6 ms·

Reflections on Avatar by Ray Kurzweil

60 points by limist 17y ago

lurkinggrue 17y ago
One bit of background that gets missed with Avatar is the military contractors are the low bidders and were using outdated military surplus.
CWuestefeld 17y ago
While I agree with the thrust of Kurzweil's criticism, there are a couple of things he missed. First, I too was disappointed by the simple, anti-corporate picture it painted. But it wasn't 100% black-and-white. There was a short scene in which Ribisi's character is reluctant to attack, and the army guy bullies him into it. I think the story would have benefited greatly just by expanding and amplifying that scene (although it was already a rather long movie). Kurzweil criticizes that the technology a century hence ought to be more advanced. He says the only revolutionary thing shown in the movie is the avatar tech itself. First, he misses the obvious fact of star travel and the hibernation that it relied on. But more significantly, I think he misses that while things advance, the form they take tends to ape what we're used to. Thus, our automobiles are very much "horseless carriages". Tablet computers are named that for their resemblance to zillion-year-old stone tablets. Since the tech in the movie was largely part of the scenery and not really highlighted, I think it's entirely to be expected that we wouldn't recognize how advanced it is.
- trevelyan 17y ago
  I actually thought the film was much less anti-corporate than previous work by Cameron. In Aliens we have the corporation that is the acting force behind the military. In Avatar the Ribisi character is weak and even somewhat sympathetic. As far as the script goes, my favourite line was Sigorney Weaver's toss-off about the Tree of Souls: "I'd die to get a sample of that". Between that and the obvious dualism intended with the mechanical and natural avatars, there's enough evidence of a thinking screenwriter to justify the film. Too bad it never really comes together.
- mclin 17y ago
  I thought that rather than a general "anti-corporate picture" it was supposed to be an allegory to what actually happened in North America wrt colonization. Edit: that is, until it switches to Hollywood mode in the final battle.
- 10ren 17y ago
  The characters were more filled out in the original, even longer, screenplay http://chud.com/articles/articles/21969/1/PROJECT-880-THE-AVATAR-THAT-ALMOST-WAS/Page1.html http://chud.com/articles/articles/21969/1/PROJECT-880-THE-AV...
barmstrong 17y ago
Kurzweil probably has no room to criticize given that he has never attempted to make a film like that and probably couldn't do better himself - but I agree with his general point that the movie was anti-technology and anti-corporation. This is a disturbing and misinformed viewpoint held by many people in Hollywood for some reason.
- sliverstorm 17y ago
  disturbing? misinformed? To a certain degree, the detractors are a positive thing. They are like the brakes on a train, preventing it from becoming a runaway train. For example, Skynet... imho, that will NEVER happen, cause everybody is so fscking scared of it. We'll get to the point where it could have happened, but fear will probably ensure we have safeguards and such.
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
  - hollerith 17y ago
    You haven't talked to many AGI (artificial general intelligence) researchers, have you?
seldo 17y ago
Is there anything in this that has not been mentioned about Avatar by a hundred other commentators? I'm seeing: derivative plot, suspiciously human aliens, big plot hole surrounding the ending. Is there anything new here? I'm genuinely asking; I may have missed it.
- elblanco 17y ago
  Well he did mention that he thought we'd be a bit further along the technology track by then.
Jim72 17y ago
What bunk. He tries to say that riding the backs of the birds is a rip of Harry Potter. Does the guy know nothing of Greek Mythology? Did he not see Clash of the Titans with Persius riding the back of Pegasus; which clearly predates Potter.
- Confusion 17y ago
  He tries to say that You are putting words into his mouth to support your interpretation of those images. I interpreted those images as simply another demonstration of the lack of imagination the movie displays. Whether riding a big flying animal is derived from Greek mythology or from Harry Potter is irrelevant. Before flinging the first criticism that comes to your mind at him, be critical of your own criticism. Supposing 'the guy know nothing of Greek Mythology' is a vast and unnecessary underestimation of his intelligence and credentials. If you'd bother to look him up, you'd see that he is probably quite aware of the mythological origins of these images.
  - Jim72 17y ago
    I put no words in his mouth. You apparently failed to read the article. "... and the flying birds were derivative of Potter creatures, including mastering flying on the back of big bird creatures." And I am sure Kurzweil knows about Pegasus. All the more the reason his article was bunk!
    - Confusion 17y ago
      I completely missed that line when I first read the article and I even missed it when I read it again, to figure out what you were talking about. I guess that shows how relevant the point about the flying thing is to the content of the article.
- Adam503 17y ago
  Kurzweil a smart guy, but I don't think I want to see him start up a movie review blog anytime soon
steveplace 17y ago
When the singularity comes, I hope we can get a new designer for him.
- Legion 17y ago
  Indeed. It's QUITE annoying to read HYPERTEXT where every fourth WORD or so is a BOLDED link to some silly TOPIC map.
jcl 17y ago
