I had to read several books and ponder the singularity for some time before really coming to understand it and its implications. Two hours just isn’t enough time to do it.

The scenes of reality and on the planet did not really mesh well, and I was constantly aware of the cartoonlike quality of life on the planet, and the motions are still not quite really lifelike.

The historic reality of imperialism was glossed over with video-game-like wonder and 2D movie characterizations … after all the whole point of the movie is the violence and spectacle, even if the excuse is to try to deliver some kind of new age techno-philosophy. It doesn’t work and the void of the lie is too big in the human mind not to see it.

I’m no fan of Harry Potter, so no comment there. “AI” is a different issue. When I first saw “AI” I really hated it, and my reaction was so strong that I left a little before the end. At some point I thought I should go back and watch a movie that gave me such a strong reaction, and I think the message of “AI” is very hard to take … I think it is a movie about the myth of our own humanity, something that everything in our culture pushes to distract away from and sweep under the rug.

I did not like the constant juvenile attitude of the Jake character in “Avatar” and the reality of his personality I think would have not led him towards being humanistic, but the reverse, the movie did not add up characterwise.

I was not worried about the likeness of the flora and fawna to Earth’s because I think there are some universal forces at work in the workings of life that will cause most life in the universe to follow a similar pattern, distorted by physics or chemistry.

While nature in the movie overcomes technology, anyone can see that is done to comfort the audience because in our world it is very likely in the battles coming up that nature will be the loser.

The biggest problem I see with the futurist orgasmic obsession with technology is the lack of introspection or critical thinking and the acceptance of everything that can be done as something that should be done … the biggest example is the Monsanto Corporation’s idea of modern agriculture which I see as far more evil and anti-life than anything depicted in “Avatar”.

But, this Tree of Life could do nothing more than simple storage and communication. There did not appear to be a greater than human recursively improving mind within that networked connection on Pandora.

I, like Ray, was terribly disappointed by the human technology, which showed very little progress from today, and a horrible misapplication of technologies that were present.

As for the modeling of gravity that Ray complained of, Pandora was a world with gravity than was closer to that of the moon than of the Earth. They mention this, very briefly, at the beginning of the movie. I thought the bigger problem with their modeling of gravity was that they did not show this effect in the normal motions of the characters, but ONLY showed it through the use of those huge “heroic” leaps made by the characters.

I notice in the comments that someone mentioned Caprica. I met one of the producers of Caprica (then just BSG) at an event at Berkeley, and mentioned Ray’s work to him. He had said that he would love to discuss tech applications of a society approaching their own Singularity with Ray…

Maybe you should give them a call, Ray?

MB

It is not healthy to always presume the avg human is an idiot, so we need to feed the same story line. Doing that creates the scenario where something that truly isn’t what is claimed will be accepted as real, and then become the definition affecting development of a product that truly is.

Good review.

Quote from Ray: “The ending (spoiler alert) was a complete throwaway. The Na’vi defeat the immoral machines and their masters in a big battle, but if this mineral the evil corporation was mining is indeed worth a fortune per ounce, they would presumably come back with a more capable commander. Yet we hear Jake’s voice at the end saying that the mineral is no longer needed. If that’s true, then what was the point of the entire battle?”

Jake did not say at the end of the film that the mineral was no longer required. He said that Toruk Makto, the rider of Last Shadow, was no longer needed. This leaves the story of a return by the corporation/human race open as a sequel, which James Cameron stated he wished to do if the first film was a financial success.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4jYr4502M0&playnext_from=TL&videos=gdS-Sq-vH-Q

And the high-tech corporation has limited tech because that’s what they can reproduce in the limited time with the limited resources they can haul over the light-years. The really high tech is inside the station, used to manufacture the rather lower tech stuff outside. Sure, we could posit that they COULD have produced higher tech stuff outside – but we don’t know the nature and limits of their tech.

I agree with you on almost all points, but I have to take issue with your belief that films like “A.I.” and “Avatar” are unrealistic because they don’t show absolutely every piece of technology being different. For example, your inclusion of the pill bottle picture seems to indicate your belief that it is unrealistic to assume such objects will still be in use in, say, 50 years. Really? Is there some kind of better way to contain pills?

Just look around your house and you’ll see all kinds of manufactured goods that have been essentially unchanged over the last 100 years or more, like furniture, clothing, and many eating and cooking utensils. Sure, I understand that styles and manufacturing processes change, but the form of the end product is always dictated by functional need, and that doesn’t change.

So no, I don’t think its unrealistic at all to see people in futuristic sci-fi films wearing normal-looking clothes, drinking their morning coffee out of ceramic mugs, keeping their pills in little orange plastic bottles, or driving around in four-wheeled land vehicles.

The director felt that showing too much technological change would cause future shock in the audience, draw their eye from one weird and wonderful tech to another, and distract from the storyline. It was decided to focus on the one Big Idea of surrogate tech, and build a plot around that one ‘what if’?

I would imagine most directors filming science fiction come to a similar conclusion, which is why we typically see future worlds where one thing changes dramatically, while everything else would not look out of place in a contemporary setting.

I wont go and see it after this review.

I walked out and got my money back on Speilberg’s AI because it lacked imagination and just walked out of Harry Potter because it looked like it had been scripted to a point system & also was unimaginative (JK Rowling is being sued fro nicking her ideas from the presently dead Adrian Jacobs’ work. they had the same agent, but I dismissed it as unlikely until I saw his work & was amazed at their similarity: wizard schools etc – which you can see online).

There are 7 great plots in literature

rites of passage

fatal flaw

Cinderella

winning the prize

defeating the enemy

battling nature

tragedy/comedy

etc

There doesn’t seem universal agreement on how to tabulate them & they’re not exclusive but thrashed out by the Greeks before gunpowder..

Hollywood could be urged to bring better sci-fi .