Avatar (Beware of Spoilers)

So I went to see Avatar today in all its 3D glory. So I thought I'd share my thoughts on it with you. And yes, this also serves as a spoiler alert.

Visual Effects

Let's face it, the major selling point of this movie is the killer visual effects. Avatar marks a giant leap forward in filmmaking. When you see this movie in digital 3D, you are immediately forced to acknowledge that in terms of the technical aspects of creating a film, Avatar ranks up there with The Jazz Singer (which ushered in the age of 'talkies'), The Wizard of Oz (which ushered in the age of color movies), and Star Wars (which revolutionized special effects). When you see Avatar in 3D, seeing any other action movie in 2D just does not compare.

One of the main reasons for this is that Avatar avoids one of the major flaws of 3D films that have gone before it. There is no monster leaping out of the screen at you. There are no explosions that send shrapnel by your head. They avoid the easy thrill, and instead use the 3D technology to its greatest effect in creating a fully immersive experience that literally puts you in the forest. To compare prior 3D films to Avatar is like comparing boy bands to the London Philharmonic Orchestra. Sure the boy band gives a nice, cheap thrill, but can't compare to the timeless beauty of the orchestra.

The only problem with the visual effects is that a normal movie screen is too restricting for them. If there's an IMAX theater in your town (or a town near yours) it is well worth the money to see Avatar in 3D on the IMAX screen.

Plot

Ok, I'll get this out of the way right now. I liked the plot the first time I saw it, when it was called Dances With Wolves. And don't tell me you weren't thinking it too.

Now that I got that out of the way, the plot basically runs like this. The main character is a marine who got paralyzed below the waist. His twin brother was a scientist, who was part of some super-freaky science project, but got killed. Because the marine has an identical genome to his brother, he can take his place, and the Company won't lose out on their investment. More on that later.

After the first bit, the film takes place entirely on the forest moon of Endor, I mean Pandora. Seems the Company has come to Pandora because it is one of the few places they can find some rare ore called Unobtanium. Unfortunately, the Company faces a few problems in their mining operation. The atmosphere is toxic (though a simple gas mask is enough to protect you), the forests are chock full of deadly animals, many of whom just shrug off machine gun fire, and, oh yeah, there's a native population that doesn't care for how they're strip mining the planet.

Remember that science project I mentioned earlier? Now we figure out what it is. Scientists take DNA of the natives, mix it with human DNA, and grow remote control bodies tuned to their owners' genome. Since our Marine's genome matches his brother's, he can pilot his brother's Avatar.

On his first mission, our Marine nearly gets himself killed, and has to jump off a cliff to keep from getting eaten, and winds up lost in the forest. Night falls, and a native woman saves him from a pack of nasty creatures that look like a cross between wolves and jaguars. She was going to leave him, but got a sign from Emya, and brought him before her tribe. The Marine is allowed to stay with the tribe to learn their ways, though the Company wants them to figure a way to get them to move, since their home is on one of the largest Unobtanium deposits around.

Most of the movie revolves around the Marine learning the ways of the tribe, while the Company plans to destroy their home and take the resources for their own. The Marine is eventually inducted into the tribe, and takes a mate, just in time to learn that the Company is moving on the tribe's home.

The tribe tries to fight, but fail utterly due to the fact that bows and arrows don't do much against gunships, and their home tree is destroyed, and many tribesmen are killed. The Marine rallies the tribes, to fight against the humans, in a desperate last stand.

As for how it ends? I'll let you find out for yourself.

Theme

Avatar beats you over the head with the native american theme, and telling you how mining without regard for the ecological consequences is bad. And the whole army man goes native, realizes the natives are better concept is literally straight out of Dances With Wolves.

Final Score

All told, I'd give Avatar top marks for visual effects, and the action sequences are excellent. I highly recommend you watch this in the theaters. When it comes out on DVD, I'm just not sure they'll be able to do it justice unless they're able to project the 3D effects on your TV.

In the afterglow

The presents are all unwrapped. The remains of the feast are all packed away as leftovers. The Family begins thinking of home, wherever that may be. And now all eyes turn just one week away, when 2009 becomes 2010.

In the afterglow of Christmas, take the time to remember the real lessons of the season. No, I'm not going to go religious on you. I'm talking about the simple, human lessons we can all learn from a holiday in a recession.

* Bigger, flashier, and more expensive does not mean better. Sure, everyone likes the new big screen HDTV, but sometimes something simple, like a T-shirt from their favorite movie, and a book they've been wanting to read for a long time, can mean so much more.

