James Cameron's Avatar
is a bit of a forgotten pop-cultural relic. No doubt this will soon change with
the eventual release of Avatar 2 and
subsequent sequels. I say forgotten because outside of its impact at the
box-office and on spearheading the 3D theatre experience, it is seldom
discussed. In an age that has no shortage of big bombastic blockbuster
spectacle franchises, this should not be unexpected. I don't think you can
point to Avatar's lack of
'stickiness', for lack of a better term, in people's minds as a specific
failing of the film in comparison to other franchises. Franchises like Star Wars became popular in a time where
such films were an incredible rarity and more modern franchises like Harry Potter released films in quick
succession after each other at regular intervals. And all of these 'sticky'
franchises had countless merchandising: toys, cereals, lunchboxes, cartoon
spin-offs, etc. that kept them present in the minds of the public. So Avatar's lack of 'stickiness' could
easily be due to its self-imposed hibernation, rather than resulting from any
lacking aspect of the film itself.
But because Avatar
has been forgotten, there has been little digging into the lore of it that
usually accompanies such large spectacle films (although admittedly such
speculation tends to cluster around franchises after they have more than one
film rather than around singular event-style films). Avatar was also saddled with a straightforward story that didn't
give audiences much to chew on after the euphoria of the visual spectacle had
worn off. This has caused many to ask what could possibly be worth exploring in
the world of Avatar to warrant Avatars 2, 3, 4 and 5. However, as with
any nascent imagined universe, there are countless possibilities still out
there and avenues to be explored. In this space I want to pick up on a few
interesting wrinkles hiding just under the surface of the world presented in Avatar that could make the world
potentially worth revisiting.
The first wrinkle that caught my attention was the seeming
disparity between the Na'vi and the indigenous life. The Na'vi are slender,
giant-sized, blue-skinned humanoids. They walk upright and appear to have
evolved from quadrupeds as they possess four limbs and a prehensile tail.
Cynically we could dismiss the lack of originality of the Na'vi design as owing
to an attempt to make them more relatable by making them appear more human,
avoiding having to make the film itself do the heavy lifting of making the
audience feel empathy for the aliens. However, the Na'vi are interesting by
contrast to the native fauna. There are flying 'dragons' of a sort that sport
four wings, and two hind legs. These dragons therefore evolved from a
vertebrate ancestor with six limbs, since the wings are naturally adapted from
the limbs. The dragons also have four eyes, two pairs of double eyes. This same
configuration is also seen on the horse creatures on Pandora, which trot around
with six limbs. In fact, I may be wrong on this, but I believe all of the
vertebrates aside from the Na'vi seen on Pandora follow the six-limbed,
four-eye configuration, including the direhorse (the above-mentioned six-legged
horse), the thanator (a sort of oversized puma), the hammerhead titanthere
(basically a rhinoceres/triceratops), the forest banshee (the flying dragons),
the great leonopteryx (an over-sized forest banshee), the viperwolf (a sort of
hyena), and the hexapede (basically a deer). It seems that the artists working
on Avatar made sure to develop a
consistent hexapodal diversity of vertebrates. So on Pandora there is a
six-limbed vertebrate ancestor. Furthermore this ancestor is very old, since it
is the progenitor for both a land-based herd animal with superficially
mammalian resemblance and a large aerial predator with superficially avian
characteristics and indeed what seems to be all vertebrates on Pandora
excepting the Na'vi. On Earth the four-limbed ancestor is the progenitor to all
tetrapods, which includes all amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals. So we
meet with the first oddity: the Na'vi have a separate ancestor from large
groups of vertebrates on the moon (perhaps even all other vertebrates on the
moon), possessing only two eyes and four limbs.
The second oddity is more glaring. The Na'vi possess a sort
of tube at the base of their skull that exposes nerve endings that allow them
to interface with similar tubes on native life-forms across the moon. These
tubes can be found on the flying dragons, on the six-legged horses, and even on
trees! That last part is truly incredible. If we think about the evolution of
life on Pandora we must suppose that these tubes were part of the progenitor of
both plant and animal kingdoms. Because these tubes allow a neural link,
essentially enabling the stronger consciousness to dominate the weaker one,
they indicate compatible nervous systems. But of what use would the plant
kingdom have of a nervous system remotely resembling those employed by animals?
We might suppose that some co-evolution between plants and animals caused them
to converge on similar nervous systems, but this is still an incredible claim.
The answer I think to both of these puzzles may be that the
origins of the Na'vi are not so simple and innocent as we have been led to
believe. I propose that the Na'vi may in fact be the descendants of a
technologically advanced colonizing race, one that used extensive
bioengineering across all of Pandora to modify its flora and fauna for their
own benefit and exploitation. After some time, some, or all of the Na'vi
descended into barbarism and lost the knowledge of much of their technology.
Now these Na'vi descendants see a world that seems tailor-made for their very
existence (since their ancestors engineered it as such), and turn to mysticism
as an explanation and worldview.
