Review: Avatar

I've finally seen Avatar, after getting it on DVD. Thought I'd do a quick review.

I've watched it twice so far and, surprisingly, it was actually better the second time around. I think that it was because I was able to take in a lot of the little details that passed me by the first time. The story IS cliched, as much a retread of a classic story arc as Star Wars was (the 'Stranger in a Strange Land' motif, ie, hero travels to far off land, befriends the natives, has adventures and becomes a great hero--see also Dances with Wolves, Lawrence of Arabia, Ferngully, etc, etc), but just like with Star Wars, the cliched plot path didn't prevent the story from transcending its expectations.

I did not see the movie on a movie screen in 3D, I saw it on a standard TV screen, so I was able to enjoy the story without being overwhelmed by the special effects. Not that I still couldn't appreciate them, but they weren't the main attraction for me in watching the story.

All that being said, Avatar is an important scifi milestone. Pandora easily is the most fully-realized alien world in on-screen science fiction. Kudos to Cameron and his crew for such amazing attention to detail in creating the alien biosphere of Pandora.

The technology of the Earthers was also created with an eye toward realism. The mecha looked less anime-streamlined and much more like what such a system would look like if made in the real world. I especially like the shots of the starship, complete with glowing-hot radiators on the twin nuclear engines and the translucent icy impact shield on its bow. Gave me goosebumps.

For those of you who frequent the Orbital Vector main site, you might be interested that I'd classify the Humans' technology in the movie at about Tech Level 15, maybe edging toward 16. Some anomalies, though--firearms should have been much more advanced, for example.

An interesting thing I was contemplating the second time through is that I don't think the Pandoran biosphere naturally evolved. There seems to be tantalizing hints (particularly the big floating mountains, the huge apparently invulnerable arches around the Tree of Souls, the presence of super-conducting Unobtanium, plus some other stuff) that the world may actually be built on the ruins of a much older more advanced civilization, maybe even post-Singularity. For whatever reason the inhabitants may have decided to abandon technology and bio-engineer a nature-centric utopia for themselves.

I did think Cameron was a bit too hard on humanity, but then its apparent he was trying to drive home certain points. Despite what some conservative critics may have said about the film, I don't see it as anti-American or anti-military, as some have said. Rather, like most films of its type, its meant as a cautionary tale, showing us the dangers of a what could happen if we let certain forces in our society run out of control. (Ie, no 'green' left on Earth, and humanity apparently run by out-of-control, amoral corporations.)

There are some exceptions, of course. Cameron apparently could not resist taking a few digs at past US administration, but they are few and fleeting.

I don't think every human soldier and worker on Pandora would have gone along with the destruction of Na'vi except for a few scientists and the Hot Aircraft Pilot. I think a lot more would have protested and tried to block Colonel Bad Guy and Corporate Douchebag. But I also realize the film could only get so complicated and long, so the creators had to simplify things a bit with this.

The Na'vi in a way also had to be streamlined in a certain way for the same reason. In order to work, the movie needed to portray the aliens as actual sympathetic characters. However, making them too inhuman, as realistic aliens would be, would take too much time and work that it would distract too much from the story, which was making for a long movie to begin with. Most other scifi films and TV series run into this problem. Because of limited time to tell stories, creators have to choose: should the aliens be human-like, and be characters the audience can relate to, or should they be realistically inhuman, and result in them being puzzling enigmas? Here, Cameron obviously chose the former path, and though it is kind of stretching believability that the Na'vi would look and act so human having evolved on a completely alien world, for the purpose of a two+ hour movie it works well enough.

As I said, the plot as a whole was pretty familiar. Since I myself kind of came up with something similar with part 1 of The Shattered Sky (see the sidebar for links), I can attest Cameron did NOT 'rip off' the story as some people say. Its just seems that when you have certain story elements, certain plots and characters follow naturally for drama's sake. But even if events were in the broad term predictable to anyone who's seen this type of story before, it was in the details that the story become very enjoyable, and at times even surprising.

All in all, it was well worth seeing, and definitely a science fiction movie milestone, mostly for its stunning world-building and satisfying if unsurprising story. Looking forward to the eventual sequel and seeing if I'm right about Pandora being a post-technological society.

Confessions Of A Xenophile

(Warning: This article will touch upon some mature subject matter, more so than my usual posts. Rated PG-13. Also, I talk here from the male's POV, but a lot of what's discussed can be applied to female scifi fans as well.)

A few weeks ago, Conan O'Brian was interviewing James Cameron on The Tonight Show and mentioned something I found interesting: He said that he thought the lead female Na'vi character in Cameron's movie Avatar was pretty hot. Andy Richter, sidekick extraordinaire, chimed in almost immediately to agree.

What's significant about this is that the Na'vi are definitively not human. Oh, the Na'vi are humanish, as in most of the 'important' parts that humans require for a female to look sexy are there. Yet they're packaged in a way that leaves little doubt that the Na'vi are not members of the species homo sapiens.

If, like Conan O'Brian, you found the Na'vi girl Neytiri to be hot, all I have to say is: welcome to the club. Some of us have actually found alien and other non-human girls hot for a long time now, and maybe its time we started speaking out.