* Just because something is used, doesn't mean it is junk. Best received gift I gave this year was an old, leatherbound copy of the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner I got off Ebay for twenty-something bucks.

* A gag gift can be a great way to show someone you care, as long as you follow up with a real one. Not every gift has to be serious. Giving the ultra-liberal a copy of Sarah Palin's book, or giving the ultra-feminist a subscription to Penthouse can get a good laugh from everyone, but follow it up with something they'll like, to soften the sting.

* Spending time with friends and family can be the best part of the holidays, as long as you have an escape. Family togetherness is a good thing. Having fun with the family and friends makes everything about the holiday better. But there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. To keep the holiday craziness from overwhelming you, be sure to take a couple hours away from the family, and spend it on you. Watch TV, play some games, go for a drive, whatever. Just do something that lets you reboot, reload, and recharge, so you're ready to go for the next round of family fun.

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Trek, Gate, or Wars?

Gonna have to go with Star Wars. I would literally give my right hand to get a working lightsaber.

Pancakes or waffles?

Waffles. Especially Waffle House waffles.

Ever read Crichton? Fave Crichton novel?

Fave Chrichton novel would have to be either Jurassic Park, Andromeda Strain, or The Great Train Robbery

Ask me anything

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Condoms in Schools?

"Show the average American teenage male a condom, and his mind will turn to thoughts of lust."

"Show the average American teenage male a lug wrench, and his mind will turn to thoughts of lust."

-- The West Wing http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V82I7vgzfgE

The above is taken from a television show, but it provides the best argument religious conservatives provide for not teaching safe sex practices or allowing access to condoms in schools. The idea that somehow this knowledge encourages kids to have sex is the cornerstone of their arguments for abstinence only education.

I grew up in Georgia, and attended high school in one of the reddest of red districts. In Health class, we weren't shown anything about condoms, and only got the basic message that STDs are bad, some of them can kill you, and the ones that don't sometimes can't be cured. The year I graduated, about half the girls in the senior class were either pregnant, already had a child, or had been pregnant at some point during high school.

Giving kids condoms is not going to go and make kids have sex. THEY ARE GOING TO HAVE SEX REGARDLESS! All that denying kids easy access to birth control does is prevent kids from having sex safely.

Think about it. When you were a teenager, if a grownup told you not to do something, wasn't your first reaction 'gee, I wanna do that'?

Educating our children about safe sex, and the consequences of STDs, is the best way to prevent teen pregnancies and the spread of STDs in our schools. Abstinence only sounds like a great thing, but we all see how well that's been working in our schools. Where was that 'abstinence only' education when Palin's girl got knocked up? How is that message working in Africa, where STDs like HIV are running rampant? How is that message working in Mississippi, a very red, very conservative state, that, as of 2006, ranked 3rd in the country for the most teen pregnancies?

http://womensissues.about.com/od/datingandsex/a/TeenPregStates.htm

It is time that religious groups face facts, and accept that the best way to stop teen pregnancy isn't to go into the same tired 'abstinence only' refrain, and instead support initiatives like what the city of Milwaukee is considering, and providing access to free condoms in area schools.

Because ignoring the facts won't change them.

Moving to Windows 7

So I decided it was time to update my old computer, which I'd had for about five years. Sure, that's not long in the real world, but as computers go, it was getting up there. A couple external hard drives were the only reason it was still keeping up with my needs.

My new computer came with Windows 7. Despite what the Mac guy says in those ads, I've been using PCs since the DOS days, and I've never had major problems with them. Still, I'd heard mixed reviews about Windows 7, so I was unsure what to expect.

There was the normal headaches involved whenever you move from one computer to another (reinstalling software, setting up the desktop like you want it, desperately searching about for your Microsoft Office product key so you don't have to buy a new one, etc.), but all told, it was a relatively easy move. The interface works much like Windows Vista, in that if you're over 40 you probably have no clue what to do, and if you're 15, you mastered it in twenty seconds.

One new feature I've found that I like is the ability to pin programs to the taskbar as well as the start menu. So I can toss Google Chrome, Microsoft Excell, and Adobe Reader in there, for easy access, while before you could only pin things to the start menu.

All in all, Windows 7 feels like a cleaned up version of Vista. There's a bit of a learning curve, of course, since a few things are slightly different between the two systems, but all in all, it is fairly straightforward to use, with the bonus that I haven't run into as many of the annoying popup windows asking me if I really want to run the program I just clicked on to run.

My review? Nice features, but don't bother upgrading from Vista unless you're getting a new system to go with it.

Time Travel, Alternate Reality, or Dream?

