Reflections on Avatar by Ray Kurzweil

http://www.kurzweilai.net/news/frame.html?main=/news/news_single.html?id%3D11907

by limist • 16 years ago

60 58 16 years ago

One bit of background that gets missed with Avatar is the military contractors are the low bidders and were using outdated military surplus.

CWuestefeld• 16 years ago

While I agree with the thrust of Kurzweil's criticism, there are a couple of things he missed.

First, I too was disappointed by the simple, anti-corporate picture it painted. But it wasn't 100% black-and-white. There was a short scene in which Ribisi's character is reluctant to attack, and the army guy bullies him into it. I think the story would have benefited greatly just by expanding and amplifying that scene (although it was already a rather long movie).

Kurzweil criticizes that the technology a century hence ought to be more advanced. He says the only revolutionary thing shown in the movie is the avatar tech itself. First, he misses the obvious fact of star travel and the hibernation that it relied on.

But more significantly, I think he misses that while things advance, the form they take tends to ape what we're used to. Thus, our automobiles are very much "horseless carriages". Tablet computers are named that for their resemblance to zillion-year-old stone tablets. Since the tech in the movie was largely part of the scenery and not really highlighted, I think it's entirely to be expected that we wouldn't recognize how advanced it is.

trevelyan• 16 years ago

I actually thought the film was much less anti-corporate than previous work by Cameron. In Aliens we have the corporation that is the acting force behind the military. In Avatar the Ribisi character is weak and even somewhat sympathetic.

As far as the script goes, my favourite line was Sigorney Weaver's toss-off about the Tree of Souls: "I'd die to get a sample of that". Between that and the obvious dualism intended with the mechanical and natural avatars, there's enough evidence of a thinking screenwriter to justify the film. Too bad it never really comes together.

mclin2• 16 years ago

I thought that rather than a general "anti-corporate picture" it was supposed to be an allegory to what actually happened in North America wrt colonization. Edit: that is, until it switches to Hollywood mode in the final battle.

10ren• 16 years ago

The characters were more filled out in the original, even longer, screenplay http://chud.com/articles/articles/21969/1/PROJECT-880-THE-AV...

barmstrong• 16 years ago

Kurzweil probably has no room to criticize given that he has never attempted to make a film like that and probably couldn't do better himself - but I agree with his general point that the movie was anti-technology and anti-corporation. This is a disturbing and misinformed viewpoint held by many people in Hollywood for some reason.

sliverstorm4• 16 years ago

disturbing? misinformed? To a certain degree, the detractors are a positive thing. They are like the brakes on a train, preventing it from becoming a runaway train.

For example, Skynet... imho, that will NEVER happen, cause everybody is so fscking scared of it. We'll get to the point where it could have happened, but fear will probably ensure we have safeguards and such.

hollerith• 16 years ago

You haven't talked to many AGI (artificial general intelligence) researchers, have you?

seldo• 16 years ago

Is there anything in this that has not been mentioned about Avatar by a hundred other commentators? I'm seeing: derivative plot, suspiciously human aliens, big plot hole surrounding the ending. Is there anything new here? I'm genuinely asking; I may have missed it.

elblanco• 16 years ago

Well he did mention that he thought we'd be a bit further along the technology track by then.

Jim722• 16 years ago

What bunk. He tries to say that riding the backs of the birds is a rip of Harry Potter. Does the guy know nothing of Greek Mythology? Did he not see Clash of the Titans with Persius riding the back of Pegasus; which clearly predates Potter.

Confusion2• 16 years ago

He tries to say that

You are putting words into his mouth to support your interpretation of those images. I interpreted those images as simply another demonstration of the lack of imagination the movie displays. Whether riding a big flying animal is derived from Greek mythology or from Harry Potter is irrelevant.

Before flinging the first criticism that comes to your mind at him, be critical of your own criticism. Supposing 'the guy know nothing of Greek Mythology' is a vast and unnecessary underestimation of his intelligence and credentials. If you'd bother to look him up, you'd see that he is probably quite aware of the mythological origins of these images.

Jim722• 16 years ago

I put no words in his mouth. You apparently failed to read the article.

"... and the flying birds were derivative of Potter creatures, including mastering flying on the back of big bird creatures."

And I am sure Kurzweil knows about Pegasus. All the more the reason his article was bunk!

Adam5032• 16 years ago

Kurzweil a smart guy, but I don't think I want to see him start up a movie review blog anytime soon

steveplace• 16 years ago

When the singularity comes, I hope we can get a new designer for him.

