Rejiggered Avatar plot

So, the plot of the new version of the movie. Our protagonist arrives - the original plot device of having him drive his dead scientist brother's Avatar is not so plausible anymore, but the idea of having him be a marine rather than a scientist is a good one: let's say he's the first marine to get an Avatar, because the procedure has (for obvious reasons) never been popular with the troops, but the Colonel finally decides he needs a man on the ground and newly paraplegic Jake volunteers and is brought to Pandora. As much of the basic setup (marines and scientists, Avatars seem to slowly drive people crazy) should be conveyed to the viewer in the first section, since the mystery of what is going on? is what will be driving the plot.

Jake arrives and gets put in the science team. The original point of having him be the Colonel's man on the inside can stay - what conflict this plot has is going to be between the humans, since the Planetmind is too big to engage in any visually effective way, and the intrahuman conflict seems perfect for this setup. The marines are not bad people in any sense - certainly not the genocidal maniacs of the original movie - they're just soldiers dealing with a situation they don't understand and which makes their ostensible job very, very hard. They're there to be bodyguards for people who they aren't very similar to to begin with* and who will slowly but inevitably go off the deep end down on the planet. The marines go out in HEV kit and hardsuits; most of them have probably never touched a native Pandoran lifeform with their bare skin, let alone started channeling the Planetmind. The Colonel, in this story, doesn't have to be the bloodthirsty maniac of the original movie, he's just legitimately worried about what is happening down on the planet. The people behind the expedition back home think getting the transferal technology working reliably is worth a little temporary crazy on Pandora, and if all else fails it has been demonstrated the weird can't get off-planet; the Colonel probably agrees with the former but since it's his brains the zombie hordes will be eating if things go south, he's understandably less reassured by the latter. He doesn't start blowing things up in the climax because he's being paid to, or because he likes to do it; he's blowing things up because his first and most vital priority is to defend humanity, and when things speed up in the third act he's honestly afraid that this thing is now able to jump planet, get back to Earth and destroy civilization as we know it. In this context, Jake is not an intel source in the Na'vi - who cares about the Na'vi? they have stone knives and bearskins - but is the Colonel's own personal attempt to feel out what is going on the planet and just how dangerous it is. He's long since stopped trusting the scientists** but a marine, more psychologically distant from the planet to begin with and loyal to the Colonel, not the project, is a perfect tool for this job.

Finally, the real plot of the movie gets started. On his first trip out he gets separated as originally, runs into Neytiri, who thinks "huh, he's a hunter. Sexy", which feedbacks into Jake, who looks at this three-meter critter with secondary eyes and four shoulderblades and also thinks "sexy" as well. When he gets back, this freaks him out a lot, freaks out the scientists not at all (the Na'vi don't think science is sexy in particular, but they've all had similar inexplicable emotional reactions) and the Colonel is worried that Jake is going downhill so fast but also interested in the fact that it happened so fast around the Na'vi specifically. Jake gets sent back out.

Jake comes back with Neytiri to the village and starts acclimatizing as in the original movie. This part can run essentially the same, although we need to get rid of the mobile Avatar lab - that's certainly not happing in this set up - and add some more of Jake having trouble dealing with everyone back at base. The videologs should not just get increasingly sympathetic to the Na'vi - they should get increasingly disjointed and irrational as well. The Colonel, with the "help" of Jake and some figuring about data transmission rates, adds the big trees to his contingency plan of Things To Blow Up When it All Goes To Hell.

Jake gets inducted into the tribe. This involves linking him into the tribe and (since it hasn't been done to an Avatar before) Grace comes along to watch, as do a couple of marines. Jake links in and Gets It: he figures out the whole planetmind thing and, before he goes completely around the bend, manages to convey enough of this to Grace that she gets it, too. Unfortunately for them, the marines and Na'vi are already keying each other up to a ridiculous degree and violence breaks out. Jake and Grace join in because, after all this time in the field and this close to the big tree, neither of them can think of any good reasons not to. The marines are killed. The Colonel hard-unplugs Grace (who's trying to explain things but the Colonel, for obvious reasons, isn't listening) and Jake, who's human body is now braindead. Between the fact that Jake is gone, he's murdered two marines, and Grace's ravings about the planetmind, the Colonel decides it's time to go to Plan Z.

