Naked blue giants must be the new SF trope

I saw the most awesome tech demo reel tonight — a little show called Avatar. It was well worth the admission cost, but you should be prepared with reasonable expectations.

There isn’t a plot. Well, actually, there is…but it’s so predictable that they might as well have left it out. It’s a wish-fulfillment fantasy on rails. Don’t worry about it, as long as you don’t expect to be challenged or surprised, it’s fine.

There are good guys and bad guys, and the good guys are really, really good, and the bad guys are really, really bad. Like straight from the associate of arts degree program at the local Cartoon Villain College. When there’s nothing else to do, they blow things up that gain them nothing but universal loathing. They also have standard cartoon villain military tactics, which usually involves sending in swarms of moronic foot soldiers to accompany their high-tech airborne missile platforms and act as targets for the defenders.

There is a climactic battle scene that puts the Ewok’s Battle for Endor to shame.

You get the idea. Don’t go in to the theater looking for cleverness or wit or even, dare I suggest it, intelligence in the story. But it’s OK, I heard several ten year olds behind me cheering at key points.

The planet Pandora is the real star, anyway, and it’s inhabited by strange alien creatures that exhibit some real creativity in their design. Except, unfortunately, for the protagonist aliens, who are basically human beings stretched out to be 8 feet tall and with lovely golden Keane eyes plastered on, but otherwise follow our body plan pretty much exactly, right down to the toenails. If I saw that situation for real, I’d be an intelligent design creationist, because it’s obvious that the intelligent aliens did not evolve from the animal stock on that world.

I kept wishing that the makers had shown a little bravery and made the aliens alien. Some of the animals had this creepy slick black epidermis, for instance, that looked like a mucous-covered wetsuit; why not drape that over the aliens instead of the pretty blue skins they had? Most of the alien animals also had an interesting complex dentition with a lipless covering — again, be daring and make the aliens look like something that you wouldn’t ever want to kiss. District 9 did it, and got away with it — the aliens in that movie were definitely different.

But then, this was a demo reel. They were showing that they can get awfully close to realistic human performances with computer graphics, and this was a story about native Americans anyway, not really about aliens on a different planet. And it actually pulled it off: the characters were impressive and expressive.

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Speaking of which, one thing I was wondering about was that the aliens, and in particular the lead female character, were hot: lithely sexy, and barely clothed. It had me wondering what kind of rights the lead actress, Zoë Saldaña, has retained to the image. After all, it’s clearly her, despite the distortions of the alien form, and that image is now in a great big digital bucket on some computers somewhere, and could be trundled out and reused in other films. I imagine it would be valuable information to the porn industry, which you just know is itching to get its hands on that technology. There must be some kind of legal protections for digital likenesses being hammered out somewhere, because one thing this movie is going to do is start making that potential problem acute.

I’ve been belittling the movie, but it really wasn’t that awful. It’s a phenomenal demonstration of a technology that will let movie-makers create anything on the screen, where all the stories are told by geeks and nerds with very sophisticated machines. In a lot of ways, it reminded me of Star Wars: an absolutely enthralling experience on its opening day which completely changed the look of all science fiction films to come, which changed the way the movie industry worked (for good and bad), and which used visual spectacle to help us overlook the silly story and the embarrassingly bad dialog.

Now we can look back at Star Wars, especially with the aid of the hideous prequels, and see that a lot of it was pure crap movie-making. Avatar is in the same situation (although I hope it isn’t mined out making a series of increasingly terrible sequels) — but it’s also got the shine of some magic in it.

Maddow vs. Cohen

Richard Cohen is one of those profit-making advocates of gay deconversion, whose work has been used in Uganda to justify laws that promote killing gay people; Rachel Maddow, of course, is the fabulous, intelligent interviewer who ought to be the model for responsible television journalism.

She politely rips him to pieces and most decorously picks her teeth with his splintered bones. I like it.

A moral conundrum, resolved with scripture

I’d never realized what a useful tool the Bible is in infallibly resolving difficult moral problems until I read this detailed dissection of a difficult situation on Answers in Genesis.

Here’s the hypothetical situation: you know the whereabouts of a family of Jews hiding from the Nazis. A Nazi patrol comes up to you and asks where they are; you, a good God-fearing Christian, can either lie and say you don’t know (which would be bad, because, like, lying is a sin), or you could tell the truth, and the Nazis would zip off and search for and presumably execute the family. What do you do?