I thought the "networked tree" thing was actually quite clever. Think of it this way: Suppose you were living in Kurzweil's post-Singularity future, where you have absolute command over biological and nanotechnological mechanics, and you wanted to set up a world-wide communications platform that will last forever. You wouldn't mine precious metals and sling fragile fibers as we have done. Instead, you'd engineer it into the fauna: self-repairing, self-sustaining, global. "The spirits of your ancestors living in the trees" sounds mystical and backward, but "copying your brain to the internet to be saved forever" sounds wonderfully Kurzweillian. Cameron bridges the two, but the technology was too advanced for Kurzweil to identify it as such. :) One thing I thought was neat about the original Avatar script that got left out of the movie was a closing threat from the Na'vi to the humans: Our giant biological computer has analyzed you and engineered a virus that will destroy you, should you return to Pandora.
- yesbabyyes 17y ago
  My feelings exactly. I am quite surprised that Kurzweil misses that. After watching the film, I thought the Na'vi had pretty much mastered the whole "hooking everything to the Internet" thing. Kurzweil sounds like a child, angry because Cameron didn't let the humans have that advanced technology. In fact, it's rather Kurzweil who fails to see "beyond" today's technology, and envision a world where technology doesn't look like it does today, but is fused with nature. And Cameron didn't show that nature can be brutal? Dude, it was full of monsters. The Na'vi could be brutal. It was a badly written review, and Kurzweil didn't seem to grasp the film at all. He also seems to have a personal grudge with nature. Not cool.
  - eagleal 17y ago
    He looked over the Na'vi bio-networking quite superficially. But his point was that how can a rhinoceros destroy a robot like that. It's like you take an armored elephant against an M1A2 Abrams.
    - sliverstorm 17y ago
      We're talking about technology and life forms that don't exist, but imho: The rhinoceros was huge. A couple bullets, even from the robots, will not stop something that size in it's tracks. The robots are smaller, flimsier, and seemed to posses lesser firepower than tanks. Elephants have armor and defense nowhere in their body. The rhinoceros in Avatar looked like they had a veritable carapace to me.
Tycho 17y ago
I'm surprised I didn't read more commentary about the Christian symbolism in Avatar - Garden of Eden, Tree of Life, etc. Maybe people no longer look at those symbols as predominantly/exclusively Judeo-Christian?
- rue 17y ago
  Neither a tree of life nor a paradisiacal existence in the past are unique to the middle-eastern fables. See e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_life http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_life
  - Tycho 17y ago
    Yes but the interesting thing is how much cultural currency the Biblical tales may have lost (in days gone by, it was a case of 'there's Christianity/Judaism, and then there's everything else').
- teilo 17y ago
  You can find "Christian" symbolism in anything. For crying out loud, people found it in the Lion King, the Matrix, and even the Ten Commandments! (The last one was a joke.) For it to be "Christian" symbolism, it would have to be quite a bit more explicit than general themes like gardens and trees. Once you start turning fiction into symbolism you can make anything out of everything.
  - Tycho 17y ago
    general themes like trees and gardens? in what way, and in what works, are these things themes? Christian mythology shares a lot of common ideas with other mythology, according to scholars. The Garden of Eden was a paradisiacal forest where humans lived in harmony with nature, where the Tree of Life gave them immortality, so long as they ignored the Tree of Knowledge (at peril of being cast out). In Avatar, the Na'vi live in harmony with nature in a paradisiacal forest with a Great Tree, afforded quasi-immortality by 'spiritual-uplink' to the tree, and in the complete absence of technology. Then along come the evil, technologically advanced humans who of course have been cast out of their own paradisiacal habitat (or destroyed it). It doesn't sound like the loosest connect ever to me. one of the characters is called 'Grace Augustine'
megaduck 17y ago
I think he largely misses the point. Like many other sci-fi pieces, Avatar is a fantasia and not a serious look at our possible future. Much of the human technology was obviously modeled after current American military tech, and that was a deliberate choice. This approach allowed Cameron to tap into current feelings and cultural currents. If things had been more 'realistic', then it would have been alien to modern audiences. Really, properly modeling the future would have made the story far more difficult to tell. It's darned hard to make a story that's universally accessible. 'Avatar' is a pretty decent sci-fi movie that's understandable to people all over the world. It will also revolutionize cinematography and filmmaking from this point onward. Any proper analysis of the film should keep those points in mind.
- mclin 17y ago
  It reminds me of this article from little while ago. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1169875 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1169875 Nerds want every question answered with a reason, even if that question shouldn't have one. Why is Superman strong? He gets his powers from the sun. Why does he get powers from the sun? Because his skin is a solar battery. Well, why is he still strong at night? Well, he's charged up for years as an adolescent, he has a lot of stored power. Ah ha! Well, in issue #626, the Parasite drained him of all energy before Batman saved him - shouldn't he be back to zero and weak by dawn? No, they say, because of...
