So I'd like to talk about Avatar, John Camerons latest testament to (a) Sigourney Weavers MiLF status and (b) awesome CGI. So, for those of you who haven't seen it, let me one sentence the plot for you: A group of generic natives who are in tune with nature try to resist exploitation by greedy corporations. It's like Pocahontas, except the Americans win.
Anyway, when watching this movie I was immediately gripped by some fundamental problems with the Navi. Or whatever the 12 foot tall cat people are called. When they gather their fetish fuel army, which consists of 2000 cat people and their mounts, which are either giant pterodactyls or giant horse-dinosaur things, they camp out in the mountains and mass for an assault. However, they're also a hunter gatherer society. This is where my enjoyment of the movie is stepped on by being a "critical thinker".
Hunter gatherer societies actually have a lot of neat properties. They're the most egalitarian, and generally the most democratic organizations. This is seen in the movie when the suitably square jawed protagonist, whose name is like Josh or Jack or something, gets to speak at the pow-wow despite being nobody. Also notable is that there are very few specialists in a hunter gatherer society, because there is only enough economic excess to support a couple. Generally you get a shaman and a big man or chief. There's some wonderful distinctions to be made here, but you get the idea.
Part of the reason it is so egalitarian is that everyone needs to work to generate the amount of goods required for sustenance. Everyone needs to hunt or gather if everyone is going to eat. There's no time to have say, a dedicated doctor, because if you did who would feed him? Coincidentally, it's sort of assumed in the movie that the Naavi are awesome warriors because they're good hunters, and this is sort of assumed in a lot of depictions of these sorts of society. However, it's a skillset that doesn't entirely transfer. I don't think it really matters in the movie. So here's the other problem, in order to get enough calories to sustain someone, you need a fairly large area of land doing the whole hunter gatherer thing. This is why there are never concentrated populations of hunter gatherers. They'd starve.
So, when they're amassing in the mountains, what are they eating? How are they able to raise this big of an army? There's a reason there are only hunter gatherer societies in areas nobody wants. The farmers always win, because there's always more of them.
The other thing is that we're talking about 12 foot tall cat things. It's gotta take a lot of calories to keep that going. So, I guess what I'm saying is, in order to generate an army that big, they would need a lot of food they don't have.
Fortunately they all get slaughtered at the end, so that at least alleviates that concern. Sadly, as the cat things were getting killed I was thinking "At least they won't have to do as much hunting tonight."
Yay Forensics!
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A few things:
ReplyDeleteI don't think you're quite wrong, but I do think your argument rests on some anthropocentric assumptions about biology.
1.) The smurf planet has a lower gravity than Earth's. That increases their ease of movement considerably, so doing all the Spider-Manesque jumping around might now be as energy intensive for them.
2.) The Navi do not breathe oxygen like humans do. Whatever it is they do breathe could greatly increase the efficiency of their metabolism.
3.) They could be drawing excess amounts of energy from the animals they bond with and control. Furthermore, they could be drawing energy from the planet itself, which is depicted as a quasi-biological organism.
I think the fact that humans and Navi are separate species that evolved on entirely different planets provides sufficient ambiguity about Navi biology that a critical-thinker could just zone out and enjoy the ass-kicking. Which I did.
1) If this is the case, then it's never really shown. Everyone acts exactly the same way they would in a normal gravity environment. I get that everywhere on the planet is shown to be tropical, so maybe they don't have to expend as much energy to maintain they're body temperature. While there's no explicit evidence to say that they're warm blooded, given that they operate during both the day and night, it seems likely that they're maintaining their own body temperature. Still going to be a lot of food to sustain a 12 foot tall cat thing.
ReplyDelete2) Yes they do. The atmosphere is poisonous to humans, not unbreathable. At least that's what I got from it, as the timeframe they give for death without a mask is much quicker than simple asphyxiation.
3) So then what do the horses eat? And given the amount of energy lost in any kind of transmission process, any additional stops from the sun to the cat people is just going to multiply the problem, not decrease it.
I'm too much of a hard science guy I think. Anyway, we can leave this here probably. Then later, beer!
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