Quote:
Originally Posted by SebC
Actually, in a way I found Pandora to be rather un-believable. The mountains aren't subject to gravity, yet the Na'vi are incredibly humanoid.
Unless our form is really close to ideal for a sentient being, and therefore likely to recur without much variation?
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The mountains are subject to gravity, you notice how the waterfalls flow down to the surface. The moutains are floating in sort of a planetary legrange point with a heavy dose of something messed up with the magnetic field due to the composition of the cores of those mountains.
The Na'vi were made to look humanoid for audiences to relate to them. That's simple and I can live with that. In fact all the flora and fauna all share recognizable traits of earth plants and animals. Realistically, perhaps instead of being carbon based, everything would be a wierd silicon based life form and we wouldn't have plants and trees, etc. but this is a movie made for entertainment obviously. People need a point of reference. The whole reason Cameron waited for so long was so that proper technology would develop to capture human faces and emotions and translate that to 3D forms That was the point of the whole movie and the crux of his original idea. This is for audiences to relate to them, their eyes, their movements, their acting, etc. Heck, in Transformers, Lorenzo DiBonaventure was the one that ruled that all the Transformers had to have mouths because he thought audiences could not relate to characters without mouths. Personally, I think he's a ###### and Cameron could have gone out further on a limb.
As for why everything is earth-like, you could also argue that it uses the common exo-biological reason for why most sci-fis have humanoid aliens with earth like plants and animals and that is because they were all seeded by a progenitor alien race at the beginning of their evolution. That fits in with the theme of the deeper, alien, planetary-wide intelligence that seems millions of years older and beyond the understanding of the primitive Na'vi who translate the understanding of the planet's nervous system and intelligence into a form of tribal religion. I believe Cameron said that the entire planet was supposed to be an organic planetary computer system.