The Hometree gets blown up as in the movie, which causes pretty much all of the scientists to freak, so the Colonel (ostensibly and possibly even actually for their safety) ships them up the Elevator. Grace, the other recent-arrival avatar-driver, and the pilot escape, Grace gets shot, and they all take off to meet up with the Na'vi, who of course (along with everything else) are riding the ragged edge of going absolutely berserk. They try to transfer Grace, fail, and then decide to go on the warpath. (This means we can drop the "Jake rides the giant bird" subplot, and good riddance, too - Mighty Whitey is a pretty sketchy trope to be playing straight these days.) The Na'vi attack, synched up with the giant horde of animals, hits the compound. We have the main climactic battle again, although kind of different - the Pandorans have the giant animal horde but the humans are defending a fortified point, not attacking without electronics. Call it a pyrrhic victory for the natives. At the climax, Sully and the Colonel fight, Sully wins (of course) and then cuts the Cable. There's nobody left down at the bottom, and the cable is slightly unstable now that it's not quite as long as it used to be (the center of gravity is barely above geosynch now, but it is a little), so Sully (although given his state, more probably other-Avatar-driver guy) negotiates with the guys at the top****.

Since the humans have finally figured out what's going on, they (or at least the scientists) have had an aha moment where everything makes sense, and since the military types are in a pretty terrible strategic situation, they negotiate. (It's probably not necessary to actually show the negotiations - just have the Cable get cut, Jake gets on radio, "I think we need to talk", jumpcut.) Then we go to the denouement/epilogue, with Jake's v.o. explaining how things have been patched up with the humans, who still have a small presence here but a lot more careful about not ticking off the Planetmind. Jake runs around happily with the Na'vi, roll credits.

So that's my version of Avatar. As you can see, it drifts a lot in theme and message from the original, and really by the end probably owes as much to Stanislaw Lem's Solaris as to the actual movie Avatar. But I certainly think it would make a good sf movie.

*The marines are jocks, the scientists are nerds. That's not enough to cause movie-worthy conflict between grown adults, but it's enough to start off some baseline tension; these people are from different tribes. Example: the marines probably r&r with typical space-marine movie r&r, drinking and arm-wrestling and whatnot; the scientists mess around with the computers and play games (which has the added bonus that when you start losing badly at chess because you can no longer strategize well, its time to start watching you; when you stop connecting with the concept of "board game", it's time for a brachial full of tranqs and a fast ride into orbit). Another example, even if it would take some good writing to convey it in the movie: the marines are based out of orbit and think of themselves as being on tour on the ground even if they spend weeks at a time down there; the scientists are based out of Base Camp and think of themselves as taking trips into orbit even when their time is distributed the other way around. The scientists driving the Avatars - even before the psychological changes set in - start to think of themselves as living in the woods and occasionally stuffing food into the body back in the prefabs.

** The main problem with this setup is it leaves no room for Grace***. She's not that important plot-wise but is very important in providing exposition for the planet and a voice for the project, and somebody with that much Avatar time in the new setting would have long since been shipped back home. My best guess is that she should be the head of the main science team - the ones who don't use Avatars, since they need some science types to stay stable, run the machines and psych tests and so on. If they treat Avataring like radiation poisoning, she might also just be severely rationing her time out in the field, showing each team of new arrivals around but only briefly.

***As the Calvinist said to the Roman Catholic.

**** Negotiating an ending is important, since otherwise another starship shows up in 12 years and drops depleted uranium rods the size of telephone poles on every large tree on the planet.

Avatar retuning

Or: if you take it apart and then stitch it back together, would it better be called "Frankenstein"?

Let me just say first that despite the fact that this post will dismember the movie, it was very good and very well-realized. The spaceship at the beginning is a rod with spheres and centrifuges -centrifuges!- attached. It drops spaceplanes rather than landing. The marines act like soldiers. There is a hell of a lot of life on Pandora, much of it sort-of implausible but all nicely designed. The bird-things use a unique wing structure, amazingly*. One part that struck me well was that all the vertebrates have a similar structure: two back legs, four front legs, tiny secondary eyes, frontal snouts that kind of fold the jaws into each other, two tentacle-ear things that hold the nerve-bundle endings. The obvious exception is the Na'vi, which are gratuitously humanoid; but early on you see this lemur-like primitive primate, which has vestigial secondary arms, almost nonexistent secondary eyes, and frontal main eyes, a flattening snout and quasi-nose. Even though they couldn't or wouldn't make the Na'vi as inhuman as the local body plan seems to demand, they nevertheless figured out a developmental path for humanoids and even put it in the movie to be seen if you want to bother looking.

