Reflections on Avatar by Ray Kurzweil

One bit of background that gets missed with Avatar is the military contractors are the low bidders and were using outdated military surplus.

Kurzweil probably has no room to criticize given that he has never attempted to make a film like that and probably couldn't do better himself - but I agree with his general point that the movie was anti-technology and anti-corporation. This is a disturbing and misinformed viewpoint held by many people in Hollywood for some reason.

What bunk. He tries to say that riding the backs of the birds is a rip of Harry Potter. Does the guy know nothing of Greek Mythology? Did he not see Clash of the Titans with Persius riding the back of Pegasus; which clearly predates Potter.

I thought the "networked tree" thing was actually quite clever. Think of it this way: Suppose you were living in Kurzweil's post-Singularity future, where you have absolute command over biological and nanotechnological mechanics, and you wanted to set up a world-wide communications platform that will last forever. You wouldn't mine precious metals and sling fragile fibers as we have done. Instead, you'd engineer it into the fauna: self-repairing, self-sustaining, global.

"The spirits of your ancestors living in the trees" sounds mystical and backward, but "copying your brain to the internet to be saved forever" sounds wonderfully Kurzweillian. Cameron bridges the two, but the technology was too advanced for Kurzweil to identify it as such. :)

One thing I thought was neat about the original Avatar script that got left out of the movie was a closing threat from the Na'vi to the humans: Our giant biological computer has analyzed you and engineered a virus that will destroy you, should you return to Pandora.

I think he largely misses the point. Like many other sci-fi pieces, Avatar is a fantasia and not a serious look at our possible future.

Much of the human technology was obviously modeled after current American military tech, and that was a deliberate choice. This approach allowed Cameron to tap into current feelings and cultural currents. If things had been more 'realistic', then it would have been alien to modern audiences. Really, properly modeling the future would have made the story far more difficult to tell.

It's darned hard to make a story that's universally accessible. 'Avatar' is a pretty decent sci-fi movie that's understandable to people all over the world. It will also revolutionize cinematography and filmmaking from this point onward. Any proper analysis of the film should keep those points in mind.