  - derefr 17y ago
    Well, yeah—that's what it means for something to be "science fiction." SF is fiction that not only feels scientific, but can be expected to hold up to genuine, in-depth scientific inquiry on its concepts and progression. If you didn't write a movie/book/whatever that will stand up to such nerdery, you should really stop calling it sci-fi.
    - tree_of_item 17y ago
      I feel as if it's the exact opposite. Do any of Asimov's books on "positronic brains" hold up to genuine, in-depth scientific inquiry? He just glossed over the details of their workings. Does this mean they're not sci-fi?
philh 17y ago
I liked the technology. It looked plausible, not primitive. Exoskeletons that are "beginning to be deployed" can plausibly be widespread in the future. I can believe that guns will continue to operate on the same principals as they have done for a thousand years. They didn't show the same restraint with the nature, unfortunately. Why did everything need six legs and four eyes, and why didn't Na'vi hair evolve to be prehensile when they started needing to shove it down the data tubes of irate wildlife? As an aside, having all those links in the text is very distracting.
- gnaritas 17y ago
  > Why did everything need six legs and four eyes For the same reason most animals on earth have 4 legs and two eyes, common genetic ancestry; It was actually a nice touch. > and why didn't Na'vi hair evolve to be prehensile when they started needing to shove it down the data tubes of irate wildlife They already had hands, a prehensile hair connection wouldn't likely offer enough advantage to become a primary trait.
  - cracki 17y ago
    four eyes might actually benefit the owner. with 2 eyes, you can cover 360 degrees without stereo vision, or half that with stereo vision. two pairs of eyes should give the owner superior awareness of its surroundings. six legs... the na'vi didn't have 6 limbs. they're an exception. that should have been continued, to maybe 4 arms, like the tree monkeys did. showing the use of 6 legs isn't a problem. enough things on earth already do that. humanoids with 4 legs might have worked... they'd have looked less human though. also, i can't imagine why a 4-legged humanoid would ride a 6-legged horse. Kurzweil pointed out that this film is meant to make money, so 4 legs wouldn't have worked so well. humanoids with 4 arms, that's already difficult from a practical standpoint. what does a 4-armed humanoid use its arms for? the bow and arrow for a 4-armed creature might just be too hard to extrapolate.
goodgoblin 17y ago
What is great about this movie review, for me, isn't the exact point-by-point analysis that the author makes, but the fact that author is noted futurist Ray Kurzweil. It would be like having Colin Powell review the Hurt Locker - its just kind of cool.
- jpwagner 17y ago
  I literally laughed out loud at that analogy. Thank you.
jawsh 17y ago
Ray missed the forest for the trees. No movie de-others the other more than this one. More importantly, he utterly misses the tonality, as if he were watching without a heart. Ray, how is it that your analysis explains nothing of the continued appeal of this movie?
- philwelch 17y ago
  The "continued appeal" of Cameron's last blockbuster (Titanic) lasted about a year longer than this one and then everyone forgot about it. Avatar's gonna go in the history of film for popularizing 3-D, but it's remaining to see whether there's any continued appeal in it.
  - jawsh 17y ago
    Fair enough. The point I put poorly there was that many people who like the movie are drawn in/back by the emotive landscape; usually one of the main things they have to say about it. Obviously that's supported by the 3-D, but I have a hunch that it has much more to do w/ my first point re: making the strange familiar. But you're right; that remains to be seen.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
RevRal 17y ago
Full paged, not framed, not cluttered with hyperlinks, and non-annoying version of the article: http://www.kurzweilai.net/news/news_printable.html?id=11907 http://www.kurzweilai.net/news/news_printable.html?id=11907
mmphosis 17y ago
The basic story was taken right from Dances with Wolves. No, the basic story is taken right from FernGully.
hendler 17y ago
I think it's the only review I've read where keywords are highlighted with a javascript function that says: javascript:loadBrain('Technology')
Adam503 17y ago
I think Kurzweil completely missed the very important set up point that the campaign on Avavar was not being conducted by the most modern military forces of that time on Earth. It was being conducted entirely by a corporate entity and it's ex-military hirelings (think Blackwater). I thought this point was particularly well though out. No profit-driven model of an corporate military campaign to put down a native uprising would send state-of-the-art anything. They'd send on-hand dated military surplus weapons and equipment and troops to fire full auto machine guns, flamethrowers, napalm, white phosphorus rounds, field artillery, and lots of ammo. State of the art military vs. peasant uprisings are useless. Watch the movie "Zulu Dawn" sometime. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zulu_Dawn http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zulu_Dawn Like the gatling guns on the front of A-10s and A-10s themselves the Air Force kept pulling out of retirement. Some situations just don't require anything more sophisticated than a gatling gun and something well armored and maneuverable to hang a gatling gun on the front of.

