I noticed what is (to me anyway) a major flaw in Avatar..

[Fumesucker]

The Colonel in Avatar says right at the beginning of the flick that Pandora is a low gravity planet, in the weight lifting scene.

And yet no one moves like it's lower gravity than Earth, even 3/4 G would be definitely noticeable in the way people move, 2/3 or lower would be blatantly obvious.

And a minor nit, the sound of the helicopters wasn't right to me, they used ducted fans one purpose of which is to greatly reduce tip effects which is what mostly produces the "whop whop" sound of regular open bladed helicopters.. Oh, and the blades turned too slowly for their size too, ducted fans are high rpm devices.

All in all I really enjoyed the flick but the low G thing bugged me through the whole thing.

[phantom power]

1. Nobody ever does that right...

except maybe Stanley Kubrick. And he was doing zero g, not low g. It always bugs me, but I admit that I don't know how I'd make it look right, either. Pretty hard to fake.

[Fumesucker]

2. I think something like 70% of the movie was CGI..

Would have been no harder to do the CGI right than wrong..

The zero G sequence at the beginning was not bad..

[phantom power]

3. True, but the actual characters were motion-capture, weren't they?

[Fumesucker]

4. I believe so..

Still, it would have been not that difficult to alter the motion capture to simulate the low G effects, at least not difficult in the sense of the overall level of technical wizardry of the film.

Thing was, it was a throwaway line in the film, it's just one that would grate on the true geek's sensibilities. :evilgrin:

[Occulus]

16. I disagree...

The physical movements necessary in low gravity environments require very different motion timing vs. full Earth gravity. This is one of the reasons segments of "Apollo 13" were filmed on the Vomit Comet; when using CG with motion capture, simulating a low- or no-gravity environment is nearly impossible. It almost has to be the real deal.

I'm willing to forgive that, because it's just so. damn. hard. to do, even with motion capture. They could have made the characters a little more "bouncy", for lack of a better word, to get halfway there, but it just wouldn't have ended up looking right (hair, for example, would have been waaay off). It's better to do an "okay, low-grav, and we'll establish that by altering their anatomy" rather than trying to actually simulate it.

I suppose they could have done all the character motion capture underwater, but that would have ended up being impractical and you would definitely have seen artifacts of the process in the final product from using that method.

[Orrex]

17. Maybe in the future, 3/4 equals 1?

NO gravity differential at all, then!

[MrModerate]

5. Could also have been an artistic choice . . .

In that the low-grav motion would have been distracting to the audience.

Similar to the choice with the Navi (where's does the damn apostrophe go? I'm feeling too lazy to look it up) as bipedal humanoids when there's no reason in the world for an independently evolved species to mimic the human pattern. But . . . if the Navi had been pentagonally symmetric creatures, f'rinstance, it would have been much harder to establish an emotional connection with them.

[Fumesucker]

6. Then why put the line in about it being a low gravity planet?

It was a throwaway line that had nothing to do with advancing the plot and it was clearly not a low gravity planet.

It's a small thing but one of those that hurt the suspension of disbelief for some of us.

[lazarus]

7. actually

it's possible that it was a low gravity planet, but the Na'Vi were so heavy (wasn't there something up with their skeletal structure?) they appeared to be in "normal" gravity. That would explain the large flying animals, for instance.

[Fumesucker]

10. The weight wouldn't make any difference..

Remember Galileo and his experiments at the Leaning Tower of Pisa, a ten pound weight falls no faster than a one pound weight.

Watch some of the old videos of astronauts on the Moon, with their suits on they weighed much more than human normally does and yet their movements were blatantly different than an unencumbered human on Earth. Now imagine what their movements would have looked like in a pressurized dome on the Moon, they would have been leaping like gazelles.

I'm just a picky geek about stuff like this, 99.9% of moviegoers would never notice..

[lazarus]

11. true

hadn't thought that through. My real science quibble was with the fact that all the fauna on Pandora had six limbs except the Na'Vi.

[Fumesucker]

12. That's a good point..

I've only seen it once and wasn't paying attention to that..

Funny how we all have different things we pick up on..

[MrModerate]

8. And I see where you're coming from, but . . .

Throwaway lines are just that -- the whole film isn't meant to turn on them. Frankly I didn't notice when the character said that, and my appreciation of the movie was not impeded at all.

My guess? They made a mistake. The line got into the script, or it came out of rehearsal, whatever, whatever, and they overlooked the fact that it had implications that they weren't going to address. In a project of Avatar's scope, I'd be shocked if there weren't a few goofs. Over time, I suspect we'll be seeing more such mistakes brought to our attention.

Alternatively, they *did* need the line about low gravity to justify banshee-flight (which sure as heck wouldn't work in earth's gravity -- they'd just fall out of the sky) as well as the floating islands, mile-long root systems, etc., etc., and *then* made the decision to not simulate low-gravity ambulation. Again making it an artistic choice.

Has anyone asked Cameron that you know of?

[Fumesucker]

9. No one else has even noticed that I know of..

So no, I doubt anyone has asked Cameron.

[SheilaT]

13. Last year there was a movie

which took place entirely on the Moon, and it made me crazy the entire way through that it was obviously filmed on Earth.

[Orrex]

14. Was that "Moon," by any chance?

I've seen people tripping over themselves to declare that it's the most best science fiction film of all time ever forever!!!!!!!!!!!!1!

That's funny about the gravity, though.

[SheilaT]

15. Yep, that's it.

There were several other glaring flaws, but the gravity thing had me pulled from the possibility of believing it all the way through.