So: plot holes to fill. We'll do a little one first, before obvious disaster #1: They need an Elevator. They're moving bulk resources, they have spaceships, a Space Elevator is a necessity. Admittedly, they're still out of current materials-science reach, but so are the spaceplanes they use, and people are going to stop laughing at the concept within a decade of them becoming common movies, just like rockets in the 1920s and 30s. I still can't think of a movie with an Elevator in it.

Now, the big one: Unobtanium. Ungh. In The Core, they had unobtanium, but when that movie introduced it, you could hear the writer telling the audience: "Look, for the plot we need a plot device. Here it is. I know it's a plot device. Let's move on quickly." In Avatar, they move on just as quickly, but the implicit admission of MacGuffinhood by this movie gels far less well. Another option we saw might be to just have it be iron or tungsten or something, which would be less jarring at the cost of painting a far grimmer picture of the resource situation on Earth. (I have since found out that the unobtanium is room temperature superconductor, which is why the piece in the main office floats, and why the Hallelujah Mountains over the sacred tree and its big EM field float, and why its so valuable. That, said, I still think my idea is neater.) But there's an even easier solution: biologicals. We're already searching our disintegrating rainforests for chemicals and production methods, an alien jungle world like Pandora would be a goldmine far exceeding any rocks you could haul out. (Not to mention, unique biologicals will always make more sense to go space traveling for than bulk metals.)

The swap of "unobtanium" for alien biologicals tightens up one small but oh-so-glaring flaw in the movie, but if you follow the train of logic it really makes a difference to the movie**. First up: the Avatars. So humanity has this make-a-new-body technology, which (since the original has to still be alive to function, isn't quite immortality) but still seems pretty game-changing to me. David Brin wrote a book, Kiln People, about the effect this one technology alone would have on society. Also, towards the end it becomes clear that the Avataring tech synchs nicely with the preexisting Pandoran neural-interface tech. So why not have them linked? The Avatar technology isn't an unrelated feature, it's the first big dividend the planet has paid and we're trying to find out if it has more.

Form here, in turn, you can tighten (or at least rejigger) the character set a little too. In the original movie, there are three groups of humans: scientist, soldiers, and suits/miners. the last is largely superfluous in the ore plot, and can be dropped entirely in the biologicals one. (The fact that the only speaking suit or miner is Burke, who I've renamed out of laziness after an identical character in a 20+ year old movie says something about their contribution to the plot.) So now we're down to the scientists and soldiers, and instead of a giant industrial base we have (let's say) a little prefab compound at Elevatordown, and that's it. The Na'vi don't have the original reason to fight the humans (although if you want to stop here you could easily splice in something about the Na'vi home-tree secreting or containing something blah blah fight scene.)

All right - here's two more things from the movie to add in. Jake goes native far more than any other Avatared scientist ever has, but he also is linking with the animals (and thereby the Planetmind) far more than anyone ever has. Possibly, if dubiously, he is the first to do it ever. Now, I'm not suggesting he gets brainwashed and reprogrammed (although that makes for one hell of a dark possible interpretation) but he's way more in tune with it than anyone else. So why not take this and run with it? Also - it bugged me how human the Na'vi were. They were biologically weird, but despite this they thought a basically like people - give some New Guineans a holistic nature spirit that responds like the Planetmind does and they'd be indistinguishable, culturally. The most glaring example is Jake's initiation ceremony: it looks pretty generically tribal, despite the fact that they can link minds with stuff and it has been demonstrated linking is not even as personal as sex to these people, and this is obviously the most complete and biologically sensible initiation ceremony, they don't link up with him.

So let's take these points about linking and the Planetmind and go with them. The Na'vi can start to be smart like people without thinking like people because they no longer are people in the complete sense. They are sentient, yes, and individuals, but their culture is literally inhuman because it revolves around things people can't physically do and can barely comprehend on an academic level, once they figure out what's going on at all. And the Na'vi are always in low-level contact with the rest of the ecosystem and the Planetmind - this last is already implied a bit by the movie. Now, when the humans come down, the first encounter-suited guys are going to weird the heck out of the Planetmind***, since they're not connected or related to it at all. The Na'vi, when the humans run into them, are going to be incomprehensible: they sometimes act like reasonably human hunter-gatherers and sometimes are totally alien. One Na'vi will meet a party and be entirely docile. Another will meet the same party and, because one of them stepped on a beetle thirty seconds before and the whole forest has suddenly tensed up, will murderize them unprovoked. The first will agree, on later encounters, that the party were all fine fellows, and at the same time that the second's attack was also entirely fine, on the basis of sub-subconscious feelings that neither can explain or understand why they would have to explain.

