Avatar

I gladly accept the burden of proof. Avatar is fracking awesome. If my opponent proves that Avatar is merely excellent, he wins. THAT's how confident I am of Avatar's awesomeness. I reject my opponent's assertion that a film has to be "original" in order to be awesome, or that it has to be "the first movie to present such themes." Every basic plot structure has been around for literally thousands of years (see e.g. http://www.ipl.org...), and every major artist in history introduces mere variations on these fundamental themes. By a purist standard of originality, no movie has ever been awesome, nor can any artwork created since the classical age of mythology be awesome. It's a useless standard. A better standard is simply whether an artwork presents its themes well or not. Annalee Newitz is a fool. None of my opponent's listed films are better because they are all one-dimensional, whereas Avatar is multidimensional. Anybody who believes Avatar is one-dimensional has simply failed to notice all but one of its many themes. Avatar has the thematic depth of those listed films PLUS a whole host of others that I could list, including but not limited to Adam's Apples, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Matrix, Tron, The Seventh Seal, etc., PLUS books like The Holy Bible and all other religious texts, One Dimensional Man, and Zarathustra, among other works. I agree with my opponent that special effects and other details are not the sole determinant of awesomeness,but I believe that they are to a film's credit, and in this film there's a whole lot of thoughtful detail and therefore a whole lot of credit that is relevant to Avatar's awesomeness. I agree with my opponent that labor-hours are only subjectively valuable, and not self-evidently valuable. But I think that the scale of an artwork is closely related to the amount of labor hours invested in it, and scale is definitely one important part of awesomeness (large scale artworks often being more awe-inspiring than small scale artworks). Thus part of what makes the Pyramids of Giza or the Great Wall of China awesome is that they used such an unfathomable amount of human effort to create. Likewise, Avatar, which in this era of supercomputing still took a decade to make, and entailed the coordination of thousands of highly skilled experts from across many scientific disciplines, is an awe-inspiring effort. It's the Hollywood equivalent of the Manhattan Project. By this standard, I concede that Waterworld and Battlefield: Earth are partly creditworthy. But they fail to achieve awesomeness for other reasons (as a side note, be aware that Waterworld was actually a huge financial success). I reject my author's list of archetypes because it is rooted in the same unrealistic standard that I cited above, which is that an awesome artwork has to present "new" themes. Again, there's no such thing as a truly novel theme; likewise, after thousands of years of storytelling, there's no such thing as a truly original character type. And even if someone invented a heretofore unknown character type, then the next critic could just boil that type down to just goodness, badness, or neutrality. So this whole business of originality is not just an unrealistic and distracting standard, but a slippery slope that tends towards absurd reductionism. But even if I grant to my opponent that the characters are re-hashed archetypes, I do not believe that that makes the film less awesome. Archetypal characters are the vehicle for plot and theme driven stories, and the use of archetypes has been a hallmark of many legendary authors: Ovid, Chaucer, and Shakespeare, to just name a few. I argue that the use of archetypes is essential for telling a theme driven story, because in a theme driven story the conflict presented is greater than the life of any individual character Fleshing out the characters distracts the audience's attention from the greater themes at issue. In a psychological story or biopic, on the other hand, the point of the story is to flesh out the characters. To say that unique, non-archetypal characters are a necessary ingredient for awesome artwork is to be biased in favor of merely one type of artwork: psychological stories, character profiles, or biopics. My opponent should justify his bias in favor of such artwork and against large-scale thematic epics, like the Odyssey and Avatar. It's not self evident that only character-driven stories can be "awesome." Nonetheless, I'll address my opponent's characterization of the characters in Avatar: Jake Sully: His transformation is very powerful: he abandons his previous life, his worldview, and his very species in a land that that is nothing like the world he knows. Analogous real-life examples are extremely rare (Mother Teresa, Siddharta Gautama, St. Paul the Apostle), and this is even a special theme in literature (Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, for example). Avatar presents a unique twist on the theme because Jake Sully's transformation is inter-special. It's a thought experiment about how difficult it would be for homo sapiens to show altruism and love for a non-human species, given how rare such altruism and love already are in a word where we're already the same species and our differences are merely cultural. Jake Sully's ultimate abandonement of his human body touches the age-old question of what defines the self, and what is mind-body dualism (http://en.wikipedia.org...). Grace: Yes, idealistic character, evocative of Jane Goodall. It is interesting to contrast her non-interventionist approach to the Na'vi with the full emotional and physical investment of Jake Sully's. This issue of non-intervention is a recurring theme in anthropology, in which the mutual gain of cross-cultural immersion must be balanced against the fact that increasing interaction irrevocably changes the character of each respective culture. It's also a tension in exploratory biology, in which our desire to collect data about nature conflicts with our desire to keep such nature "undisturbed." Grace even echoes the scientific theme of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle (http://en.wikipedia.org...). Neytiri: She is fascinating not only because she makes a similar cross-species leap to that of Jake Sully, but also because it underscores how disabling the experience of falling in love can be. She is totally on-guard about humanity's destructive habits, yet her inhibitions are nonetheless weakened by the experience of falling in love with another person. this happens to any of us who suffers from a broken heart, and it's interesting to see it happen to an alien character. Moreover, her relationship with Jake raises the theme of forgiveness: must forgiveness be earned or purchased, or can forgiveness be gratuitous? Neyriti forgived Jake, but did she do so only because Jake performed restitution for his betrayal of her? (Was it even adequate restitution? after all, he caused the death of many Na-vi and theloss of their home tree.) If so, is it truly forgiveness, or just settled scores? If not, then it shows forgiveness can be sought for even the most grievous of sins, which is a theological theme.WWJD Parker: This character is a touchstone for capitalism, utilitarianism, and existentialism. To whom does the Na'vi planet belong?To the na'vi because they were there first, or to the humans because they can exercise dominion over it, or to nobody, or to everybody? What should be done about the planet's resources: how should we weigh the benefits to humanity of obtaining the element "unobtainium" (or whatever it was called) versus the costs to the Na'vi of exploitng that material? Is it right for this apparently critical natural resource to just sit there unused? Also, how should humans appraise the interests of non-humans? Do they experience co-equal utility simply because they're intelligent? I could go on. D-rape: interesting