Legion• 16 years ago

Indeed. It's QUITE annoying to read HYPERTEXT where every fourth WORD or so is a BOLDED link to some silly TOPIC map.

jcl• 16 years ago

I thought the "networked tree" thing was actually quite clever. Think of it this way: Suppose you were living in Kurzweil's post-Singularity future, where you have absolute command over biological and nanotechnological mechanics, and you wanted to set up a world-wide communications platform that will last forever. You wouldn't mine precious metals and sling fragile fibers as we have done. Instead, you'd engineer it into the fauna: self-repairing, self-sustaining, global.

"The spirits of your ancestors living in the trees" sounds mystical and backward, but "copying your brain to the internet to be saved forever" sounds wonderfully Kurzweillian. Cameron bridges the two, but the technology was too advanced for Kurzweil to identify it as such. :)

One thing I thought was neat about the original Avatar script that got left out of the movie was a closing threat from the Na'vi to the humans: Our giant biological computer has analyzed you and engineered a virus that will destroy you, should you return to Pandora.

yesbabyyes• 16 years ago

My feelings exactly. I am quite surprised that Kurzweil misses that. After watching the film, I thought the Na'vi had pretty much mastered the whole "hooking everything to the Internet" thing.

Kurzweil sounds like a child, angry because Cameron didn't let the humans have that advanced technology.

In fact, it's rather Kurzweil who fails to see "beyond" today's technology, and envision a world where technology doesn't look like it does today, but is fused with nature.

And Cameron didn't show that nature can be brutal? Dude, it was full of monsters. The Na'vi could be brutal.

It was a badly written review, and Kurzweil didn't seem to grasp the film at all. He also seems to have a personal grudge with nature. Not cool.

eagleal3• 16 years ago

He looked over the Na'vi bio-networking quite superficially. But his point was that how can a rhinoceros destroy a robot like that. It's like you take an armored elephant against an M1A2 Abrams.

philwelch3• 16 years ago

It's an admittedly cool idea, but it's also very blatantly set up as if it isn't technology at all, just so he can paint technology as evil.

James Cameron is a white man using technology and corporations to make movies about how white men, technology, and corporations are evil. I lasted about an hour and a half through the movie before the preachiness outweighed the special effects for me. District 9 was better told and even had a more exciting mecha battle.

cryptoz• 16 years ago

James Cameron does not paint technology as evil. It is very clear that he thinks the greatest technology of all is the Avatar itself; the Avatar is humanity's achievement in science and technology that allowed us to communicate with aliens in a familiar way.

The dull grey ships and weapons of the military look backwards and old compared to Avatar technology.

Tycho3• 16 years ago

I'm surprised I didn't read more commentary about the Christian symbolism in Avatar - Garden of Eden, Tree of Life, etc. Maybe people no longer look at those symbols as predominantly/exclusively Judeo-Christian?

rue• 16 years ago

Neither a tree of life nor a paradisiacal existence in the past are unique to the middle-eastern fables.

See e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_life

Tycho3• 16 years ago

Yes but the interesting thing is how much cultural currency the Biblical tales may have lost (in days gone by, it was a case of 'there's Christianity/Judaism, and then there's everything else').

teilo• 16 years ago

You can find "Christian" symbolism in anything. For crying out loud, people found it in the Lion King, the Matrix, and even the Ten Commandments! (The last one was a joke.)

For it to be "Christian" symbolism, it would have to be quite a bit more explicit than general themes like gardens and trees. Once you start turning fiction into symbolism you can make anything out of everything.

Tycho3• 16 years ago

general themes like trees and gardens? in what way, and in what works, are these things themes?

Christian mythology shares a lot of common ideas with other mythology, according to scholars. The Garden of Eden was a paradisiacal forest where humans lived in harmony with nature, where the Tree of Life gave them immortality, so long as they ignored the Tree of Knowledge (at peril of being cast out). In Avatar, the Na'vi live in harmony with nature in a paradisiacal forest with a Great Tree, afforded quasi-immortality by 'spiritual-uplink' to the tree, and in the complete absence of technology. Then along come the evil, technologically advanced humans who of course have been cast out of their own paradisiacal habitat (or destroyed it).

It doesn't sound like the loosest connect ever to me. one of the characters is called 'Grace Augustine'

megaduck• 16 years ago

I think he largely misses the point. Like many other sci-fi pieces, Avatar is a fantasia and not a serious look at our possible future.

Much of the human technology was obviously modeled after current American military tech, and that was a deliberate choice. This approach allowed Cameron to tap into current feelings and cultural currents. If things had been more 'realistic', then it would have been alien to modern audiences. Really, properly modeling the future would have made the story far more difficult to tell.

