Avatar & the death of “Star Trek aliens”
Since readers of this weblog tend toward nerdishness I’m assuming they’re following the buzz around Avatar: The Movie. I only got interested in it last night trying to figure out the references in yesterday’s South Park episode, Dances with Smurfs. Check out the tailer below. Obviously actors in regular films aren’t going to be replaced by CGI in the next few years, but, looks like we’re on the cusp of a the shift when it comes to a human being necessary to portray humanoid aliens. The “uncanny valley” is to some extent an upside in sci-fi, excluding the problems that will generate when it comes to the sticky issue of hybridization.
Labels: science fiction
If you count Gollum and various other LotR creatures, we’re already there.
Still waiting for aliens that actually look alien. These things have human dentition, for crying out loud!
mike, that wouldn’t make a good film. we need to be able to *identify* with the aliens. ergo, *childhood’s end*.
Actually, Solaris (both versions) has a very alien alien — although it still manifests in human semblance, and neither movie shows the full extent of the weirdness described in the book.
District 9 made a passable attempt, and still had aliens that we can identify with. Of course, they had very human eyes and a similar bauplan….
I know things have to be anthropomorphized a bit, but I’m still weirded out when nonhuman characters have human teeth.
Another James Cameron bile-fest. The military, in a Cameron film, are nothing but psychotic murderers controlled by corrupt rapacious corporations who exist only to plunder. He maxed out on this theme in The Abyss but he hasn’t moved on.
Why are there so many movies about remote-controlled surrogate bodies at the moment? “Surrogates”, “Gamer”, now “Avatar”… is this because it fits with the 2009 zeitgeist, or it because Hollywood writers are plagiarists?
Neuroskeptic: Seeing as Avatar has been in development for about a decade (or more?), I don’t think either of those can account for it. (The othes, maybe.)
Bahumbug, Cameron simply plagiarized Poul Anderson’s Call Me Joe.
Jing,
I don’t think Avatar plagiarises Call Me Joe any more than Anderson plagiarised Clifford Simak’s Desertion. Yes, both involve humans operating in an inhospitable world via proxy bodies designed for that environment; but in Joe, there are no indigenous sentient natives to interact with, violently or otherwise. That interaction appears to be the main thrust of Avatar,with the avatars mostly a facilitating device, while Joe is more concerned with the proxy technology itself and its implications for identity.
Sf has traditionally encouraged authors to build on other people’s ideas. You don’t see Vernor Vinge ragging on Charlie Stross for writing about the Singularity, which Vinge conceived and named. Instead, he writes blurbs for Stross’s books. I think Cameron’s evident familiarity with print sf gives his work a richness that most sf films lack.