Thread: Na'vi anatomy
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Old November 11 2013, 02:49 PM   #14
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Re: Na'vi anatomy

Tosk wrote: View Post
Reverend wrote: View Post
Indeed, the fact that we do see the Pandoran equivalent to primates and they have six limbs and four eyes is very suspicious indeed.
Yeah, but did you notice how the arms were attached to the trunk with a single upper-arm? There's part of your missing link right there. As the mammals have evolved, they ended up with two arms instead of four. That "Pandora Monkey" is the middle step, with two arms on each side that join up part-way.
I had a similar thought and if you look at the primate equivalent lemur looking thing I mentioned, the four arms are pretty much the only basic difference. I was going to mention that the Na'vi appear to be the only species I notices with hair, but as you can see this thing has a little downy ridge. It even has two eyes without so much of a vestige of the smaller pair of eyes. So it looks like the Na'vi aren't the only species that are drastically different and where there's two, there's probably a whole family of species.

Still strikes me as a little odd though. Yes I know you can't make direct 1:1 terrestrial comparisons, but you can apply certain patterns of evolution. Specifically that for as long as there have been life on Earth, it's been divided up amongst fairly narrow lineages. For example the reason why we mammals share a basic anatomy with fish, reptiles and birds is because we evolved from the same species that first crawled out of the sea. We've inherited all the evolutionary "choices" up until that point and built on them. It's why we have five fingers and not three or eight because that's how many bone digits said fish had.

So to my mind, for the Na'vi and what looks like a member of the same family (order? kingdom?) of species to be so divergent from the rest, they either split off from the other large animals *very* early, or their ancestors have been tampered with somehow.

Ultimately it's just a little odd that Cameron introduced what looks like a deliberate inconsistency, I have to wonder if he has a story idea that'll compliment it.

GalaxyX wrote: View Post
I don't get the praise this movie gets.

Boring plot, derivative story (reminded me of a cross between Ferngully: The Last Rainforest, and Dances with Wolves). The characters were cardboard cutouts. It was fucking preachy to the max, and the supposed highlight of the movie (the purdy graphics) seriously made me feel like I was watching someone else play an extended session of Crysis Warhead at full blown maxed out graphical settings (I have a GTX 690 on a 27" monitor, so I know what that looks like )

Way overrated IMO.
And I don't get why people get so bent out of shape over it. It was a highly archetypal story straight out of Joseph Campbell's monomyth, well acted and well presented. Nobody anywhere, not the critics who praised it or even the people who made it claimed it was Shakespeare. Wasn't trying to be. It was just a very well done *fun* adventure film of a sort that hardly ever gets made any more. Mostly it just known as the first (and AFAIK so far pretty much only) film to do 3D well. Mostly, it was just refreshing so see a film with some colour!

OK so it had an environmental message in there too. So what? It's more that most blockbuster films can say and it's a message that served the story, not the other way around. Also, it's hardly irrelevant because this kind of crap it still going on right now and hardly anyone even notices.

Like a lot of simple adventure films, what held my attention beyond the opening credits was the seemingly well thought out and reasonably detailed world Cameron came up with. Not unlike Star Wars in that regard.

Mister Fandango wrote: View Post
Sure, you can claim a starfish is similar to humans...
Uh...where exactly did I claim this? I'm pretty sure I said the exact opposite; that they're completly anatomically dissimilar. You'd have to compare the DNA to prove humans are related to starfish--which, before anyone else decides to misinterpret me, yes of course they are. The point being that the point of divergence between humans and starfish is in the order of billions of years while the divergence between humans and other mammals is more like tens of millions. I'm also not say that the Na'vi and other Pandoran species are quite *that* far removed, but the fact remains that a human has more in common with a coelacanth than a Na'vi with a direhorse.

Last edited by Reverend; November 11 2013 at 03:04 PM.
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