It's darned hard to make a story that's universally accessible. 'Avatar' is a pretty decent sci-fi movie that's understandable to people all over the world. It will also revolutionize cinematography and filmmaking from this point onward. Any proper analysis of the film should keep those points in mind.

mclin2• 16 years ago

It reminds me of this article from little while ago. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1169875

Nerds want every question answered with a reason, even if that question shouldn't have one. Why is Superman strong? He gets his powers from the sun. Why does he get powers from the sun? Because his skin is a solar battery. Well, why is he still strong at night? Well, he's charged up for years as an adolescent, he has a lot of stored power. Ah ha! Well, in issue #626, the Parasite drained him of all energy before Batman saved him - shouldn't he be back to zero and weak by dawn? No, they say, because of...

derefr2• 16 years ago

Well, yeah—that's what it means for something to be "science fiction." SF is fiction that not only feels scientific, but can be expected to hold up to genuine, in-depth scientific inquiry on its concepts and progression. If you didn't write a movie/book/whatever that will stand up to such nerdery, you should really stop calling it sci-fi.

tolmasky• 16 years ago

I don't feel this is true at all. I think people start to question reality when the plot is weak or when the object that in unrealistic is tied to the plot in a significant way.

I've never sat through Back to the Future and seen a nerd say "but what exactly does a flux capacitor do in order to enable time travel, this movie is so unrealistic!". I think that as long as a minimal effort is given to explain away these points it is satisfactory to most people as long as those points are not essential to the movie: the physics of time travel is not essential to the story of Back to the Future.

However, the more important to the movie, the more time must be spent. Cloning dinosaurs, and specifically how they clone dinosaurs, was pretty important to Jurassic Park. Hence, more effort was placed in explaining this to the audience (they're all girl dinosaurs, fossilized dna, need frog dna, etc etc). This is significantly more involved than "oh we have a flux capacitor for that" explanation. Both are perfectly fine though, since they match their necessity to the movie.

I personally felt that Avatar succeeded at this level of explanation. Aside from "unobtanium" somehow making it past the first edit of the script, the technological/biological stuff was fine: Unoriginal? Yes. Uncomfortably unrealistic? No.

However, I think absolutely everything else about that movie was pretty subpar. The plot was really uninspired. Its sad, so much gloss on top of such an empty story. On top of that, I really was not that impressed with the graphics. I'm sure plenty of people will tell me I don't know what I'm talking about, but when I'm 70 years old and someone asks me, visual effects-wise, what was the highlight of my movie going career, I'm going to say seeing the brachiosaur in Jurassic Park, and probably won't even remember Avatar.

markbnine• 16 years ago

I thought the low-tech choices for the military were kind of fun. Especially that huge knife for the exoskeleton. That's not something I've seen before. Also the detachable gun.

gwern• 16 years ago

> Especially that huge knife for the exoskeleton. That's not something I've seen before. Also the detachable gun.

Gundam?

sliverstorm4• 16 years ago

The american military generally does not follow this stereotype to the least, but there is a long-standing conception of armed forces using somewhat dated, simple technology. The reason of course being reliability and serviceability. Never dated to the point of being useless, but behind the cutting edge.

Frankly if I was on some mission light years from civilization, I'd like to have something dead-reliable and easy to fix if it breaks.

tokipin• 16 years ago

that goes for the creature designs as well. there were "dogs" and "horses" in the movie. and in fact i'd argue that goes for the plot itself. a lot of people criticize the plot, but i think it was a very deliberate choice. a "screwy" or "clever" or too-sophisticated plot would have detracted from the rest of the movie

gnaritas2• 16 years ago

I think a more sophisticated plot would have made a better movie, but it'd have killed the box office. Cameron knows his audience. When you make the most expensive movie ever, you better damn well be shooting for a wide audience; the nerds aren't going to get you a positive return on the investment. Avatar was exactly what it needed to be to justify its existence.

Once this technology becomes cheap enough, then it'll make economic sense to make really smart movies to chase the long tail of very specific niche audiences, but movies cost too much right now to be able to do that effectively. People who like really smart movies are a tiny niche audience. You have to dumb it down or it'll lose money.

bobbyi• 16 years ago

His criticisms seem to amount to saying that he doesn't like this genre of movie.

Complaining that a fantasy movie doesn't make realistic predictions about the future of technology is like complaining that a romantic comedy didn't have enough action scenes.

rbanffy2• 16 years ago

It's very hard to tell a story if you are to make an accurate enough prediction of the future.

Raw unadorned reality doesn't lend itself to make great movies.

eagleal3• 16 years ago

The point is: Cameron and the Production (together with the distributors) wanted to make a movie that earned fast enough. They didn't want a masterpiece (I think, the original Avatar manuscript, Proejct 880, is actually a lot better that this version[1]).