As this goes on, some scientist figures out a fraction of the neural connectivity of Pandora and figures out an Avatar-making process. They test it and it works beautifully: they have a human inside a Na'vi body, but it doesn't work on non-Pandorans (they can't do human to human, which is obviously what they would want) and even worse, it doesn't work off-planet. They can gat all the obvious parts set up but without the permeating and enabling Planetmind (which no one knows about or has even really imagined yet) nothing moves. So they now have this Avatar system, which think they only barely understand and don't really understand at all, perfect for exploring the planet and (on encounter with the Na'vi) something the Na'vi trust to a degree that makes no sense (even when the Na'vi know it's really a human they trust it almost implicitly). They start using it.

Now the crazy-fun begins, because once people start wearing the Avatars, they're in contact with the Planetmind too. Because they're not really Na'vi they don't go quite as far as the real Na'vi do in acting on it, but Avatar-drivers start to develop what look like psychological problems after a while: they start getting erratic and emotional - more, they start getting emotional weirdly, having increasingly incomprehensible reactions to regular events. After a very long time, they start losing rational reasoning ability - they still think, but in ways that look schizophrenic to normal humans. Cycling them out, to everyone's great relief, brings quick recovery, but putting them back in an Avatar in turn brings immediate relapse. The people in charge figure out a "safe time" - probably somewhere between weird emotionalism and the complete "schizophrenic breakdown" and start cycling people through. Figuring this out is still obviously valuable enough to cover some temporary psychological disturbance (certainly all the volunteers think so).

At this point, enter hero.

*For reference - each time vertebrates have evolved flight on Earth, they built the wing slightly differently. Bats stretch membranes between the fingers. Birds hang feathers off a simplified arm. Pterosaurs hung membranes off the arm and lengthened fourth finger, with the other fingers a tiny claw halfway down. The Banshees in Avatar use pterosaur-like arm/fifth finger arrangement, except the other four also extend out to form little adjustable surfaces at the outside edge.

**Not least, which is probably why they didn't do this, it shoots the message in the head. The strip-mines, hauler trucks, and industrial plants that show up early on form a pretty impressive visual contrast to the eco-friendly Na'vi, and backs up Cameron's Industry V Nature theme beautifully. My McGuffin doesn't allow this and by the time it graduates to the status of plot point down the article a bit, the theme is more Man and the Alien anyways. Which is a nice theme which (surprisingly few, given their ostensible subject matter) sf films do, but it's not Cameron's point.

***In the movie it's never made clear whether the Planetmind is sentient - you can read the evidence plausibly either way. My personal preference is that it isn't - it's smart in an inhuman fashion, but isn't what we would think of as conscious. The Na'vi are, but as individuals, not as part of a larger conscious entity.

Avatar review

So, I just saw Avatar. It was a fine movie, with a high level of thought put into it, spoiled only by a bit of copout (and a lot of unnecessary violence) at the end. In the hour or two walking home afterwards, my friends and I took it apart to an atomic scale, saw a lot of well-done fine detail we initially missed, and realized that most of its flaws could be removed with a little fine-tuning of the concept (and all of them with a lot).

Summary next - obviously, what follows will be full of 10 kilo Bouncing Betty anti-personnel spoilers. Read at own risk.

So, the plot. In the future*, Earth is undergoing unspecified but vaguely grim environmental concerns. The planet Pandora contains a resource - unobtanium, God help me - which is, if not necessary, at least extraordinarily valuable. So a company - not Weyand-Yutani but "RDA" - come in to extract it from the lush jungle via open-pit mine. The problem is that there are locals (the "Na'vi", the stone-age blue-skinned locals on all the ads) who are vaguely-pantheistic peace-with-nature types and so obviously not impressed. Relations start out OK, at least, with some efforts at diplomacy, but as it becomes clear that the company's interests and the Na'vi's intersect nowhere, things have degenerated into essentially open war, with the anthropologist-scientist types increasingly outweighed by the aggressive and ever-more numerous PMC troops defending the company installations.

At this point enter our hero. Jake Sully, paraplegic USMarine vet, get a free job offer from the company. His twin brother was signed up to go do science on Pandora, but died shortly before the boat left. His brother's DNA had been used to build an "Avatar" - a Na'vi body with some human brain parts that can be remotely meat-puppeted for exploration of the (unbreathable) planet and diplomacy with the Na'vi. Since this was hideously expensive, and since, as his brother's twin, he is the only one who can run the (DNA-specific) Avatar, and the company gives him the chance to join in. He does, delighting the Colonel, the head of the PMC, who now has a man in the science team, even if the scientists hate him for the same reason.

