Another Movie Thread - Because We Love Them So

[Klaus]

I just saw Erik The Viking for the first time last week, no idea how I'd missed it until now.

It was really fun from start to finish, with some clever one-liners and brilliant Terry Jones moments.

Yup. I think you need to really be a MP fan to get some of Terry Gilliam et. al., and some Brit humor. John Cleese is more accessible. I remember showing my mom MP Flying Circus on PBS when I was like 12, and trying to explain to her why the naked man playing the organ, and "The Larch" were hilarious. Time Bandits and Brazil are pretty obscure. But... What I value in a good movie is unpredictability, where I'm unsure where the plot is going. Often, writers (such as David Lynch *cough*) add inane twists and turns just to be intentionally avant-garde, rather than creating a well written, cohesive, unique and believable story.

So applying my filter to a film like Avatar; It was predictable, formulaic, yet enjoyable to see once with the boys on the big screen. I was more attracted to see the movie for the special effects and film making process, than for the story. The science, while far-fetched, was within the realm of possibility. I found the overall plot somewhat inconceivable, in that within the entire complex on Pandora of future humanity (with the hindsight of what they've done to Earth), only a handful of people would stand up against the rampant ecologic destruction and extermination of the indigenous population. Heck, we're afraid of contaminating Mars with microbes, and we are pretty sure it's devoid of life and (whatever side you fall on,) considering how something like oil drilling on a fraction of the 19,286,722 acres ANWR refuge is political suicide. So, I just don't buy into the premise that people would be so immorally complicit just to extract something as unoriginal as unobtanium even if it was worth $20 million a kilo. Beyond that, I was turned off by the cliche' of the gung-ho military eager to destroy and escalate, the greedy corporation only thinking about their short term gains, and the noble science geeks being the only humans exhibiting humanity. I think the most interesting part to me was the society and culture of the Na'vi loosely based on indigenous tribal cultures of earth, but adapted to the unique biology of their planet. I just knew by the end of the film, that given Lt. John Dunbar Jake Sully's predicament, I'd have gone native too. Mostly just to beat down that stupid abusive stereotyped Colonel, and that riding horses and flying on dragons with a brain to brain interface would be pretty cool.

Also, if it was possible to grow brain dead clones and drive them remotely, then why didn't everyone have an "Avatar" whether or not they be Na'vi? Wouldn't that be safer than risking your actual body, or perhaps we just need to buy into the whole premise that military grunts flown a kazillion miles to Pandora are expendable?

Well, the lack of "clones for everybody" was pretty reasonably explained. Right at the start, they say that Jake's clone was meant for his twin brother, who had died in an accident or some such. The clone was expensive enough (and took enough time to produce), that it was worth it to try to teach an undereducated, washed-up military grunt to drive it instead of discard it.

I can also see a shift in attitudes toward ecological destruction if you assume that Pandora isn't the only other planet we've discovered with life on it. If you can find a habitable planet in every other star system, and getting to them is easy, trashing one for it's valuable minerals doesn't seem so wasteful. I wouldn't want to see it happen, but I could see how people would change their perception of the value of any one planet.