yeah, hi, it me, the dumbass unironic avatar fan. i did it, i went ahead and read all the avatar books because i’m a fucking nerd.
i did skip a few of the tertiary books that reviewed poorly if it didn’t sound like i was missing much. like apparently the art of avatar is bad? which is really kind of mind-boggling when you consider the strengths of the movie.cool? cool.
avatar: the na’vi quest (junior novel 2009)
by nicole pitesa
this was a junior novelization of the first half of avatar so i’m not going to properly review it.
it was fine? i’ve definitely read better novels intended for this age group, both when i was in that age group and more recently. but i don’t think it’s really worthwhile for me to dig into the shortcomings of something like this? let’s just move on.
avatar: an activist survival guide (book 2009)
by maria wilhelm & dirk mathison
yeah, i’m pretty much always a sucker for these “nonfiction”-style books about franchises i like. i devoured all the star wars essential guides back in the day, and a lot of the star trek equivalents.
i do have two substantial complaints, though. first, the book repeatedly mentions “overpopulation” on earth, and it’s just… look, i know you’ve heard this a bunch of times if you read much of my writing, but i’m gonna say it again: it’s not a thing. it’s just not. and this is what happens when people without a solid grounding in dialectical materialism and political theory try to do environmentalism. much of the blame is rightly placed on big corporations, but you’re still swallowing wholesale their incredibly racist and misanthropic explanations for environmental degradation and making it a “personal responsibility” thing.
this doesn’t just come up in the parts of the book that specifically refer to earth, by the way. the book says that part of why the na’vi are more “in balance” with nature is because they have a nearly equal birthrate and deathrate, and just… no, guys. that’s not how this works. that’s not how any of this works.
my second major complaint is that there is just so much binary gender essentialism and compulsory heterosexuality on display in this book’s presentation of na’vi culture. it strains credulity that a culture like the na’vi would include either of these features.
this is actually not the most surprising thing to me, though, because it’s extremely similar to some of the things i’ve run into as a baby witch/neopagan. what cameron & co are doing in creating the na’vi doesn’t seem all that dissimilar to me to what a lot of neopagan pioneers did in constructing the various mainstream branches of neopaganism. it is a bit counterintuitive and frustrating to see such obvious reproductions of the wrong thinking that these people absorbed from white, western, largely christian culture in people and groups that are intentionally trying to break with that culture, but at least they’re trying i guess? but you still see these sorts of ridiculously rigid, binarist ideas about “natural” gender in a lot of the most popular and well-known neopagan groups.
i love, love, love the detail that some lifeforms on pandora have characteristics of both plants and animals, and that biologists and botanists “must reassess their preconceptions about the mechanics of life.” a book more solidly grounded in theory would likely add that this speaks to the fact that many “scientific,” “natural” categorizations that are often taken for granted are themselves socially constructed, informed by the ideologies of the cultures that develop them.
this is less a criticism, and more just an amused observation, but it’s kind of hilarious that this book decries the commoditization of na’vi culture and then goes on to describe basically exactly what you can find at the gift shop in pandora: the world of avatar? and i know it’s different when you’re not talking about an actual culture, but the na’vi are so similar to so many actual earth cultures in a lot of ways, so i still feel deeply uncomfortable about the idea of buying like… probably a good 75% of the goods on offer at those giftshops. and, again, this does remind me an awful lot of how i feel sometimes in new age/neopagan shops/etc (though in that case it’s even worse because it is explicitly white people making money off of the appropriation of actual, existing cultures on earth).
you might think i’m asking for a lot from a silly movie tie-in book, and you’re probably right, but this is a franchise that’s trying to appeal to people not just as a big, dumb action/scifi franchise, but also as a franchise that wants to Say Stuff, so i don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask it to do better if that’s the road it wants to travel down.
i’ve spent a lot of time talking about this book’s shortcomings even though they are pretty nitpicky at the end of the day, because there just happens to be a lot more to say about them? like, i do really like this book, honestly! it’s just, all there there really is to say about that is that it’s a really cool book about a really cool world. i like the way it’s formatted, as already mentioned i love these “nonfiction”-style supplemental books about scifi worlds, and i really do like the world of avatar. so this book really is right up my alley. b-rank
avatar (movie 2009)
i forgot how fucking incredible this movie is in 3d.
look, i hate 3d and i’m so glad it’s failed as hard as it has. most of the time even when a movie looks great in 3d it just doesn’t add that much to the experience for me to be worth all the headache–sometimes literally. plus the glasses hurt the bridge of my nose. plus now with masks you have to deal with trying to get them not to fog up.
i’m not trying to go all Old Enby Yells At Cloud here, especially over a fad that peaked 10 years ago, but i just think that 3d is for theme park attractions and the very occasional movie that really, truly calls for it. and those movies should also look fucking great in 2d, btw! avatar is the best 3d movie of all time, but when you’re watching it in 2d there are absolutely zero scenes where you snicker & say “oh, i wonder if this was originally in 3d?” so other movies really have no excuse.
