2. We're then asked to believe that there's a particular area where radio communications and whatnot don't work.
Radio seemed to work fine in the area. The flux just seemed to interfere with navigation equipment.
Sounds like an awfully convenient plot device. Actual navigation systems either work by radio from well-known beacons (e.g., GPS), by looking at visible landmarks (e.g., celestial navigation), or by carefully tracking your motion from the last known-good landmark (dead reckoning). Maybe future-human-tech has some totally other form of navigation, but it would be entirely sensible if they deployed GPS-ish satellites around Pandora and for the electromagnetic actions of the plant-network to screw with those communications. But then it should also screw with the avatar command and control channel.
Only thing I can think of here is that they didn't bring any.
That's as good a guess as any. If we've got the unspecified ability to travel at relativistic speeds, then we've presumably got some seriously good tech for storing and deploying energy. Any sufficiently dense energy source might as well be a bomb. Which brings me to...
5. Unobtanium? At least they're honest that it's just a thinly veiled plot device.
Sure, it's a standard term we use to joke about unspecified, rare, expensive materials. We never found out anything at all about what properties this particular unobtanium has, save that it's worth a whole lot of money. (There's an
Avatar Wiki that claims its value is as a superconductor, also explaining those floating islands, see also the apparently canonical
Pandorapedia).
My only guess here is that James Cameron was wanting the sci-fi tech level feel more like Aliens and less like Terminator.
Yeah, but we know better. When we've got unmanned aerial drones used by today's military, it's safe to assume we'll have them in the future. The canonical (?)
Pandorapedia article on the scorpion gunship claims that UAVs didn't pan out on Earth, leading us back to human pilots.
4. So, like, the whole planet is sentient?
Though that does raise another question, how did the planet wrangle all the wildlife to attack at the end?
Exactly. The whole movie hinges on that particular point.
And what sort of evolutionary process would yield cross-species compatible network jacks?
Good question. Only thing I can come up with here is that the linking pieces are like an organ shared among species. All mammals for example share very similar biology while being very distinct creatures. Overall, I did like the use of it, and had noticed the warriors using it to link to their horses before the movie really brought it up.
I agree it makes sense for mammalian critters to share similar structures, but I don't see how those structures could have provided any sort of evolutionary advantage. If anything, you could imagine the co-evolution of some really nasty parasites that take advantage of that network port.
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