Cunnel Quaritch

Heap Big Numbnuts

Just so we're on the same page, I'm referring to the character, not the actor. I don't know if this will be Stephen Lang's favorite role when he gets around to making a final summing-up of his career, but he, Stephen Lang, was certainly good in this role.

Cunnel Quaritch, on the other hand, is a complete numbnuts.

Proposition 1: The Navi have a single target they must defend. It's not just a high-value target, it's a maximum-value target.

Proposition 2: The Navi have no means of defending said maximum-value target from orbital bombardment.

Proposition 3: Cunnel Quaritch has at his disposal a groovy VTOL shuttle that is capable of not just exo-atmospheric flight, but actual orbital operations.

Proposition 4: Dropping a suitably large inert mass (say, a bulldozer) on the maximum-value target from orbit may not destroy it the first time around, but if you repeat it about 20 or 30 times, the job can eventually be considered done.

Proposition 5: There's more than enough cheddar in the ground to pay for all of this.

So what does Quaritch do?

Well, I guess it wouldn't be much of a movie if they did it the the way I think they should have. It would be more like the closing scenes of Metaluna in the movie This Island Earth, with those doggone Zagon meteors smashing everything flat, and we'd have to listen to Barber's Adagio for Strings as the Navi come to the belated understanding that sometimes even the fanciest flying dragon is no match for a seventy-ton bulldozer traveling at oh, say, 20,000 miles per hour. Physics be physics, man, whether you're flying the Hero Dragon or not.

My point is that once Quaritch and The Company (was it Weyland-Yutani, as in Aliens?) had decided that matters had degenerated into a "shit-fight", Quaritch made one serious operational blunder after another.

German generals made a sort of second career after World War Two at blaming everything on Hitler. It was Hitler's fault the British Army got away at Dunkirk. It was Hitler's fault the Luftwaffe was unable to subdue the RAF. It was Hitler's fault that the Red Army handed them their hats at Stalingrad. It was Hitler's fault that nobody could come up with a good answer to the USAAF and RAF bomber offensives. It was Hitler's fault the cream of the German Army got plowed into the topsoil at Kursk. It was Hitler's fault that German radar research was so bad they never realized that the British were using high-frequency centimetric radar against German U-boats. Of course, this wasn't all Hitler's fault, but when you've got an opportunity to offload blame on someone that nobody will stand up for and defend, you take it. (If I were Iraqi, for example, I'd blame my fallen arches on Saddam Hussein, and who would argue otherwise?)

But in the case of Avatar, Quaritch owns all the command mistakes.

People occasionally accuse me of siding with the Company in the movie. That's not necessarily true - my own feelings on the matter are complex, but somewhere in amongst them is the understanding that the Company could give me electricity and the Navi could not, and that's a pretty powerful argument in favor of collaboration. But in any event, my real point is that contrary to the "life lessons" people think they've taken away from the movie, naturalistic spiritual harmony counts for exactly squat in the face of extremely high kinetic energies.