I Saw Avatar & What I Think About It

Sis' Eleanor dropped me off at AMC yesterday where I saw the movie Avatar. It's a blend of science fiction and science fanciful about the attempt of a human, particularly American, industrial-military usurpation of mining land, bearing the closest thing to priceless minerals ("unobtainium" at $20,000,000.00 kg.), from the blue-complexioned ET human-like but low-tech natives, the Na'vi, on the fictional moon Pandora, with an atmosphere breathable by humans, in a different solar system that results in a human hi-tech war against the Na'vi. The Na'vi are supported in the last moments of the first battle, as best as I can remember, while they are being exterminated, in a spontaneous or happenstance counterattack by the whole of the local powerful and dangerous animal kingdom of the moon against an armada of human fighter-bomber aircraft and ground artillery, giant and nimble war robots and human ground troops equipped with ferocious weapons. Prior to the human military assault, human scientists on Pandora breed or bio-engineer their own Na'vi, in what looks like a bio-genesis amniotic fluid-filled glass tank (aquarium-like, or glass, womb), who can be animated and controlled remotely by a human thinker-meditator and human thought and through whom the human controller can also view and experience (a kind of astral projection, mental telepathy, remote viewing through or psychic habitation of another). The industrial-military complex commissions creation of the lab Na'vi for him to infiltrate the natural Na'vi and have him influence the natural Na'vi to voluntarily and peacefully move from their ancestral land, located on the site of the nearly priceless minerals, so the industrial-military complex might not have to attack them with the overwhelming power of hi-tech weapons to take the land forcibly and then mine the minerals.

See the movie for the whole story. It has strong historical and political overtones. The most original thing about the movie is the vegetated asteroids suspended in the moon's upper atmosphere -- the Hallelujah Mountains. Like humans, the Na'vi are primates but are tall and slender hominid monkeys, with a tail, whereas humans are ape-related or-derived hominids without tails. Roughly speaking, hominids are upright-standing, bipedal, manually intensive and centered, tool and technology making and using primates. The Na'vi have cat-like faces, hiss like cats and wear their head hair in long, neat dread-lock-style thin braids.

Na'vi is pronounced NAW VEE. Unobtainium is pronounced UN OBTAIN E UM.