On Friday I officially ended my status as the only person left in the U.S. who had not seen the movie Avatar. My favorite parts of the movie were, of course, the script and the love story. However, I noticed that some effort had gone into special effects and, in particular, into creating a world full of animals. There was a lot of water on the imaginary planet but no fish. We never saw fish in the water. We never saw the local people fishing.
Here on Earth, more than half of vertebrate species are fish. How come the planet portrayed in Avatar didn’t have any?
James Cameron doesn’t like fish. Titanic was all about water and did you see any fish there? Nor did I, see the pattern?
Even the fish in The Abyss turned out to be aliens.
1- To make it a strange planet.
2- It’s a blind spot in the author’s mind. He never eats fish, and forgot they existed.
3- They all got ejected into space after having eaten unobtainium contamination.
Stay tuned for “Avatar: Aquaman Edition”…
reinharden
Because most of the land animals were aquatic in nature already (the tubeworm trees that hid at a touch, the swimming “seeds” etc.). If he had aquatic species in the *water*, he’d either have no distinction between the land and water animals, would have to design some kind of “double-aquatic” species (which might require *real* imagination rather than a retread of previous movies coupled with the ripoffs of several noted SciFi writers’ work and one or two “Yes” album covers), or – most probably – it would have added to an already astronomical budget without adding much to the plot since none of the characters seemed to bathe, drink or fish.
I thought that when they talked about bringing all the tribes together they mentioned bringing in the coastal fishing tribe as well.
So why do the tall blue females have breasts? These particular smurfs are not mammals and the breasts don’t give milk.
What I don’t get is how the Avatar “drivers” communicate with their Avatars. Radio would be one candidate, but part of the movie takes place in a location where the EMI is so bad that aircraft instruments and radios don’t work. Yet the Avatar/driver link always seems to work flawlessly (at least until the mean Colonel slams the big red button…)
J. Peterson, judging from the heavy driver apparatus, I’m assuming it was some form of quantum entanglement, ie, sub-atomic particles in both operator and avatar brains would be individually sistered/entangled and changes in the remote state would be mirrored by changes in the local state. Also known as quantum teleporation, this has already been done over modest distances, with drastically labored effort, experimental controls and simpler subjects such as individual photons or rarefied cesium gas.
That’s the easiest way to explain it. I doubt such technology would actually look like that, or if it existed, we would even bother with manned space exploration or have any further needs to leave the planet.
Phil,
Congrats on joining the in crowd. 🙂
Seriously, if that movie wins an Oscar for best picture,
it just may be the real sign that the apocalypse is
upon us.
I wondered about the lack of fish as well.
Because the ancestors of the Na’vi who created AI-wa and the modified ecology didn’t want fish?
Actually, there are a lot of fish on Pandora. There is a huge variety and of breath-taking beauty. It is just that the scenes in this particular movie about Pandora were shot in locations where there were no fish. And also fish did not figure into the story line, so were never mentioned. Remember the movie Casablana? It had no fish either, for similar reasons.