60 points by limist 17y ago

One bit of background that gets missed with Avatar is the military contractors are the low bidders and were using outdated military surplus.

CWuestefeld 17y ago

While I agree with the thrust of Kurzweil's criticism, there are a couple of things he missed. First, I too was disappointed by the simple, anti-corporate picture it painted. But it wasn't 100% black-and-white. There was a short scene in which Ribisi's character is reluctant to attack, and the army guy bullies him into it. I think the story would have benefited greatly just by expanding and amplifying that scene (although it was already a rather long movie). Kurzweil criticizes that the technology a century hence ought to be more advanced. He says the only revolutionary thing shown in the movie is the avatar tech itself. First, he misses the obvious fact of star travel and the hibernation that it relied on. But more significantly, I think he misses that while things advance, the form they take tends to ape what we're used to. Thus, our automobiles are very much "horseless carriages". Tablet computers are named that for their resemblance to zillion-year-old stone tablets. Since the tech in the movie was largely part of the scenery and not really highlighted, I think it's entirely to be expected that we wouldn't recognize how advanced it is.

trevelyan 17y ago
I actually thought the film was much less anti-corporate than previous work by Cameron. In Aliens we have the corporation that is the acting force behind the military. In Avatar the Ribisi character is weak and even somewhat sympathetic. As far as the script goes, my favourite line was Sigorney Weaver's toss-off about the Tree of Souls: "I'd die to get a sample of that". Between that and the obvious dualism intended with the mechanical and natural avatars, there's enough evidence of a thinking screenwriter to justify the film. Too bad it never really comes together.
mclin 17y ago
I thought that rather than a general "anti-corporate picture" it was supposed to be an allegory to what actually happened in North America wrt colonization. Edit: that is, until it switches to Hollywood mode in the final battle.
10ren 17y ago
The characters were more filled out in the original, even longer, screenplay http://chud.com/articles/articles/21969/1/PROJECT-880-THE-AVATAR-THAT-ALMOST-WAS/Page1.html http://chud.com/articles/articles/21969/1/PROJECT-880-THE-AV...

