Avatar, Exoskeletons, and the Disabled
The more I watch Avatar this way (I mean thinking about disability), the more I am amazed at how many things I didn't notice when I first saw it. One of those things is that exoskeleton thing, which I have now learned is called an AMP suit. I was watching that scene with Jake meeting Quaritch again, and it suddenly hit me that here's Jake in a beat-up, stripped-down wheelchair, while able-bodied Quaritch is in the suit, a machine that effectively makes him super-able-bodied. And I thought, why isn't Jake in a suit of some kind? If they have these AMP suits on Pandora, they should have a version for paraplegics available on Earth, shouldn't they? Well, guess what -- they do. For real, and right now, although they are horribly expensive. The filmmakers would probably say that Jake can't have one for the same reason he can't have corrective surgery, which is that the VA won't pay for it, but hey, it's the future, and by then the cost should have come down, right? He could maybe have a stripped-down, beat-up, secondhand one, couldn't he?
Well, my main point is that even though I didn't know these things already exist, plenty of other people who did were probably asking themselves the same question. Incidentally, there are a lot of YouTube videos of the things.
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