Avatar: Almost as Offensive as Stupid

When Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace hit theaters years ago, there were all sorts of allegations that many of the alien species were based on racist stereotypes.  The oh-so-annoying Gungas were alleged to have embodied negative African or Carribean stereotypes (uneducated, functionally-retarded, at the beck and call of the white massa).  The Neimoidians with their pan-Asian accents have been labelled as racist, portraying Asians as sneaky, greedy math gurus.  And, big-nose Watto who jews Qui-gon Gin into betting his ship against just spare part is, of course, a Jew.

But, when James Cameron’s Avatar hit the theaters, there wasn’t a peep about the racism.  Why?  Because it only stereotypes white people.  Without really giving away anything that happens in the movie: The humans (who are all white) exploit the natives of another world (who are not only blue, but played by non-white actors).

Mild Spoiler Alert

There are only two non-white human characters (counting only characters with names and lines in the film; there might be some token blacks in the back of a scene or two).  They are played by Michelle Rodriguez (who I assume is hispanic) and Dileep Rao (who I assume is the same as Fez on That 70s Show).  Both of their characters betray the humans to help save the Na’vi.

Now, some people might say that there’s nothing particularly bad about this because white people do in fact exploit other races.  But, try making a scifi movie about crime in the future where all the black characters rob liquor stores and smoke crack and justify it with statistics about who’s most likely today to rob a liquor store and smoke crack.  Jesse Jackson would be there to protest the opening in person.

The racism would be a bigger problem if only the movie weren’t such a god-awful piece of shit.

Spoiler Alert

I guessed the plot of the movie based only on the trailers, and I bet you did too.  Humans want to exploit a foreign planet, the natives who are in touch with nature and other hippie shit get in the way, the humans start to kill them, and one of the humans comes to learn how the natives are good and humans are bad and fights to save the natives, and wins.  There is literally zero suspense in the movie because the entire plot is known from the beginning.

But, it gets worse.  Why are the humans so eager to mine the hell out of beautiful Pandora?  Because there’s some rare mineral underground.  We’re never told what’s so special about this mineral except that back on Earth it’s valued at $20 million a ton!  …That’s not very much money though.  Consider that you have to take a 12 year round trip just to go from Earth to Pandora and back and that’s a seriously tiny amount of money.  The cost of gas would destroy profits entirely.

[Correction, the mineral is worth $20 million a kilo, which makes it a whole lot more valuable, but many of the problems still exist.]

Maybe the mineral should have been described as a likely cure for cancer?  Then the plot would be more interesting, because the humans have a fair ethical reason for wanting it.  It’d still be wrong to slaughter the Na’vi to get it, but at least the humans’ motivation makes everything more complex and interesting.  But nope, we’re after a rock that’s worth less than gold.

And just to make things worse, keep in mind that the movie is set in the 2150s.  $20 million today is the equivalent of about $800,000 150 years ago.  So, we can assume that $20 million in the future is worth about  $800,000 of today’s dollars.  Maybe the future humans don’t use USD, but they’re all white and speak with American accents and call their money dollars, so if it’s something else, that should have been mentioned.

This is a seriously worthless rock.  Y0u know what else the evil white corporate bad guys could have made $20 million a ton shipping?  Space tourists!  Virgin Galactic today sells seats on planned future sub-orbital barely-in-space flights for $200,000 each.  Just think how much people would spend for a vacation on a planet as lush and amazing as Pandora.

And of course, just to make this even more dumb, to get the ore off Pandora they would need to launch a rocket.  A rocket loaded with tons of rocks is going to be very hard to get off the ground, and extremely hard to get past Pandora’s gravity.  And after that, we have to remember that Pandora is just a moon.  The rock-heavy ship would then need enough power to reach the escape velocity needed to fly away from a freaking gas giant.  Where do they keep all this fuel?  Couldn’t we use it back on Earth?

So, the worthlessness of the rock aside, we also have the problem of why the humans have to uproot the local Na’vi tribe.  Apparently their home tree sits on top of the largest mineral deposit within 200 kilometers of the human settlement.  And, apparently the humans haven’t learned about slant drilling….