barmstrong 17y ago

Kurzweil probably has no room to criticize given that he has never attempted to make a film like that and probably couldn't do better himself - but I agree with his general point that the movie was anti-technology and anti-corporation. This is a disturbing and misinformed viewpoint held by many people in Hollywood for some reason.

sliverstorm 17y ago
disturbing? misinformed? To a certain degree, the detractors are a positive thing. They are like the brakes on a train, preventing it from becoming a runaway train. For example, Skynet... imho, that will NEVER happen, cause everybody is so fscking scared of it. We'll get to the point where it could have happened, but fear will probably ensure we have safeguards and such.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- hollerith 17y ago
  You haven't talked to many AGI (artificial general intelligence) researchers, have you?

seldo 17y ago

Is there anything in this that has not been mentioned about Avatar by a hundred other commentators? I'm seeing: derivative plot, suspiciously human aliens, big plot hole surrounding the ending. Is there anything new here? I'm genuinely asking; I may have missed it.

elblanco 17y ago
Well he did mention that he thought we'd be a bit further along the technology track by then.

Jim72 17y ago

What bunk. He tries to say that riding the backs of the birds is a rip of Harry Potter. Does the guy know nothing of Greek Mythology? Did he not see Clash of the Titans with Persius riding the back of Pegasus; which clearly predates Potter.

Confusion 17y ago
He tries to say that You are putting words into his mouth to support your interpretation of those images. I interpreted those images as simply another demonstration of the lack of imagination the movie displays. Whether riding a big flying animal is derived from Greek mythology or from Harry Potter is irrelevant. Before flinging the first criticism that comes to your mind at him, be critical of your own criticism. Supposing 'the guy know nothing of Greek Mythology' is a vast and unnecessary underestimation of his intelligence and credentials. If you'd bother to look him up, you'd see that he is probably quite aware of the mythological origins of these images.
- Jim72 17y ago
  I put no words in his mouth. You apparently failed to read the article. "... and the flying birds were derivative of Potter creatures, including mastering flying on the back of big bird creatures." And I am sure Kurzweil knows about Pegasus. All the more the reason his article was bunk!
  - Confusion 17y ago
    I completely missed that line when I first read the article and I even missed it when I read it again, to figure out what you were talking about. I guess that shows how relevant the point about the flying thing is to the content of the article.
Adam503 17y ago
Kurzweil a smart guy, but I don't think I want to see him start up a movie review blog anytime soon

steveplace 17y ago

When the singularity comes, I hope we can get a new designer for him.

Legion 17y ago
Indeed. It's QUITE annoying to read HYPERTEXT where every fourth WORD or so is a BOLDED link to some silly TOPIC map.

jcl 17y ago

I thought the "networked tree" thing was actually quite clever. Think of it this way: Suppose you were living in Kurzweil's post-Singularity future, where you have absolute command over biological and nanotechnological mechanics, and you wanted to set up a world-wide communications platform that will last forever. You wouldn't mine precious metals and sling fragile fibers as we have done. Instead, you'd engineer it into the fauna: self-repairing, self-sustaining, global. "The spirits of your ancestors living in the trees" sounds mystical and backward, but "copying your brain to the internet to be saved forever" sounds wonderfully Kurzweillian. Cameron bridges the two, but the technology was too advanced for Kurzweil to identify it as such. :) One thing I thought was neat about the original Avatar script that got left out of the movie was a closing threat from the Na'vi to the humans: Our giant biological computer has analyzed you and engineered a virus that will destroy you, should you return to Pandora.

