Extremely Late Avatar Review

[dwgism]

sammason  post reminded me that I had written something that's probably worth repeating here. I wasn't up to sitting through a film when Avatar was in the cinemas at the start of the year but I finally got to see the Special Edition at the start of September (though a 170 minute film didn't do much for my ability to walk by the end of it) and I couldn't

Comments

[elettaria]

I didn't see Avatar, but this sounds very similar to the boy with progeria in Tad Williams' overlong Otherland quartet.

SPOILERS AHOY (you should probably spoiler-mark the original post, come to think of it)

The Otherland set has a group of people travelling through a virtual reality world in which they are trapped for the vast majority of the books. After a while, one of the characters, who appears as a warrior type (he entered via a game he was playing) turns out to be a teenager with progeria, who is getting the opportunity to do various things he couldn't in his real body. The progeria deteriorates over the course of the books, worsened by the life support all the travellers have to be on, and at the end he dies (heroically, of course). It turns out that he's still in the virtual world, and as long as that world is kept open, he can "live" there and be visited by his best friend etc. Actually, it's a copy of him, but the novels seem to think that a replica is fine as it's all based on your own consciousness etc.,

[dwgism]

Having met Tad Williams at a book reading I'm willing to bet he's not exactly positive about a virtual world built for the rich ;)

Spoilers.....

Avatar is different in that the transfer is into a very real body (there's even a sex scene....) and it really is his consciousness riding around in the Avatar, not a copy or a simulation (part of the Avatar backstory is that the body needs to be grown from your own cells melded with Na'va DNA, or in Jake's case his now-dead twin's cells). And the permanent transfer at the end really is a case of swapping one body for another while keeping the same consciousness (and has already failed once, so it's a risky act). Cameron has obviously thought through the logic quite carefully, but what the film says about being disabled doesn't seem as important to him.