like think of the amazing spider-man movies. even if they looked good in 3d (i have no idea) the first one looks like ass in 2d, and there are a bunch of scenes in both where you kinda roll your eyes because it’s basically the big budget tentpole equivalent of in friday the 13th part iii when they stop the movie to juggle or play with yo-yos. it just dates the movie and makes it harder to enjoy in every format.
so basically you need a filmmaker as obsessive as james cameron who has the clout to bully studios into letting him spend as much money & take as long as he fucking wants to put something like this together for it to be worth a damn. and like, if that’s what it’s gonna be, fine? i’ll happily see those movies in 3d? i just don’t want to return to the years of every single studio movie coming out in 3d because the vast majority of them end up looking fucking terrible in 2d & not really being that good in 3d? and as a 3d hater, i just don’t want to see a 3d movie but every once in a while. i’m sorry.
anyway, like i said, this movie looks fantastic no matter what format you watch it in. but given that i most recently saw it on a laptop screen & (i swear to the gods) on one of those tiny screens on the back of an airplane headrest because i thought it would be hilarious to watch it on the way home from disney after going to avatarland for the first time, i was pretty blown away by how big (heh) of a difference seeing it on the big screen again made. even just the early parade of establishing shots & voiceover narration have so much more power to draw you into the world, and it makes all the amazing alien sights on pandora all that much more powerful because you’re already sucked into the movie’s world. it’s small wonder that so many people found the movie so intensely affecting when they saw it in theaters, but given that not many people are sitting down to watch a nearly 3-hour epic on a regular basis this weird narrative formed about the movie being “forgettable” or whatever the fuck. boy am i ever sick of that one.
i kind of want to go see it again. this is exactly what happened the first time it was in theaters.
i’ve written about my issues with the movie(mostly the totally-avoidable white savior narrative) as well as the things i like about it at length before, and i don’t have anything to add to that now. but as often happens with movies where i let myself be swayed by the popular narrative around them, i find myself looping back to my original opinion when i first saw it: this movie fucking owns. s-rank
the making of avatar (book 2010)
by jody duncan & lisa fitzpatrick
basically a coffee table book about the production of avatar (2009). similar to the kind of information you would get in particularly good dvd extras (less so the featurette kind, moreso the massive documentaries in the lord of the rings extended edition kind). and it’s undeniably satisfying seeing some of the gorgeous, full-page (oftentimes two-page) pictures ranging from concept art to production photos to stills from the movie. and i get that you oftentimes get similar things in the form of b-roll in the aforementioned “making of” documentaries, but having the pictures on a glossy page in a huge book physically in your hands satisfies on a completely different level.
i loved all the insights i got from hearing from cameron and others in this book. there are so many little examples in here that speak to the fact that cameron’s priorities in storytelling mesh up so well with the kinds of things i look for and enjoy as a member of the audience. i’m so impressed by the amount of attention he pays to tiny details no one’s really going to notice but will still make a huge difference taken in the aggregate. it’s kind of incredible that avatar’s visuals have aged as well as they have considering how heavily reliant the film is on cg, and that kind of attention to detail has a lot to do with it. also the fact that cameron is apparently very into the nuts and bolts of the technology of filmmaking and was just constantly pushing the boundaries of what was considered possible and pushing his team and himself to invent new technology on the fly.
speaking of movies whose visuals have aged astonishingly well, i kind of didn’t realize how much this movie had in common with lord of the rings, thanks largely to the contributions of weta workshop and weta digital. so i think that helps explain why i like it so dang much.
also, while i want to be careful with this last point, i think this book actually may have tempered some of my big-picture problems with the narrative in avatar. there were passing references to studio executives being concerned that audiences wouldn’t be able to connect with na’vi main characters etc, and it was quite transparently dumb but it did remind me how transparently dumb studio executives can often be. and given the amount of money, buy-in, and leeway cameron needed from these same execs, it’s entirely possible that some of the more frustrating aspects of the film’s narrative may have been there to appease them. again, i’m not excusing anything, and i’m not even sure this is exactly how things went down because obviously that kind of dirt isn’t going to come all the way out in a pretty coffee table book, but it was still something that made me think. a-rank
the science of avatar (book 2012)
by stephen baxter
i’m gonna get the bad stuff out of the way first for this one. as usual, the fact that it will take me longer to talk about the bad than the good does not mean there was more bad than good. however, my frustrations with this book are… pronounced. none of them are exactly surprising, and they reflect a lot of my frustrations with the franchise as a whole.
an uncritical acceptance of the malthusian myth of “overpopulation” is reflected in several iterations of this franchise whenever earth is mentioned, but seeing it parroted by someone writing about science from a real-world perspective makes me facepalm even harder.
the careless depletion of our planet’s resources, mass murder of our animal cohabitants, and widespread destruction of its natural beauties (including those essential to the maintenance of life as we know it!!) addressed both by the avatar franchise as a whole and this book in particular are very real. but they have a known cause and it isn’t “overpopulation,” it’s capitalism.