yesbabyyes 17y ago
My feelings exactly. I am quite surprised that Kurzweil misses that. After watching the film, I thought the Na'vi had pretty much mastered the whole "hooking everything to the Internet" thing. Kurzweil sounds like a child, angry because Cameron didn't let the humans have that advanced technology. In fact, it's rather Kurzweil who fails to see "beyond" today's technology, and envision a world where technology doesn't look like it does today, but is fused with nature. And Cameron didn't show that nature can be brutal? Dude, it was full of monsters. The Na'vi could be brutal. It was a badly written review, and Kurzweil didn't seem to grasp the film at all. He also seems to have a personal grudge with nature. Not cool.
- eagleal 17y ago
  He looked over the Na'vi bio-networking quite superficially. But his point was that how can a rhinoceros destroy a robot like that. It's like you take an armored elephant against an M1A2 Abrams.
  - sliverstorm 17y ago
    We're talking about technology and life forms that don't exist, but imho: The rhinoceros was huge. A couple bullets, even from the robots, will not stop something that size in it's tracks. The robots are smaller, flimsier, and seemed to posses lesser firepower than tanks. Elephants have armor and defense nowhere in their body. The rhinoceros in Avatar looked like they had a veritable carapace to me.

Tycho 17y ago

I'm surprised I didn't read more commentary about the Christian symbolism in Avatar - Garden of Eden, Tree of Life, etc. Maybe people no longer look at those symbols as predominantly/exclusively Judeo-Christian?

rue 17y ago
Neither a tree of life nor a paradisiacal existence in the past are unique to the middle-eastern fables. See e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_life http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_life
- Tycho 17y ago
  Yes but the interesting thing is how much cultural currency the Biblical tales may have lost (in days gone by, it was a case of 'there's Christianity/Judaism, and then there's everything else').
teilo 17y ago
You can find "Christian" symbolism in anything. For crying out loud, people found it in the Lion King, the Matrix, and even the Ten Commandments! (The last one was a joke.) For it to be "Christian" symbolism, it would have to be quite a bit more explicit than general themes like gardens and trees. Once you start turning fiction into symbolism you can make anything out of everything.
- Tycho 17y ago
  general themes like trees and gardens? in what way, and in what works, are these things themes? Christian mythology shares a lot of common ideas with other mythology, according to scholars. The Garden of Eden was a paradisiacal forest where humans lived in harmony with nature, where the Tree of Life gave them immortality, so long as they ignored the Tree of Knowledge (at peril of being cast out). In Avatar, the Na'vi live in harmony with nature in a paradisiacal forest with a Great Tree, afforded quasi-immortality by 'spiritual-uplink' to the tree, and in the complete absence of technology. Then along come the evil, technologically advanced humans who of course have been cast out of their own paradisiacal habitat (or destroyed it). It doesn't sound like the loosest connect ever to me. one of the characters is called 'Grace Augustine'

megaduck 17y ago

I think he largely misses the point. Like many other sci-fi pieces, Avatar is a fantasia and not a serious look at our possible future. Much of the human technology was obviously modeled after current American military tech, and that was a deliberate choice. This approach allowed Cameron to tap into current feelings and cultural currents. If things had been more 'realistic', then it would have been alien to modern audiences. Really, properly modeling the future would have made the story far more difficult to tell. It's darned hard to make a story that's universally accessible. 'Avatar' is a pretty decent sci-fi movie that's understandable to people all over the world. It will also revolutionize cinematography and filmmaking from this point onward. Any proper analysis of the film should keep those points in mind.

mclin 17y ago
It reminds me of this article from little while ago. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1169875 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1169875 Nerds want every question answered with a reason, even if that question shouldn't have one. Why is Superman strong? He gets his powers from the sun. Why does he get powers from the sun? Because his skin is a solar battery. Well, why is he still strong at night? Well, he's charged up for years as an adolescent, he has a lot of stored power. Ah ha! Well, in issue #626, the Parasite drained him of all energy before Batman saved him - shouldn't he be back to zero and weak by dawn? No, they say, because of...
- derefr 17y ago
  Well, yeah—that's what it means for something to be "science fiction." SF is fiction that not only feels scientific, but can be expected to hold up to genuine, in-depth scientific inquiry on its concepts and progression. If you didn't write a movie/book/whatever that will stand up to such nerdery, you should really stop calling it sci-fi.
  - tree_of_item 17y ago
    I feel as if it's the exact opposite. Do any of Asimov's books on "positronic brains" hold up to genuine, in-depth scientific inquiry? He just glossed over the details of their workings. Does this mean they're not sci-fi?

