The Mind of Bryan Lee Peterson

So I think it is time for me to make a writing comment on Avatar since by now everybody, even impoverished children in Africa have probably seen it. While it was pretty, and the story was epic, it wasn’t without its writing flaws. James Cameron is, I think, the best person in Hollywood for polishing the turd. I think he has had only a couple of original stories (The Abyss and Strange Days), and even those I’m beginning to doubt. He ripped off the Terminator from a Harlan Ellison written Outer Limits storyline. Titanic was based on “A Night to Remember” which I first read in fourth grade. This one was widely known to be a take off on Dances With Wolves, Pocahantas, or any other of 20 or so books. Given how lazy he seems to be in coming up with stories, I’m guessing he didn’t go too deeply into the more obscure of the list. Most of the issues I had were issues of laziness, and I think they are from the laziness of not being hungry. Somebody who isn’t given five years, $300 million and complete control from the outset of filming would have fixed these problems. Let me ruin the movie for you.

Actually, I found the movie tremendously enjoyable, let me start by saying it. The world Cameron created is richly detailed, down to creating a full language and ecosystem. But you’d think if you could come up with such a world, you could come up with a better name for the rock the humans want than “Unobtanium”. This name is a joke from materials scientists and materials users that should never have made it into a movie. You’d think after 5 years of production, you could come up with a better name for a mineral. There were two ways around it. One, come up with a better name, or second, mention “unobtanium TM, I don’t know what it’s made of and I don’t care, I just know it makes money.” The repetition of the name in serious context just made it silly. Another example of this is Pandora. We couldn’t come up with a better name for it than this? Really? Star Wars can do it just fine.

The other issue with the unobtanium is that we don’t know what it does. This entire three hours of this epic tale and epic war was fought over something that so far as we know is a rock, by the looks of it, a piece of pyrite or hematite. At least in Dune (another story parts of Avatar’s plot could have been stolen from) we knew what the spice did. You could say it’s a MacGuffin, but in this case, we deserve more than a MacGuffin. MacGuffins only work when it’s a story about characters, and this is a story about a war. The characters are absolutely secondary to plot. They don’t really have their individuality, much as James Cameron would like you to think. There’s the grizzled military leader, the money-driven company man (last played by Paul Reiser in Aliens, another James Cameron movie), Sigourney Weaver’s native liaison is nothing more than a Jane Goodall without a past. Think about it, what do we know about her, what did she do before coming to Pandora? Where are the telltale tics and tremors of any of these characters? No, not a character piece, and so we have to care about what the pathetically named unobtanium does.

The next issue I have was a reference to a “Daisy Cutter” in reference to a bomb to be used on the natives. If you look up “Daisy Cutter”, it is not a generic term. It is used in reference to a particular weapon of the current U.S. Military, the largest conventional bomb in the world, which fills up the entire cargo bay of a C-130. It is nickname the daisy cutter for the blast pattern it creates. What the future military creates on Pandora is the mother of all cluster bombs, not a single gigantic and comparable conventional bomb. All comparisons aside, when she said, “Fricking daisy Cutter,” it pulled me out of the world of Pandora, and back into the very familiar war-torn world we live in, and that worked counter to all of the work they did in creating the world of Pandora. Eight years of development and execution thrown away in one word. Now, if they had used “cluster bomb”, it would have made plenty of sense, as this is a generic term for a bomb made of many little bombs. It would also have made things that much more horrible, as cluster bombs are now banned by the U.N.

And really, robots that carry guns and knives? What possible utility does that have? I can’t imagine we’d build anything so anthropomorphic as we’d have a device for the knife, a gun with much more design efficiency. Didn’t we see enough of this with the Matrix? Aren’t the robots and weapons of Robotech much more likely than these cheesy things?