Jake gets enrolled as bodyguard for Grace Augustine, head of the science team, but on his first real trip outside the compound is cut off from the group and nearly killed by a local, Neytiri. She stops when probably about a hundred blooms from their sacred tree land on him, which convinces her to instead take him back to their giant home-tree-village. There she turns out to be the chief's daughter and convinces everyone else to take him in as well**. Grace is ecstatic when he comes out of the Matrix - er, Avatar - and so is the Colonel, who now has the intel source he couldn't even plausibly fantasize about a year before.

Jake acclimatizes. He gets into, if not the good graces of the Na'vi, at least their toleration, and starts picking up Na'vi skills. The Na'vi - and the Avatars - have this funky thing where they splice this nerve-bundle at the end of their hair-braids into a similar bundle on various animals, and can ride horses (or, occasionally, birds) with preternatural skill, since they're not so much riding them as merging with them and hauling their bodies along for the ride. Everyone except Neytiri's intended ends up liking him, and he because he implausibly - if, somewhat squickeningly, accurately - is afraid Jake is stealing her from him.

Then Jake's day job interferes. The Company suit-on-the-ground, whose name I forget and so I will refer to as "Burke", after the identical character in Aliens, has decided the time has come to go after the motherlode, which lies (of course) under the Na'vi village. Jake tries to negotiate their withdrawal from the tree, which was probably going to fail even before he reveals he knew this day was coming from the beginning and turns them all against him. The marines slag the tree with napalm and the Na'vi flee to their sacred tree (the one with the blooms, not the one they live in). Grace, Jake, and a B-scientist and the speaking-role pilot freak at this and take off together to remote and mobile Avataring station from which they can get back to the Na'vi. Grace is shot in the escape. The Na'vi, understandably, want nothing to do with Jake, so he links with an untamable giant bird and rides it in to convince them all he is special***. He rouses the tribe, and their neighbours, to attack the human base camp; he also convinces them to try and use the tree to move Grace's consciousness from her dying human body to her Avatar, which fails, but leads to (the completion of) the movie's big reveal. The whole planet is quasi-linked through the trees; the linking the Na'vi do with the horses and birds is an expression of the fact that the whole planet shares a consciousness (sort of, not really, but a bit). The Na'vi aren't just pissed because the company is blowing up their sacred forest; they're pissed because by blowing up the forest, the company is (in a nebulous but demonstrably real sense) hurting them.

And so but anyways. Here the plot flies off the rails. The Colonel decides to blow the sacred tree and Jake's assembling army off the map before the do it to him; there follows half-an hour of essentially plotless explosions. The marines, to my quasi-amazement, actually massacre most of the Na'vi army, including Neytiri's intended, with their massively superior firepower, but then an enormous frickin' horde of animals, directed to the army by the Planetmind****, arrive and more or less literally stomp them into the dirt. The Colonel, because he is a stupendous Batman-grade badass, is of course the last to go down, fights Jake mano-e-mano (well, mech-e-Avatar) and dies. Jake uses the tree to transfer himself to the Avatar for good, and the surviving humans at the camp are forced offplanet. (In a bit that shows how much Jake has gone native, but also manages to be a bit disturbing as well, Jake v.o.s that "they" are going back to "their dying planet", which implies some rather sketchy inferred holocaust back on Earth when the resource tap from Pandora runs out. Uh, nice job, Jake?)

So that's Avatar. As you can see the plot isn't half bad, but the last half hour cops out on the ideas of the first half for a solve-all-woes-with-fireballs ending. How to fix this? Well, I have some ideas.

*The exact date is understandably hidden, but judging from their relatively low-grade improvements in military design, I would guess it's the "near future", in the science fiction sense - maybe 2050s or 70s. About all they have that's not plausible in the distant soon is (possible) FTL and cryo, both of which are inevitable sf concessions to the plot, and the Avatar system itself, more on which later.

**This is where my friends began whispering "Pocahantas" at each other. This turned out to be largely accurate, only less the truce at the end.

***Yes, it's the "Native tribe, at one with the land, defeats imperialist industrialist white folk. Because of the white guy who leads them." Sigh. The movie isn't as formulaic as those two sentences would indicate, but the trope at its heart is a little dirty.

****Term unashamedly cribbed from Sid Meyer's Alpha Centauri which admittedly greatly resembles this "character".

(4/5 stars; 5 for the first three quarters but the climax drags it down a lot.)