With the release of James Cameron's Avatar on Blu-Ray in the past few weeks, I opted to revisit some of the film's most engaging aspects, this time in an angle somewhat unfamiliar to film audiences: the scientific and political bridge. Does Cameron's film propel past the surface of its extracted Aliens/Terminator/Titanic mash-up? Dr. Richard Kelley joined me in sharing many of these same connections and ideas.
Richard Kelley has worked in high-energy astrophysics since 1977. After receiving a BA from Rutgers University and a doctorate from MIT, he joined NASA at the Goddard Space Flight Center in 1983. He has worked on measuring the properties of binary X-ray pulsars, including the discovery of several new X-ray pulsars, and pioneered new sensors for high resolution X-ray spectroscopy. He has participated in several satellite X-ray observatories, and is currently working on a new orbiting telescope in partnership with Japan that will be used to study matter very close to black holes.
This is The Reel Deal interview:
MW: Which science fiction films made an impact on you growing up?
RK: War of the Worlds, 1953. The Time Machine, 1960. 2001, Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back.
War of the Worlds was great, and really scary to me as a kid. It seemed so plausible. Meteors landing in remote places of the earth, no place was safe. The way it ended was so clever. The Martians could not have known about microbes and our immune systems that have evolved to protect us. Once the Martians breathed our air, they were doomed. This might actually protect us if real aliens visit earth. Wells was an English teacher, but read a lot and had a great, logical imagination.
The War of the Worlds, 1953.
MW: Yeah, well that's happening again with Time Machine. Reinventing logic, manipulating it.
RK: I loved Time Machine because it really sparked my imagination. What could be better than moving through time to see history or the future? Our life spans are so short and I wanted to be able to move through time to get to what I was interested in seeing. I had even built my own small model of the machine in the movie!
The Time Machine, 1960.
Back to the Future actually did a good job of showing the irrationality of this – if you interact with events in a different time, you change the future, and perhaps even your own existence. The theme is wonderful to contemplate and H.G. Wells once again made it seem like it might work.
MW: What of Stanley Kubrick's film?
RK: 2001 for its special effects, and the way it portrayed that unusual way in which we might come in contact with extraterrestrial intelligence besides our own. All other movies were conveying aliens as monsters, and here's 2001, and it just had this huge black block. The long scenes of the astronauts living in space were fantastic for the time, they still hold up to this day. Then there's the fact that there was very little dialogue, I liked that. Modern movies feel this need to constantly fill the time with sound and action. Kubrick's film, you just heard a lot of breathing. You were really there as an observer on board. There was a relatable quality to space travel, you were on the ship with them. It also taught us that all software has bugs! HAL 9000 was a computer and only as good as its software.
2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968.
MW: There's that notion that a real-world education links to the creeping suggestion of what's on screen. Shouldn't commercial science fiction be held responsible for that, in a way?
RK: Yeah. I think Star Wars reached so many people because it inspired the imagination about life elsewhere in the universe, and for the images it created. Space ships were not all shiny and plastic as you usually saw, but used and dirty. The realism was there. This was a world in which you could easily move through enormous spaces, so the machines that did this were necessarily grungy and beat up. And then there were all of the creatures that inhabited the galaxy. So many oddball creatures that had their own languages. And this idea of an intergalactic saloon was so cool.
Star Wars, 1977.
MW: Was there a special interest, speaking from your perspective and background, in seeing a film as promising to deliver on the level of attention to detail as Avatar, through all its anticipation?
RK: My only real interests in seeing the movie was that it was a science fiction film and in 3D. I expected on some level that the CGI would be impressive given the power of modern computers and techniques, and that’s what I wanted to see. The storyline was OK. I didn’t really care about that as a priority and none of my scientist friends cared much about that either - though they are certainly enlightened and concerned people when it comes to indigenous rights.
MW: So just how authentic, how plausible are the film's science fiction elements? Are we looking at something more imagined and metaphysical or can this stuff actually kind of steer in the direction of some form of reality?
RK: First, on a technical level, I was overwhelmed by the visual panorama of the film. Seeing those space travelers coming out of their little “coffins” as they approached Pandora in that scene with that long, stretching spaceship interior, with people floating around as far as you could see, I thought - this is it. Everything’s changed now, this is the future of movie making. The attention to detail was extraordinary, none of it looked hokey. In later scenes, little things like insects flying around between you and the action, those subtle touches. And they got the physics right for the motion of vehicles, whether they were landing to flying through the air. Looking through that lens, as a physicist, that’s my test of a good space-based sci-fi movie.
One thing my colleagues and I went back to were those choppers. At first it struck me as really clever. I wondered why we don’t have helicopters that look like this - that is, two big fans that can each tilt forward and backward for high maneuverability. The only answer seems to be that they would have a lot of extra mass that you would have to lift, and this is not practical.
MW: Did they ever look good. Classic Cameron, extracting that grungy military iconography.
Helicopters in full assault. Avatar, 2009.
RK: Sure, they looked cool. And very realistic.
MW: That level of aesthetic realism can fool logic.
RK: The Na’vi looked kind of “right” too – tall (due to reduced gravity) and very lean and athletic, characteristic of creatures that live in the wild. They have to compete with other animals.
