Avatar is about capitalism
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Tbf, the air on Pandora is toxic to humans. That was the entire point of using the avatars in the first movie... Wouldn't exactly call that suitable for sustaining the life of our species
And that material they found in the planet was some fictional things humans had never encountered before.
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Aliens, Mech suits and remotely controlled vat-grown body doubles aren't enough to make it sci Fi?
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[email protected]replied to [email protected] last edited by
It's a motif as old as time. Foreign invader getting Stockholm Syndrome with the natives. Another famous example is Dances With Wolves. That film called The Great Wall as well. Some versions of Robin Hood has it. Anthropologists call it Going Native, which is what Carlos Castañeda did.
But they're not all about economic expansionism
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[email protected]replied to مهما طال الليل last edited by
Imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism.
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Pandora was a moon, not a planet.
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Pollution makes their species stronger; this doesn't imply an individual preference.
Idiots walking off cliffs doesn't make the survivors like cliffs; it teaches them to avoid them.
That said, evolution can be a real crap shoot, and you never know what sort of perverse effects you'll get: like us loving sugar so much we eat ourselves into diabetes.
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There could be many reasons:
- The thing you are mining is actually very rare, and although it could be elsewhere, it's the only place you found it. This is the case in Avatar. The Unobtanium they are mining is not found anywhere else.
- It's easier to mine on a habitable planet. You don't have all the extreme difficulty of operating in space or a planet/moon with no atmosphere. In Avatar workers can freely operate without any special equipment, using just a gas mask, and don't need to be astronauts.
- You are assuming they found Pandora to mine on it. They probably found it through scientific research, and the mining angle only appeared later when the resource was found.
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Nope.
Science fiction is an exploration of how science or technology changes society, or how society might respond to stuff, or how a society with a given tech might exist; it’s a form of speculative fiction.
Avatar isn’t that. It’s supposed to be an indictment of capitalist greed.
Just because it has technology doesn’t make it “sci-fi” and the elements that might are just a maghuffin to explain what they’re doing there. It could have just as easily been gold. Or diamonds or alien art.
Take Marry Shelly’s Frankenstein and compare it to say, avengers.
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Me too.
It’s supposed to be an indictment of capitalism. But that falls flat when you realize it was one of the most profitable movies of all time; grossing over 2 billion and being one of the fastest to reach the various benchmarks at theaters.
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Sorry, no. Genre doesn't require a specific theme. This is some literature vs pulp gatekeeping.
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Well it's literally Pocahontas in space so more obvious comparison is to the colonialism. They could grow gardens and farms while destroying the natives, the movie would have been the same.
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[email protected]replied to [email protected] last edited by
Well acschually oxygen is a corrosive chemical and probably damages your lungs (since that's the tissue that comes in most contact with it). And also the Great Oxydation Event is probably one of the greatest - if not the greatest - mass extinction of all times, so ...
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Which Tarzan book did you read the synopsis for? Burroughs wrote 24 of them.
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Colonialism was driven by capitalism
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They weren't settling land - they were setting up a mining operation.
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So.... if it has robots and space and cloning, its science fiction and if it doesn't it's not?
so by that definition Marry Shelly's Frankenstein is not proto-SciFi?
Or Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea? The Steam House? Around the World in 80 Days?
Or HG Wells The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Sleeper Awakes, and The Invisible Man are not?
Or maybe Snow Crash? ...Children of Men?
I find it hilarious that you're criticizing me for gatekeeping. Science Fiction as a genre is much broader than just space, or robots, or cloning. or any of the cool, glittery-glowy-things.
Sure, any single work can span a few genres. Even things you might not necessarily think go together like Comedic SciFi as in Red Dwarf, Farscape or Dr. Who. Sure, books and movies don't have to be overt about it, and most the really good ones aren't. The core of Science Fiction is (or any form of speculative fiction, really,) is asking "the question". It's asking "what if..." For example, The World Well Lost; the scifi elements are secondary to the emotional and social aspects.
If you enjoy Avatar, that's great. I'm glad you did. I found it annoying, cliche and trite with terrible plot development and horrible characterization. The science or technological elements in Avatar could easily be removed for more...historic... settings, devices or straight up objects. the Unobtanium could easily be replaced with Lunar regolith or some sort of fancy Martian Marble
️ being sold for countertops. Or Inca gold. Or Peruvian emeralds. or anything to which an obscene value could be placed.It serves no purpose at all to the plot. none of the technology or science or technology influences the characters, the plot or anything else. The entire movie is an orgy of CGI and an anti-capitalist screed. (nothing wrong with being anti-capitalist, mind.)
Ultimately, genres are delineated not because they're necessary for the art they're describing, but because people want to know what they're getting into before they sit down and watch it. When you tell me something is scifi, and it turns out to be horror with aliens or... a marvel superhero movie... I'm not going to be very happy with you.
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That comic also represents 100% of all survival crafting games, plus Factorio
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So… if it has robots and space and cloning, its science fiction and if it doesn’t it’s not?
At no point did I say this. Even remotely.
You can't just inverse something I said and assume it's still equivalent. You'd think someone this passionate about reading would have a higher level of comprehension...
There was no point in me reading past this pathetic strawman. Hope you enjoyed writing that pointless essay.
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I think there's a tendency to see inter- (and intra-)stellar travel through the lens of the inter-continental expedition and colonialism. It... kinda makes sense... superficially, there's some similarities; a voyage in a vessel, going to uncharted places, kicking off a new era of settlement and extraction. For this reason, movies and games really like the comparison, cus it makes for an easy narrative the audience is already familiar with.
In reality, though, nothing about space bares any similarity to anything in our past. Everything about the expeditions to, the colonizing of, and the industrial development and extraction of the Americas? All that was couched within the biosphere, contingent on it. Movies and media and junk get to ignore that because they exist to tell a story. So what if SciFi du jour doesn't actually make sense? Doesn't harm anyone, right? Except...
...except Musk and his fanclub really like describing Mars as the next colonial outpost. They'll tell you it's only a few short decades away! And I think that's cus they don't see where the metaphor falls short. To them, colonizing Mars is just the next thing that will happen in the narrative of history. After all, it's happened once - so it must happen again right???? They don't see the sheer wall of work and resources and work and decades (probably centuries, realistically) that would have to go into it. They don't think about anything more than a superficial picture on a screen. People needed boats to cross the Atlantic, we'll need rocketships. Now that they've got rocket ships, thats most of the work done. Afterall, in movies, you just need to get there. Then the plot can advance.
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Sorry, it wasn't as much a synopsis as it was the criticism section: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarzan#Themes_of_gender_and_race
Looking at it now, I see citations for the essays, but not for the factual claims made by those essays, so I hope the editor who wrote it didn't take their word for it.