Because of all the buzz with the "go green" and climate change, this version attracts more people (manuscript freezed before the UNCCC Copenhagen).

[1] http://chud.com/articles/articles/21969/1/PROJECT-880-THE-AV...

philh• 16 years ago

I liked the technology. It looked plausible, not primitive. Exoskeletons that are "beginning to be deployed" can plausibly be widespread in the future. I can believe that guns will continue to operate on the same principals as they have done for a thousand years.

They didn't show the same restraint with the nature, unfortunately. Why did everything need six legs and four eyes, and why didn't Na'vi hair evolve to be prehensile when they started needing to shove it down the data tubes of irate wildlife?

As an aside, having all those links in the text is very distracting.

gnaritas2• 16 years ago

> Why did everything need six legs and four eyes

For the same reason most animals on earth have 4 legs and two eyes, common genetic ancestry; It was actually a nice touch.

> and why didn't Na'vi hair evolve to be prehensile when they started needing to shove it down the data tubes of irate wildlife

They already had hands, a prehensile hair connection wouldn't likely offer enough advantage to become a primary trait.

cracki• 16 years ago

four eyes might actually benefit the owner. with 2 eyes, you can cover 360 degrees without stereo vision, or half that with stereo vision.

two pairs of eyes should give the owner superior awareness of its surroundings.

six legs... the na'vi didn't have 6 limbs. they're an exception. that should have been continued, to maybe 4 arms, like the tree monkeys did.

showing the use of 6 legs isn't a problem. enough things on earth already do that.

humanoids with 4 legs might have worked... they'd have looked less human though. also, i can't imagine why a 4-legged humanoid would ride a 6-legged horse. Kurzweil pointed out that this film is meant to make money, so 4 legs wouldn't have worked so well.

humanoids with 4 arms, that's already difficult from a practical standpoint. what does a 4-armed humanoid use its arms for? the bow and arrow for a 4-armed creature might just be too hard to extrapolate.

goodgoblin• 16 years ago

What is great about this movie review, for me, isn't the exact point-by-point analysis that the author makes, but the fact that author is noted futurist Ray Kurzweil. It would be like having Colin Powell review the Hurt Locker - its just kind of cool.

jpwagner• 16 years ago

I literally laughed out loud at that analogy. Thank you.

jawsh2• 16 years ago

Ray missed the forest for the trees. No movie de-others the other more than this one. More importantly, he utterly misses the tonality, as if he were watching without a heart. Ray, how is it that your analysis explains nothing of the continued appeal of this movie?

philwelch3• 16 years ago

The "continued appeal" of Cameron's last blockbuster (Titanic) lasted about a year longer than this one and then everyone forgot about it. Avatar's gonna go in the history of film for popularizing 3-D, but it's remaining to see whether there's any continued appeal in it.

jawsh2• 16 years ago

Fair enough. The point I put poorly there was that many people who like the movie are drawn in/back by the emotive landscape; usually one of the main things they have to say about it. Obviously that's supported by the 3-D, but I have a hunch that it has much more to do w/ my first point re: making the strange familiar. But you're right; that remains to be seen.

RevRal• 16 years ago

Full paged, not framed, not cluttered with hyperlinks, and non-annoying version of the article:

http://www.kurzweilai.net/news/news_printable.html?id=11907

mmphosis• 16 years ago

The basic story was taken right from Dances with Wolves.

No, the basic story is taken right from FernGully.

hendler• 16 years ago

I think it's the only review I've read where keywords are highlighted with a javascript function that says:

javascript:loadBrain('Technology')

Adam5032• 16 years ago

I think Kurzweil completely missed the very important set up point that the campaign on Avavar was not being conducted by the most modern military forces of that time on Earth. It was being conducted entirely by a corporate entity and it's ex-military hirelings (think Blackwater).

I thought this point was particularly well though out.

No profit-driven model of an corporate military campaign to put down a native uprising would send state-of-the-art anything. They'd send on-hand dated military surplus weapons and equipment and troops to fire full auto machine guns, flamethrowers, napalm, white phosphorus rounds, field artillery, and lots of ammo.

State of the art military vs. peasant uprisings are useless. Watch the movie "Zulu Dawn" sometime.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zulu_Dawn

Like the gatling guns on the front of A-10s and A-10s themselves the Air Force kept pulling out of retirement. Some situations just don't require anything more sophisticated than a gatling gun and something well armored and maneuverable to hang a gatling gun on the front of.

Reflections on Avatar by Ray Kurzweil

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