I believe the above speculation deepens the lore of Avatar
because it makes it more interesting than the simplistic view of Na'vi =
natural and therefore good and humans = unnatural and therefore bad. It opens
up the possibility that Pandoran life forms may have been greatly modified from
their naturally evolved forms, and some may have been caused to be extinct, by
the actions of the Na'vi. It also provides an explanation for how the Pandoran
forest is able to serve as a computational database for the consciousness of
all the Na'vi. Yes we can point to that plot point as being a literal metaphor
for the idea that in this interconnected perfect ecosystem everything is
ultimately returned (even the souls of the dead), but maybe that perfect
ecosystem was only ever possible through ingenuity and shaping nature according
to the will of the powerful? Removing some of the innocence of the Na'vi makes
the world of Pandora slightly more disturbing and less cut and dry, which in
turn I believe makes it more interesting, especially as considered across the
span of multiple sequels.
If the Na'vi are descended from an interstellar race, it
opens up the possibility of other moons or planets having been colonized by
them. Perhaps this race would go around 'bio-forming' worlds in a manner
counter to the way humanity strip-mines the worlds they come across. The
descended Na'vi might even be made to become deliberately ignorant of their
ancestry so as to keep them on their respective worlds. The different Na'vi
might be suitably different, each adapted to differences in each world's
specific conditions. The ancestors might be long gone or might be still around,
and so the series could slowly build toward some kind of confrontation with
this ancestor race or the technology they left behind.
Another wrinkle is the resource that humanity is mining, the
so-called unobtainium. That they are commercially mining this resource and have
yet to assign a name other than the placeholder afforded to unknown engineering
materials intended to meet a specification is a cause of course of endless
frustration, but we can perhaps brush that off by suggesting that it is simply
Parker who refers to it as such because he is so technically incompetent that
he is unable to pronounce the name of the resource of which he is procuring. We
can imagine for example an early oil tycoon referring to the substance as
'black gold' with enthusiasm, much to the face-palming of his subordinates. In
any event, the name is not of much importance. The resource is said to be a
room temperature superconductor, and it must be unknown within the Solar system
or very rare to justify the interstellar journey required to obtain it on
Pandora and then bring it back to Earth. Now high temperature superconductors
would enjoy all kinds of uses including for magnetic sails (used to brake when
approaching a star) and for magnetic confinement of fusion propulsion systems,
both useful for interstellar travel. Those two are probably the most compelling
uses for HTS that could possibly justify an interstellar voyage in search of
them. But if the primary use of unobtainium is to facilitate interstellar
travel, then this travel must serve more of a purpose than the procurement of
more unobtainium. We know precious little about the world of Avatar, but it must be one in which
humanity is actively reaching out to other star systems beyond simply what is
seen in the film or is planning to do so on a large scale and is stock-piling
unobtainium to do so. If humanity is in an expansionist phase, colonizing
distant worlds, then the importance of unobtainium is made that much more
clear. It wouldn't simply be a case of humanity using some magic resource to
keep their dying world running for 'one more day', but instead would be the
messy fuel needed to reach outwards and grow unbounded in population and
knowledge. Humanity may purposefully not be colonizing Pandora and only have
the mining outpost there because of the ethical concerns of dominating and
displacing the Na'vi. This I believe deepens the lore because humanity is shown
to be flawed but sympathetic. There can be an aspirational side to humanity,
where they are progressive and reaching out to the stars, colonizing lifeless
worlds and making them into new frontiers. Of course the downside to that
ceaseless expansion means that sometimes the little people get in the way. We
can understand Quaritch and Parker as the kind of people who like to wade in
the mud, but whose actions if brought under full public scrutiny would draw
condemnation.
Tying these ideas together could be the suggestion that the
ancestor race of the Na'vi is absent, or that no technologically advanced
civilizations other than humanity have been discovered. In that chilling
context, humanity may see it as part of their purpose in the universe to spread
technological civilization across the galaxy, even if sometimes there is an
uncomfortable cost for that. The other tie-in would be the presence of unobtainium
on Pandora itself in the first place. Presumably the substance would have also
been of tremendous value to the ancestor race, and so it may be that they came
to Pandora because of it, or perhaps they used Pandora as a place to deposit
large quantities of it for unknown reasons. It may also be that they had
discovered how to manufacture the substance and were doing so on a large scale
on Pandora for many years.
Hopefully I have illustrated above how a few seemingly incidental
details as presented in Avatar could
be picked up on and used to expand the canvas. The reader can see how Avatar sequels could potentially entail
more than simply the broad strokes of bad
humans come back to Pandora, good Na'vi beat back bad humans again, and
start to engage moderately more challenging subject matter.
Avatar (2009) Directed by James Cameron [Film]. Los Angeles, Calif: 20th Century Fox.
References
Avatar (2009) Directed by James Cameron [Film]. Los Angeles, Calif: 20th Century Fox.