***This entry contains spoilers. Don't read if you don't want 'em.***

A staple of the science fiction genre is the "What if?" plot. In a "What if?" plot, the writers are free to go outside the continuity of the series, sometimes drastically changing things. The difference between this plot, and the main continuity, is that for the plot, the writers ask "What if X happened?", where X is something completely off the wall, like a major character becoming a vampire in a setting where vampires don't exist, or something like that.

Now, "What if?" plots can generally be broken down into four types: Weirdness, Time Travel, Alternate Reality, and Dream/Hallucination.

Weirdness - This would be something that, while out of the ordinary in the continuity, is within the scope of the universe. Prime examples would be in the Star Trek episode "A Piece of the Action", where the Enterprise encounters a world that is literally out of a gangster novel. Weird, but it still fits in the continuity.

Time Travel - Time travel stories typically involve going backwards or forwards in time, and both have their fair share of perils. Go back, and you risk changing the past, and negating your own existence. Go forward, and what you learn there could change the future. This is the second most common form of "What If?" scenario.

Alternate Reality - In a universe where parallel realities exist, sometimes the writers will step into those alternate realities, and see what might have been. A good example of this would be in the X-men comics, where they routinely explore parallel worlds, with the best example being the "What If?" series. This is by far the most common type of scenario when dealing with a "What If?" plot.

Dream/Hallucination - Rarest of all is the dream/hallucination scenario. In part, writers are not fond of using this option because, if it is done wrong, it can seriously anger fans. In this setup, suddenly, inexplicably, things are completely different than they used to be. However, when you get to the end of the plot, you realize it was all a dream, or perhaps a vision or hallucination caused by some outside force. Regardless, none of it is real, and usually it serves to teach the main character of the plot some lesson.

How can you tell what kind of "What If?" plot you're in? Well, there's a few signs to look for.

If they have a simple means of getting into and out of the situation, then you're looking at normal weirdness. If they just have to beam up to the ship, or jump through the stargate, or something like that, then you're in normal weirdness territory. The situation falls within the "norm" of the series, even though you have soldiers with MP-5s dealing with natives armed with crossbows fighting enemies with rayguns. Its par for the course, in other words. Note that if the series centers around going back and forth in time, or dimension hopping, then any time travel or alternate realities count as normal weirdness.

But what if that isn't the case? Then you're looking for one of the other situations.

Time travel is usually the easiest of the three remaining scenarios to discover. Typically, you'll see some means of travel that takes you elsewhere in time. Either its a time machine, or your means of faster than light travel slingshotted you around a star, or something of that nature. Regardless, time travel usually means that you either go back in time, or forward, and they are very obvious with the method. There are exceptions, like Planet of the Apes, but for the most part, people are up front with time travel.

Alternate realities can be tricky. Depending on how 'close' the realities are, you might not know you're in a different world until later. However, like time travel, there's almost always some clear means of travel between the realities. A wormhole, or a transporter accident, or something like that is always present. Maybe everything went purple for a moment. Regardless, there's always a clue that something has changed.

The Dream/Hallucination method is by far the most subtle of the "What If?" plots. Many times, something will happen, and things will seem to progress on, but in reality, that' where the dream begins, like when Dorothy hit her head in the beginning of the Wizard of Oz. But there are times when it sneaks up on you.

Take the recent episode of Sanctuary. The episode starts off with Magnus waking up in a post-apocalyptic world, with no memory. We know that this is not in the Weirdness category, so we can eliminate that altogether. After Will tells Magnus that she's been dead for three years, time travel appears to be the most likely option. However, the clues point elsewhere.

First, in Dream/Hallucination episodes, there's always something the main character is trying to remember, something they keep coming back to, even though it seems to have no real bearing on the matter at hand. A trip to Honduras, for instance.

Second, look for something out of the ordinary. Again and again through the episode, you see a white, misty shape moving through the background around Magnus. This is a clue that things are not what they appear.

Third, the 'friend' who keeps trying to distract the main character from their work. In this case, Will trying to get Magnus to leave, and give up. This usually is a sign that this is simply a mental battle between different parts of the main character's subconscious.

Finally, things conveniently happen for no real reason. Magnus happens to escape will, and happens to find another survivor in a city full of zombies? If it seems too convenient to be true, its usually false.

By the second commercial break I had called it as being a dream. This is confirmed by the fact that as Magnus pieces together her memory, combined with the information from a conveniently recoverable computer log, she makes the connection that it is her fault everything happened. And then the illusion fades away, the spirit of the tomb having conveyed their warning to stop Magnus from opening the vial of doom-stuff.

If you can read the signs, it is plain that the whole thing was a dream.