baxter talks about carrying capacity, ignoring completely the fact that the agriculture industry in the united states alone could feed the entire world and have enough left over to feed nearly half of them again. instead, over 10% of that country alone experiences food insecurity, and any food (whether in the form of raw materials or finished product) that cannot be easily profited off of is discarded in unthinkable quantities. we don’t have a math problem, we have a political problem.
one of the more insidious manifestations (and i’m not blaming baxter himself for this, it’s a trap basically every liberal falls into with this kind of thing) is the use of “we” language when discussing the kind of wide-scale environmental destruction. “we’re” destroying the forests, “we’re” destroying the oceans. no, we are not. capitalism is. the vast majority of the world’s most politically powerful nations are organized according to the principle that profit is more important than people or the planet. that is not an “us” problem. this is victim blaming on a massive scale.
this also ties in to my other biggest frustration with the book: it’s far, far too willing to give the benefit of the doubt to the same exact kinds of organizations that the film rightly villainizes. i get the impression that the author thinks rda is an “evil corporation,” which–while strictly true–doesn’t distinguish them from any other corporation. the book takes it for granted that the further exploration of space will be driven by capitalist profit-seeking, and expresses hope that the real corporations driving this hypothetical future exploration will be more responsible than rda.
which, you know. they won’t. they’ll be exactly as responsible as they’re forced to be, and even that will only be when they think they realistically might get caught doing otherwise.
that would be bad enough but the same benefit of the doubt is extended to private military forces like the ones employed by rda, and once again the author expresses hope that the ones used by companies for hypothetical future space exploration/exploitation won’t be cartoonishly evil, because apparently he hasn’t read a single article about civilian contractors in the real world? i would hope even a liberal would know better than to write something as nervous laughter-inducing as, “don’t call them ‘mercenaries,’ however. nowadays they are known by terms like ‘private military contractors’ (pmcs).”
phew. now, while i might have difficulty convincing you of this at this point, i actually liked this book quite a bit!! i think the central thrust of the book is largely summed up by its final paragraph: “avatar was wonderful, and reality is pretty wonderful too. and, to me, the more we understand it, the more wonderful it becomes.” that is exactly the spirit that the majority of the book is written in. it loosely follows the structure of the movie and uses it as a sort of framing narrative for 101-level discussions of the various real-world scientific discoveries and questions that are depicted in the film. this requires bringing basically every major scientific discipline to bear in one form or another.
the book is intended for general audiences, so the science in it isn’t too dense or hard to follow. i really did enjoy the vast majority of it, which isn’t all that surprising because i’ve always loved learning about science when it’s approachable. i know y’all might think i’ve always been a wimpy liberal arts and social sciences nerd, but i actually took more than 4 years’ worth of science classes in high school.
as far as i can tell the science in here is for the most part pretty great and well-researched. i mean, okay, even there i have to nitpick the tiniest bits. at one point platelets are bizarrely referred to as a type of white blood cell. they aren’t white blood cells! they aren’t cells at all! but that’s the only blatant factual error i noticed, and it’s a pretty minor one. i also rolled my eyes a little at there being several pages devoted to “the fermi paradox,” as i happen to agree with the view that the fermi paradox is a) not actually a valid paradox, and b) not, strictly speaking, science, but this is hardly an uncontroversial position so i can’t hold it against baxter for not sharing it, and he clearly knows way more about science than i do.
what’s really exciting to me, though, and i imagine is exciting to baxter himself, is that the intervening years have rendered some of this information outdated! given the film’s plot there is, of course, a section devoted to the exciting discoveries of exoplanets (planets outside of our solar system) that was just starting to explode when this book was published. and the discussion of the science in this section (as far as it had gotten in 2011 anyway) is fantastic! but what’s really exciting is that we’ve come much further since then. in 2011 the exoplanets we had discovered numbered in the hundreds, today it’s in the thousands. and the book specifically mentions that despite them being the closest stars to our own sun, no exoplanets had yet been detected around any of the stars of the trinary alpha centauri system, today there are three confirmed exoplanets around proxima centauri (the closest of the three to our sun), and a candidate exoplanet around both of the other two, more sun-like stars of the system.
as previously alluded to, i really did enjoy how baxter used a rough outline of the film’s plot to discuss a variety of scientific concepts that would hopefully excite fans of the film, especially since he could refer to aspects of the film like some sort of massively overpriced visual aid. major topics like space travel, astronomy (especially the search for exoplanets), the origins of life and evolution, what alien life might look like, the potential perils of first contact, cloning and genetic research, and the human brain and the nature of consciousness are all covered with a multidisciplinary approach to give the reader an introduction to all of them. helpfully, there’s a chapter-by-chapter suggested reading list if readers found themselves particularly hooked by any of these specific questions.
all my frustrations aside, this is a damn impressive bit of nonfiction writing, and exactly the sort of book i would’ve gobbled up as a high schooler. a-rank
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