As a non-Bible believing amoral godless atheist, my first thought was that this is trivial: you lie your pants off. The ‘crime’ of telling a lie pales into insignificance against the crime of enabling the death of fellow human beings.

According to Bodie Hodge of AiG, though, I’m wrong. The good Christian should reject lies, Satan’s tools, in all circumstances, and should immediately ‘fess up the location of the Jews. He backs it up with Bible quotes, too.

If we love God, we should obey Him (John 14:15). To love God first means to obey Him first–before looking at our neighbor. So, is the greater good trusting God when He says not to lie or trusting in our fallible, sinful minds about the uncertain future?

Consider this carefully. In the situation of a Nazi beating on the door, we have assumed a lie would save a life, but really we don’t know. So, one would be opting to lie and disobey God without the certainty of saving a life–keeping in mind that all are ultimately condemned to die physically. Besides, whether one lied or not may not have stopped the Nazi solders from searching the house anyway.

As Christians, we need to keep in mind that Jesus Christ reigns. All authority has been given to Him (Matthew 28:18), and He sits on the throne of God at the right hand of the Father (Acts 2:33; Hebrews 8:1). Nothing can happen without His say. Even Satan could not touch Peter without Christ’s approval (Luke 22:31). Regardless, if one were to lie or not, Jesus Christ is in control of timing every person’s life and able to discern our motives. It is not for us to worry over what might become, but rather to place our faith and obedience in Christ and to let Him do the reigning. For we do not know the future, whereas God has been telling the end from the beginning (Isaiah 46:10).

Gosh. I never thought of it that way. So…all those Christians who sheltered Jews during WWII are actually burning in hell right now for their sinful wickedness? That is so counterintuitive, it must be true!

Don’t die gay in R.I.

Sometimes I find it hard to believe how callous these conservative politicians can be. The governor of Rhode Island has just vetoed a bill that would have allowed a same-sex partner to make funeral arrangements for a dead partner. So imagine this: someone wracked with grief at the loss of someone to whom they had committed a substantial part of their life now gets to also be told that they are locked out of the responsibility of taking care of anything to do with the funeral ceremony. How degrading and insensitive; how vile and intrusive.

Shame on Governor Carcieri. It takes a real man to kick the heart-broken and bereaved at the moment of their deepest hurt, and Carcieri has arranged to do it over and over again for years to come.

The cameraman speaks

We’re learning a bit more about the fellow who was maced and arrested in Chicago, thanks to the efforts of the Chicago Ethical Humanist Society; members of that group are busily writing to me to let me know the Whole Truth of the incident, and why they were justified in siccing the police on Sunsara Taylor’s cameraman. It’s weird, though: they keep telling me how bad and awful and wicked this fellow is — his name is Gregory Koger, by the way — but they won’t say what he did that justified the police assault on him. And that is dismaying. The ethical society doesn’t seem to care much about ethics and logic and justice.

So I got this email:

PZ, this is the man – in his own words – whom Taylor recruited to be her cameraman.

What do you think she thought his reaction would be when told by the police to stop/leave?! She knew he would snap, fight, and would get pulverized in the process.

Are you still full of admiration for her?

I followed the link, and the answer to the question is more complicated than a yes or no.

Koger is an admitted jailbird. He committed some very serious crimes and served some very serious jail time. He probably is a little bit scary; maybe a bit frustrated, and definitely angry with the system.

Yet when you go to that link, what you also discover is that he’s ambitious and is trying to improve himself through education. He thinks, he writes, he studies. He’s active in the Communist Party, which, while I don’t care much for the revolutionary agenda, is definitely motivated by a strong sense of social justice, and I can understand why someone who is being judged by the comfortable bourgeoisie as a thug who deserves to be beat up by the police would find it appealing.

What I can’t understand is how someone who identifies themselves as an ethical humanist would decide this fellow human being was nothing but a mad dog brought to the event to provoke a violent incident. What they don’t understand is that I’m not speaking out because I idolize Bob Avakian (I don’t) or think Maoism is the answer (I don’t) or that I think Sunsara Taylor should not be criticized (not at all) — it’s because the Ethical Humanist Society of Chicago is betraying what ought to be the basic principles of such a society: tolerance, engagement, argument, discussion.

One of the things I do admire about the Communists is that they do reach out to the poor, the oppressed, the imprisoned, and they try to address the injustices our society commits. It’s a shame that ethical humanists can’t do the same, but instead treat a former criminal as a pariah who has to be put down.

The members of the EHSC should really stop writing me. Every time they do, I’m a little more appalled at their attitude.