philh 17y ago

I liked the technology. It looked plausible, not primitive. Exoskeletons that are "beginning to be deployed" can plausibly be widespread in the future. I can believe that guns will continue to operate on the same principals as they have done for a thousand years. They didn't show the same restraint with the nature, unfortunately. Why did everything need six legs and four eyes, and why didn't Na'vi hair evolve to be prehensile when they started needing to shove it down the data tubes of irate wildlife? As an aside, having all those links in the text is very distracting.

gnaritas 17y ago
> Why did everything need six legs and four eyes For the same reason most animals on earth have 4 legs and two eyes, common genetic ancestry; It was actually a nice touch. > and why didn't Na'vi hair evolve to be prehensile when they started needing to shove it down the data tubes of irate wildlife They already had hands, a prehensile hair connection wouldn't likely offer enough advantage to become a primary trait.
- cracki 17y ago
  four eyes might actually benefit the owner. with 2 eyes, you can cover 360 degrees without stereo vision, or half that with stereo vision. two pairs of eyes should give the owner superior awareness of its surroundings. six legs... the na'vi didn't have 6 limbs. they're an exception. that should have been continued, to maybe 4 arms, like the tree monkeys did. showing the use of 6 legs isn't a problem. enough things on earth already do that. humanoids with 4 legs might have worked... they'd have looked less human though. also, i can't imagine why a 4-legged humanoid would ride a 6-legged horse. Kurzweil pointed out that this film is meant to make money, so 4 legs wouldn't have worked so well. humanoids with 4 arms, that's already difficult from a practical standpoint. what does a 4-armed humanoid use its arms for? the bow and arrow for a 4-armed creature might just be too hard to extrapolate.

goodgoblin 17y ago

What is great about this movie review, for me, isn't the exact point-by-point analysis that the author makes, but the fact that author is noted futurist Ray Kurzweil. It would be like having Colin Powell review the Hurt Locker - its just kind of cool.

jpwagner 17y ago
I literally laughed out loud at that analogy. Thank you.

jawsh 17y ago

Ray missed the forest for the trees. No movie de-others the other more than this one. More importantly, he utterly misses the tonality, as if he were watching without a heart. Ray, how is it that your analysis explains nothing of the continued appeal of this movie?

philwelch 17y ago
The "continued appeal" of Cameron's last blockbuster (Titanic) lasted about a year longer than this one and then everyone forgot about it. Avatar's gonna go in the history of film for popularizing 3-D, but it's remaining to see whether there's any continued appeal in it.
- jawsh 17y ago
  Fair enough. The point I put poorly there was that many people who like the movie are drawn in/back by the emotive landscape; usually one of the main things they have to say about it. Obviously that's supported by the 3-D, but I have a hunch that it has much more to do w/ my first point re: making the strange familiar. But you're right; that remains to be seen.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

RevRal 17y ago

Full paged, not framed, not cluttered with hyperlinks, and non-annoying version of the article: http://www.kurzweilai.net/news/news_printable.html?id=11907 http://www.kurzweilai.net/news/news_printable.html?id=11907

mmphosis 17y ago

The basic story was taken right from Dances with Wolves. No, the basic story is taken right from FernGully.

hendler 17y ago

I think it's the only review I've read where keywords are highlighted with a javascript function that says: javascript:loadBrain('Technology')

Adam503 17y ago

I think Kurzweil completely missed the very important set up point that the campaign on Avavar was not being conducted by the most modern military forces of that time on Earth. It was being conducted entirely by a corporate entity and it's ex-military hirelings (think Blackwater). I thought this point was particularly well though out. No profit-driven model of an corporate military campaign to put down a native uprising would send state-of-the-art anything. They'd send on-hand dated military surplus weapons and equipment and troops to fire full auto machine guns, flamethrowers, napalm, white phosphorus rounds, field artillery, and lots of ammo. State of the art military vs. peasant uprisings are useless. Watch the movie "Zulu Dawn" sometime. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zulu_Dawn http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zulu_Dawn Like the gatling guns on the front of A-10s and A-10s themselves the Air Force kept pulling out of retirement. Some situations just don't require anything more sophisticated than a gatling gun and something well armored and maneuverable to hang a gatling gun on the front of.