The avatars themselves were another creation worth coming back to. The idea of “mixing” DNA of humans and the Na’vi all seemed plausible. The way an Avatar would collapse to the ground if the human was disturbed was a realistic way of showing that the human was still in control of what the Avatar did. That leads back to the idea that the subconscious mind is actually a conscious one on a different level, which certainly many physiologists have thought about over the last hundred years, and seems realistic when you think that sometimes dreams really do influence our conscious state. So, I think the film’s fictional components are not that far off from what we humans can imagine might be possible some day.
RK: The big thing that never sat with me, though, is the ending. The big climactic finish had the tough, mega-macho marine type, Colonel Miles Quatrich, getting skewered by Neytiri. I don’t think he was the real bad guy – it was Selfridge, the corporate leader on Pandora. He was the one laying down the policy and rejecting all of the intelligence provided by the scientists for the sake of the unobtainium [, the mineral they're mining]. Quaritch’s job was to protect the mission. He was certainly cavalier about life and obviously didn’t care about the blue people running around in the woods and their sacred trees, but in a broad sense, he was just following orders. The company was the real villain there. In the end, we see Parker Selfridge merely standing in line to get on a space ship back to the dying planet he came from. It wasn't justified!
MILITARY.... Colonel Miles Quatrich (Stephen Lang)
OR
....CORPORATION? Who's the aggressor? Parker Selfridge (Giovanni Ribisi)
MW: You touched on human rights a little before. Much of the film is politically charged throughout. Then it particularly culminates in the third act of the film, with Jake ultimately choosing sides and inciting this violent confrontation alongside the Na'vi people - and an ethical commentary on the corporate mindset that dominates a lot of our global policies, with the humans' exploitation of the unobtanium found on Pandora. Does that kind of straightforward criticism of politics in the narrative resonate with someone as yourself, working for the American government?
RK: I had no issue with the theme of the film. Yes, in some sense I work for the same government that forcibly relocated and killed Native Americans, but a government is by the people that are alive at the time. Still, Avatar does raise a good question about survival of species. What happens if somebody else is sitting on something you want, for example oil? Are we ever justified in just taking it by force? What if we really want it and they have enough? And at what point does civil behavior, like trading for it, turn into all out aggression to obtain what you want?
MW: Would you say we're as out of touch as Selfridge and those aggressors, how we evaluate situations that may or may not benefit us to thrive as a society?
RK: The history of humans, and even other animals is that you take what you need. In the case of humans, we often first reduce those sitting on it to something that is evil and despised, like “savages” – this shows up in Avatar. In essence, that is what we have done.
Human-lead air raid burns down Hometree. Avatar, 2009.
MW: Just a bit cynical.
RK: We're only now beginning to see with some setbacks in the later half of the 20th century, that maybe we should think about doing something else that is less violent to survive. My guess is that there are still dark days ahead for humans as resources eventually get consumed the way they do.
MW: The film is anything but approving of government's involvement in scientific progress. There's a clear disdain and send-up of industrialism.
RK: Yeah, the industrialists and the military security forces there outnumbered the scientists.
MW: Is there a sense of friction felt among scientists today?
RK: I thought the relationship between the characters played by Weaver and the others was truthful. Both parties clearly didn't like each other, but had to rely on one another to pursue what they wanted, and this case, anthropology and biology vs. unobtanium. They tried to be civilized and maintain control as long as possible, but failed when the decision was made to remove the indigenous by force.
MW: That's something that's reflective of the collective attitude today, then, when those two collided?
RK: Films tend to exaggerate in order to tell it in the span of a couple of hours. My experience wouldn't tell me there is anything quite so dramatic as this in our present scientific and industrial world, with people actually shooting to kill to prevent something happening. Still, there is something like this happening in our own scientific world today – global warming. Industrialists, and certainly their conservative defenders in broadcast “journalism” fear controls and limits on their enterprises, so they label the scientists as liberals and socialists that are supposedly making this stuff up in order to impose socialism over capitalism.
MW: Much like the dismissal of Sigourney Weaver's character, Dr. Augustine. Her concerns get ridden off, basically as a form of hopeless, tree-hugging hippie propaganda.
The motley crew of indigenous studies. Avatar, 2009.
RK: Unfortunately they're becoming successful in describing global warming as something that you choose to believe in or not. It's a way to dismiss the scientific process that is really at the heart of the issue. Real scientists don’t actually care if there is global warming or not....Well, they might in a long-term sense for the viability of the planet, but not in terms of right and wrong. Science doesn't care who’s right. Scientists just want to observe the world and come up with testable measurements of their ideas about how things work. When a new idea or theory comes along to explain the data, that's when they move on and run with it as long as it works.
MW: Is this dystopian vision of the future something we're heading towards as a government, with our current attitudes about scientific ethics?
RK: I don’t think so, but I do certainly worry about the health of the planet globally. Democracy, unfortunately, seems to be a luxury of affluent societies. As things become more difficult for people, democratic idealism gives way to greed. Humans have not been able keep from using up their environment to the point where it is too late to fix it. This is seen in smaller settings, like island communities, which often survive now by tourism and not their own balance of nature. It’s hard for me to see the earth as all nice and healthy in a thousand years unless humans wipe themselves out and the planet reverts to total equilibrium. Looking back, this was again the theme of The Time Machine.
MW: Like Wells had a time machine himself.
RK: Extraordinarily clever, ahead of his time. That message is still relevant.
* The opinions expressed by Dr. Kelley are his own and do not reflect NASA policy.
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