Kurzweil on Avatar & My Two Cents on SciFi

Futurist, Inventor and Generally Sharp Guy, Ray Kurzweil Reviews Cameron's Avatar

The Secret History of Science Fiction, with a preview of the introduction care of Amazon - Don't buy from Amazon, patron your local booksellers.

In summary of the above article, Kurzweil is pretty thoroughly disappointed with Avatar. Sure, the film is an entertaining, action-packed and visually appealing work, but its plot and believability or pretty tired and suspect. Cameron obviously had the goal of an "environmental movie" with plenty of action. I do agree with Kurzweil's disappointment in the Hollywood portrayal of indigenous Nature worship (TVTropes on Avatar), particularly for its apparent drawing on and incredible simplification of a general--i.e. bland--native faith tradition. He makes a few smart remarks about aerial combat and the epic action-packed climax, but I want to move on from there.

Kurzweil suggests that the technology used in Avatar is pretty, well, present day. You can see some 3D modeling, some fancy pants medical imaging models, and the outstanding avatar technology itself, but after one hundred years, what is with the missiles and gas canisters? Kurzweil would probably like to see a sonic blast the likes used on American college students and Honduran protesters mixed up with some ion cannon action a la StarCraft to take down that otherworldly tree of the Na'vi. The automatic rifles maybe traded out for plasma guns or some Predator shoulder laser cannon. And what is with the oxygen masks, can't they just shoot up so nanorobots into their longs to scrub the air as they breathe? After all, isn't it the FUTURE?!

Sidenote: I read and enjoy Ray Kurzweil's work and definitely respect the work he has and no doubt continues to do to revolutionize the human-technology interface. He was, after all, the inventor of a text-to-voice machine to assist the blind and has developed pretty slick electronic music instruments to boot. I antagonize him here because, as I will get to, I think he is missing the point.

Okay, if the role of Cameron's Avatar was to show us a setting and story taking place on a far flung world a hundred years in the future, then Kurzweil may well be right on track complaining that the Avatar roughnecks aren't beaming up and phasering one another. But, and here I stretch my vantage a little, science fiction usually isn't about telling us how it is going to be in the future. (I am going to stop linking here because I will be doing a lot more name-dropping and less TVtroping.) With a few exceptions--like the mythical Isaac Asimov and Arthur C Clarke--science fiction isn't trying to provide accurate prophecies of the world that is to come. Rather, science fiction has generally been about the world as it actually is right now, which one might pick up The Secret History of Science Fiction and read the introductory essay to find out. Whether you pick up a book by Robert A Heinlein or Ursula K le Guin, watch Star Trek or the Matrix, or even--well, heck--have read X-Men or Spider-Man comics, they are about issues and ideas concerning the present.

Is this a little too much to say? Well, Heinlein was well-known for mixing up racial identities and throwing them around the galaxy to explore. Le Guin just can't help but play around with gender identity and roles or utopia and anti-utopia. Star Trek was the first broadcast of an inter-racial kiss. The Matrix, well, I don't want to get carried away like I might in my adolescence, but trust me here. And hey, guess what, X-Men is even on the very surface confronting issues about racism, nationalism, homophobia, and the like. In the Eighties, Spider-Man was one of the first popular, fictional media means of talking about drug problems in the marginalized inner-city that actually played into a young, wealthy, intelligent, white dude's life. Even, if not especially today, you can pick up The Yiddish Policemen's Union and, under the clever guise of an alternate history, Michael Chabon ties in anti-Semitism, Jewish identity and Judaica, indigenous rights and identity, and have a lot of fun with a neo-noir detective story. (Note: Many science fiction styles, most notably cyberpunk, are drawn heavily on the detective stories and Film Noir character tropes that flourished following World War II.)

What does this have to do with Avatar? Well, Avatar isn't actually about encountering an alien moon, encountering new cultures, and mining minerals for commodities on Earth. It is more accurately about the treatment of ecosystems, indigenous cultures and people, land rights, the use of coercive methods, and genocide. Of course it draws heavily from Dances With Wolves because, though marked as they are with their own particular eras, they are dealing with the same issues. As most present writers and critical readers would recognize, a good story isn't about novelty, but about substance and style.

Avatar isn't my favorite movie, but it does succeed in having pretty hefty quantities of both substance and style while bringing environmental and post-colonial issues to a pretty immense audience. My personal criticism of Avatar is that its effort at being a spectacle, a thoroughly enjoyable one I acknowledge, detracts from any potentially enlightening or motivating intention. That is, upon leaving the cinema, I was more interested in riding sweet, giant, armored jungle cats (maybe the Na'vi will start an ecotourism bureau) than I was in saving the rain forest or researching ethnobotany--both of which are already interests to me. What hope, then, might I have for the average theatre-goer to take from it anything more than that? One might even leave with a lingering voice saying, "Well, we already lost all of that stuff here, hopefully we'll know better when we make it to Pandora." That, I would say, would be a grave disappointment.