort!"—in the World War II science-scandals (Manhattan Project, the experiments on Shoah victims, Unit 731), but what about Tuskegee? That was civilian from top to bottom. Anything you make an idol out of, you're gonna give human sacrifices to; science is not exempt.
- It's apparently a commonplace how creepy those data-jack things the Na'vi have are. For one thing, it evokes the deal-breaker question of SF—"How the hell would that evolve?" The Gaia hypothesis is all well and good, except it isn't, but the whole point of Gaian thinking is that "Gaia" is sort of deist, and everything in the ecosystem will just sort of trend the right way...somehow. Yes it's poppycock, but it's a lot less poppycock than this—this is some weird combination of the Blind Watchmaker with the Deus Ex Machina.
But the other point is the thing with those flying critters: so basically to become a man in their tribe, you have to tentacle-hentai a pterosaur. O...kay? Only this is portrayed as not at all the incredibly creepy thing that it is, but as all beautiful and wonderful and shit. And then Sully gets the biggest one, and becomes the Overfiend of the Na'vi, I guess? - The Na'vi piss me off: they're a Noble Savage cliche, without the rape, robbery, torture, mutilation, casual murder, and occasional cannibalism that are the reason for that second word. They also don't have the almost suicidally strict social control that goes with that first one, seen in, e.g., honor-killings. It's pretty much unavoidable for aliens in SF to show the author's pet theories about society, but how about if those pet theories are something less naive? My own aliens are a militocracy, since I happen to know that actually tends to work out pretty well...but the main tension of their society is the members of the military elite trying to get absolute power in their territories, because I'm not an idiot.
- Update: forgot to add this yesterday. You know when Quaritch talks about the Na'vi having "naturally occurring carbon-fiber" reinforcing their skeletons, and that making them hard to kill? Maybe he meant "that makes them much tougher than you'd expect from light-worlders", because if the CF is on their skeletons then their vital organs are still just as accessible as yours are—there are no bones covering a bullet's access to your intestines of which I am aware. Also, even if they did have some form of natural armor...I'm guessing we still have armor-piercing rounds in the 22nd century, that are rated for stuff that simply doesn't happen in nature. Like, y' know, steel.
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