Stupid Sci-Fi

I've contained myself as long as I could, here's my Avatar rant. There will be spoilers, if you haven't seen it yet and keep reading don't get mad at me.

I saw the film with my son a few weeks ago and was glad he enjoyed it, I was impressed by the visual spectacle of it all, 3-D actually improved and enhanced the film, otherwise I hated it.

The movie was simply stupid. It has an earth apparently choking to death on it's own pollution that has found an alien world with an interesting biology and awesome material resources in the form of Unobtanium (fuck you Cameron). This unobtanium is so valuable it prompt's a corporation from a resource starved earth launch a mining program and fund an amazing cloning-mind transfer procedure and trust it to a corporate governor that is a mental midget and a macho tin soldier cut out military commander that doesn't seem to understand the tiniest iota of military strategy.

The Avatar program is capable of growing fully functioning adult bodies of an alien species and allowing a human to not just remotely control them but to project their consciousness into them. Expensive or not, the avatar program would be the solution to earths problems in and of itself. If the environment is so bad humans can't live in it anymore: make new people that can, you have the technology.

The avatar program is so expensive Jake the hero gets recruited to replace his dead twin brother because of biological compatibility. Jake has no training at all, no idea of what his mission will be and of course does well in seconds and is allowed to go on what must be resource rich missions with no training to speak of.

This avatar program is so expensive the corporate idiot in charge ignores all input and seems to almost completely disregard it exists. Corporate idiot is told about the really cool bio-communication all the life on the planet shares and how information could be shred by everything on the planet and totally blows it off. Is this a sci-future with computers and information systems or not? Even if corporate idiot wants the unobtanium (fuck you Cameron) why doesn't he pause and say "hmm how could we make money off of this too?" or "hmm, maybe we could hack this information network to our advantage", it took me 30 seconds to think those two points, I suppose I'm too smart to be the corporate governor of an interstellar mining colony in a universe where Earth is running out of resources.

The military commander is sneaky enough to use Jake the hero as his "secret way in" to learn about the aliens and either learns nothing he couldn't with a telescope or utterly ignores all the input from Jake the hero who runs an avatar in an really expensive research program that can create mature alien bodies that function. The military commander doesn't seem to understand tactics however when he deploys ground forces during an aerial assault in terrain dominated by floating mountains for no reason I could see other then to give some toy properties a foundation in the film.

The aerial assault is apparently done in aircraft that move really damned slow thanks to a bullshitium energy field that screws up human tech sensors; the same technology that could get people to the planet, launch an insanely expensive side program that could create functioning adult aliens just can't cope and produce aerial combat craft that can fly faster then winged animals.

The robot armor suits are boring but a step up from The Matrix, these armor suits have plexi-glass shields over the exposed human operators. The robot armor boys use actual separate firearms and big ass macho knives; ever notice tanks don't hold weapons in big mechanical hands? But sure these robot armor is supposed to be versatile and of no apparent use except for being a bigger target then a person.

The expensive Avatar program is so expensive there are some spare Avatar control pods just laying around the scientists are able to secure for themselves and avoid corporate and military involvement when lazy writing couldn't think of another way to move the story forward.

The alien sentients look too much like people, forgivable when it's people in costumes but this is all CGI, they don't' have to look so much like people except for cheap story telling reasons. The aliens are so alien compared to people I seriously doubt we could have a conversation with them: they can organically communicate with other life forms, effectively and meaningfully. Why the hell do they have a spoken language that says anything more complex then being able to yell warnings? They could certainly commune with each other with their magic ponytails and never need to develop a complex spoken language.

The aliens emotions key to facial expressions just like ours do, here in western culture. Not every human on earth shares the same set of facial expressions keyed to emotions, stupid sci-fi aliens do so only for lazy story telling.

Of course Jake the hero stumbles into and falls in love with the alien princess and this works out for him and the story plot. Sure they do only make stories about interesting things but it's a ridiculously beaten to death storyline.

In the end the primitive aliens in touch with their environment send the earth men packing back to their dying home world: leaving Jake the Hero behind as the greatest traitor to the human race that has ever existed.

It's all dumb sci-fi, having half a brain capable of solving problems in the story with resources mentioned within the story in most situations would have completely nullified the story.