The term is 'xenophile,' someone who is open to, and holds affection for, the alien and foreign. It also has a sexual/romantic connotation, as in someone who is attracted to foreigners, or, in this case, non-human people. Its not as unusual an affectation as most people think.

Science fiction fandom, to no surprise, boasts a very large percentage of potential xenophiles, and of course that genre has had no shortage of sexy non-humans to appeal to fans. With SF so popular nowadays, xenophilia seems to be more popular than ever, and I would even dare say it was close to being mainstream, especially with hugely successful properties like Star Trek and Avatar showing sexy aliens and humans having liaisons with them.

My first inkling that I may be a bit of a xenophile myself came in pubescence, with a fascination for Orion slave girls and Vulcan women in Star Trek and for Frank Frazetta's cover paintings showing the crimson-skinned, egg-laying Dejah Thoris in Edgar Rice Burroughs classic John Carter of Mars series. I grew up and of course discovered real girls, but even through dating and all the other romantic hijinks, a curvy alien woman was sure to rivet my attention pretty strongly, even to this day.

Of course this caused some friction with some girlfriends, but most were pretty understanding it. In fact, the ones that were into SF or fantasy themselves usually saw no problem with it, though sadly I have never been able to get one to dress up in green body paint and an Orion slave bikini. Someday....

Friends have also confessed similar attractions over the years, so I know I was far from alone: Athaclena from The Uplift war by David Brin; Aslan and Vargr characters from the Traveller RPG; Klingon women from later Star Trek incarnations; Delenn from Babylon 5; Twi'lek girls from Star Wars; Orcs and Night Elves from World of Warcraft; Dadward's alien pin-up girl Xixa, illustrated to the left. Even the Beast from Disney's Beauty and the Beast, who my girlfriend (27 at the time) would have much preferred not turn back to human at the end of the movie. Attraction toward the inhuman seems to be a very common theme in our modern culture.

So is it all the result of some deviant mutant behavior? Naw.

First of all, people who seem to have at least some xenophilia in them actually seem to be pretty high in number. From my own very unscientific polling, I'd say at least about 25% of my friends, family, and coworkers could be considered to have xenophilia tendencies. What it is in the general population I couldn't say without a real study, but about a quarter or so of the population sounds about right, and of course the percentage is probably significantly higher among scifi fans.

I also think xenophilia derives from a very basic facet of human behavior: outbreeding instinct. It doesn't get as much press as its scandalous cousin inbreeding, but outbreeding is very important to any species' long-term survival, and is responsible for so-called hybrid vigor. Its the instinct to introduce as much variation into your offspring's genes as possible to ensure better overall survival. To do this, one seeks mates who are as much unlike oneself as possible but still recognizable as viable breeding prospects. In other words, the more exotic and foreign a date appears to you, the more attractive he or she will likely be.

Most of us have experienced at least a touch of this at one time or another. If you ever found a foreign accent sexy, it was likely your outbreeding instinct at play. It explains also why asian women are so popular as sex fantasies among guys in the North America, and why blond women are the same to males in the Far East. Its all a matter of what is familiar to you, and what you will find exotic.

Some people have a much more highly developed outbreeding instinct than others. So much so that apparently it can extend to imaginary characters who aren't technically human. As long the character is relatively human in shape and the specific "parts" (do I really have to spell out which ones?) which we tend to focus on for attraction are there, other details don't seem to matter as much. In fact, these tertiary characteristics, if made slightly non-human, only add to the characetrs' exotic nature and in some ways will make her (or him) more attractive in that outbreeding kind of way.

There also seems to be different sub-classes of xenophiles that have sprung from different scifi subcultures and genres. These include fantasy-philes (likes elves, hobbits, elves, orcs, etc), otaku (anime girls in all their big-eyed weird haired variations), furries (human-like mousegirls, catgirls, etc), monster-philes (vampires, werewolves, ghosts, etc), technophiles (cyborgs, androids, fembots,) and more.

But of course this is all just fun fantasy. Non-human people don't exist, and if we ever did meet any, the chances are very huge against them ever being romantically or sexually compatible with us. (Unless we eventually genetically engineer some that way, but that is another whole can of ethical worms...)

But that doesn't stop scifi fans from fantasizing, and in fact, capitalizing on their xenophilia has become big business. The Twilight series, about a human girl with very non-human would-be suitors, shows just how much money can be made from tapping into it from the female side. Avatar's runaway popularity also seems to stem at least partly from the sexiness of its non-human characters, especially in a way that appeals to males. Both properties take different approaches as to target the different genders, but they both tap into the same desire we have for the sexually exotic. And because they've made so much money, it only means that Hollywood and others are sure to tap more of this xenophile desire in the coming years. So I suspect this is only the beginning of a wave of xenophile works we'll see in the next decade or more.

So if you've ever had a tingle in your trousers from watching ten foot blue-skinned cat-eyed people jumping about in skimpy loincloths, relax. There's nothing wrong with you. You're not alone, and in fact belong to a fairly large group of like-minded indivduals. Welcome to the club.

(Neytiri copyright James Cameron. Other illustrations by Dadward, used with permission. Check out his WEBSITE and all his cool swag at his CAFEPRESS SHOP!)