A Tale of Two Sci-fi Movies

Let's start at the end. Avatar's action takes place on a very distant moon, the source of a valuable mineral. After an epic battle between indigenous, technology-challenged natives and greedy earthling miners, a battle decided by an amorphous tree-based native deity, the natives herd the marauding miners back onto their interstellar space ship, presumably to return to earth in disgrace. This narrative is, at best, psychologically challenged. One would suppose that the miners, who'd arrived at least passably interested in talking with the natives and who considerably later turned to violence after not getting access to the mineral, would not be — could not be — the last word of earth based mining interests. I understand willing suspension of disbelief and all of that, but within the context of the movie's own narrative the notion that after a single defeat the earth forces depart, never to return, leaving the natives happy and at peace in their technology-deficient paradise, strikes me as ludicrous. No. The initial earthling contingent leaves but then they would come back with ten, or a hundred, or however many times more men and guns needed to completely wipe out the natives. If the mineral is as valuable as the movie says it is, the humans are going to take it. That's the true logical end of the story. If James Cameron had other ideas I certainly didn't detect them. But perhaps I'm just being picky.

Another thing that made no sense to me was the "avatar" technology. Remotely controlling a human/alien clone through some kind of augmented mental interface? OK, whatever. But then when the interface cuts off the clone goes to sleep? It breaths and its heart beats and it stays alive, but it has no consciousness? Nada, zip? Sorry, that doesn't make any sense to me either, again, even within the context of the movie. With this plot device Avatar becomes a surrealist pastiche, which is fine, maybe something like Being John Malkovich, where it just makes up its own rules as it goes along, but that's not really science fiction. Science fantasy, almost, or some kind of science fiction mash-up, but Avatar is not at all, for me anyhow, convincingly science based.

Critics and bloggers have had a lot to say about the symbolism of alien natives, the meaning of their deity, the human lead character becoming his hybrid clone, yada-yada. I didn't pay much attention. See it for yourself and decide whether any of that means anything to you. (And unlike Ebert I did not find the female alien lead character, who is entirely CGI, sexy. What's wrong with me?)

Avatar is mostly eye-candy, ultimately unsatisfying.

District 9, however, was fun. A whimsical story of a ginormous alien ship that has some kind of break-down leaving it hovering over Johannesburg. Its crew apparently gormless and leaderless, earth authorities relocate them into a camp on the ground. There are a lot of them, they breed, and eventually they number a couple million. Human-alien relations deteriorate. One human, sent to re-re-locate the aliens to another camp further away from people, accidentally whiffs some alien fuel. It begins to turn him into one of them. His former colleagues now want to dissect him (Yikes!) so he finds refuge in the alien camp and winds up befriending the only alien who knows how to make the alien ship work. At the end of the movie the smart alien zooms off to get help from his homeworld while our human is stuck transformed into a "prawn."

Yeah, it's kind of mindless shoot-em-up alien stuff, but the hapless human in thrall to alien DNA is a neat twist, as is the evolution of his friendship with the alien pilot, and his ultimate self-sacrifice (though the plot-line theoretically allows the alien to return later and transmogrify our hero back into a human).

The thing that resonates with me is the notion that an alien, space-faring civilization might not be so much more advanced than our own and that accidental human-alien interactions might turn out to be of a very different kind than we usually imagine.

Also interesting is the idea that only one alien, out of millions, has the knowledge, ability, and interest to operate the alien ship. One wonders whether/how a technologically advanced civilization might work that way.

Avatar: two and a half out of five stars (one star for 3D special effects). District 9: three and a half stars.