Anyways, 200 klicks isn’t a whole lot.  Did they just not to a geographical survey before setting up camp to find a rich deposit that doesn’t have a huge native population living on top of it?  And if it’s the largest within 200 klicks, we can assume there’s bigger deposits else where.  It should be too hard to move around the planet to those sites.  After all, the humans have space ships.

But, isntead of finding ore not protected by hostile natives, the humans send in their avatars to try to pursuade the Na’vi to leave peacefully.  Or at least, that’s what they’re supposed to be doing.  Jake is given 3 months to talk sense into them but he doesn’t even try.  The first time he brings it up is when the bulldozers are already at the Na’vi’s door.

Guess he was too busy swinging on trees and fucking the locals.

So to save the Na’vi, Jake needs to organize a counter-attack, and to get the Na’vi to follow him, he needs to ride the great sky-beast, the Turok.  First, the Turok isn’t much bigger than the normal Mountain Banshee most of the Na’vi ride, so its importance isn’t exactly clear.  It doesn’t seem to have any special powers other than Marginal Bigness.  The Hammerhead Titanothere looks far more powerful, but no one even tries to domesticate them.  And they’re herbivores, so it’d be a lot safer than conquering a flying predator.

But even dumber than the importance of the Turok is how Jake manages to get onto one.  This is supposed to be pretty hard to do.  Supposedly it has happened only 5 times in the Na’vi oral history.  So how does Jake get on one?  He flies above it and jumps on.  Done.

Jake says he had some insight about the Turok.  Since it has no natural predators, it would never need to look up; it would always fly high and then look down for prey.  So, fly over it and it won’t see you coming.  But, wouldn’t anyone ever trying to get onto one of these things approach from above?  Even without this insight, the only way to get on a flying creature is to jump down on its back.  It’s not like you can jump up from the ground onto it.  It seems like the 5 Na’vi who managed to tame a Turok were also the only 5 who ever tried.

I’m sure there’s a lot more dumb stuff to talk about, like how the humans seem to have forgotten the have missiles and switch to bombs in the final fight, but I think I’ve made my point: As offensive as Avatar was, it was far more stupid.

PreDetermined

I didn’t expect to find myself writing about something I discovered through a Facebook advertisement, but this presents an opportunity to discuss some basics in human stupidity that was too good to pass up.

Apparently there is some contest being held as a promotion for the movie PreOrdained.  The site reads (in part):

“The producers of PreOrdained The Movie are scanning the earth to find the truth.  [This makes it sound as if they want to approach their subject objectively and have an open mind.]  There is no doubt there is a power greater than us.  [So they've already decided what the truth they're looking for is.  Makes me wonder what they're still scanning for.]

[There is then some instruction on uploading videos of ghosts and such.]  “We want your experience to legitimize our discoveries.  [Uh...? What?]“

This is probably the most extreme form of confirmation bias I’ve ever witnessed.  For the lay people, confirmation bias occurs when you have a theory in mind which colors the way you view evidence.  In a mild form, it means you tend to interpret data more favorably than you should.  In the more serious form, you ignore data that would disprove your theory, concentrating only on data that confirms it.  For instance, you may believe that traffic lights always turn red when you’re in a hurry (and because you’re in a hurry).  You likely pay a great deal of attention to these delays when in a hurry because they matter more to you.  If you’re not in a hurry and catch a bunch of red lights, the occurance will be less interesting to you and less memorable.  Likewise, you won’t remember being in a hurry and catching green lights.  Your theory seems good to you, but only because you’ve blocked out the statistics that would show being in a hurry does not affect the lights at all.  This is completely natural; we forget mundane events because there’s no good reason to remember them.  Evolution favors efficiency.

But this site is just asking for confirmation bias.  It claims to be seeking the truth but asks only for evidence that would tend to back up its claims.  And the wording is just awful.  They admit their discoveries are illegitimate.  Asking for anecdotal evidence may be fine if you’re looking to make the exposition more interesting, but asking people to legitimize a theory while c laiming the theory is certainly true is fundamentally dishonest.

But, if you’re advertising your half-assed video project on Facebook and need random people to upload videos for you, you don’t deserve any longer of a rant than this.