Review: "Avatar" ( + a fun Thought Experiment)

When I first heard of Avatar, I'll admit I thought of the animated Nickelodeon show. Well, Avatar isn't by Nickelodeon but it was animated, and yes it was quite a show.

Estimates have over $150 million spent on marketing this $300 million movie. The hype surrounding the film revolved around the sheer amount of time spent creating it and the new technologies invented to shoot it. If you are a gamer, you should be familiar with this technique of marketing. Blockbuster Video Games are produced to very high production values. New software is written and re-written to get the look-and-feel of a video game just right. Screenshots are "leaked" to get interest up. The wow factor is what studios aim for in a game these days.

Well, Avatar seemed to be all that leading into opening weekend and it did deliver. The production was through the roof. You ARE on the forest moon named Pandora. You fight the battles and you feel the flora and fauna. This movie WILL win the Oscar for Best Visual Effects, if nothing else. Unfortunately, the movie also falls victim to what I'll call the Video Game Budget Ratio.

100:1. It's not a Vegas odd for anything, so don't get excited. It represents the balance of effects budget to story and character development budget. For every $100 spent on mind-blowing special effects, $1 is spent on screenplay. Avatar's downfall is the low-brow, underhanded insult to viewers it doles out in the form of it's story and characters. Save Sigorney Weaver (even she isn't safe at some points from the director's megaphone), the characters in Avatar were as bland in one direction as Pandora's forest is vivid in the other. The One-Note performance of Stephen Lang's Colonel character reminded me of my Halo playing days. Made me want to lock and load and that's it.

Sam Worthington's character, Jake, however isn't firey on purpose. The intent here, I believe, is to allow the audience the ease of replacing him for themselves as the movie progresses. The movie wants to emotionally engage you wholly through the eyes of Jake and his eponymous Avatar.

I won't re-hash the story here, however I'll say this: For the movie to work for me, it needs to be a cautionary tale. It needs to say to us "Remember Fern Gully? Yah, don't do that." It needs to remind us that anything that drives us to disassociate with our humanity is not good and needs to be abolished. It also needs to not lay the message on so thick, that it loses half a star.

Rating: * * * 1/2

Now for something fun. On the way home from watching Avatar, I remember something that had been said in the movie. The whole point of the humans being there on Pandora was a fictitious substance they called, probably tounge-in-cheek, "unobtainium". A little Googling revealed that it's a naturally occurring superconductor at room temperatures. Also the year the movie happens is 2154 AD, esentially 150 years from now. My question is this: Assuming unobtainium holds it's value over time (I know, I know, just look at fluctuating gold prices), would the price of unobtainum (Ub) justify, in a Venture Capitalists' mind (at least 50% ROI), a single there-and-back-again trip to Pandora today (using travel times from the movie).

A little legwork:

Ub price in 2154 (Source: Avatar): $20 million per kilo
Ub price in 2009 (adjusted for 3.0% inflation): $241,507 per kilo
For comparison:







Let's say we retro fit (for interstellar space travel, al la proper shielding, .7c speed etc.) one of the Space Shuttles for this mission at the cost per mission, so far: $1.5 billion in 2008 (Source: Space Shuttle )

Shuttle can hold in payload: 24,400 kg
Time it takes to get to Alpha Centauri/Pandora at .7c : 5.681 years

Alright, up front costs: $1.5 billion dollars, 7 humans, 11 years

Robots could mine the Ub and humans could supervise from surface and/or orbit.

well, in 2020, the Shuttle would return, with 24,400 kg of Ub, which is now worth $337,631 per kilo (inflation), times 24.4 million = 8.2 trillion dollars in 2020. A total return of 408,566% or 371% a year.

Let's mine Pandora baby!