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The audience explores the lush landscape through the eyes of Jake Scully, a mercenary flying in from an eco-devastated Earth now devoid of everything green. After a journey of five years, nine months, and 22 days, Jake and a troop of jarheads arrive in Pandora to help a soulless intergalactic company claw a rare mineral, unobtainium, from the ground. A glimpse of the strip-mining pit shows what’s at stake. If the company has its way, this alien world will become a hellish dustbowl just like Jake’s home planet.
The year is 2154, and advanced biotechnology is serving the cause of industrial espionage. Jake is given an avatar, a second self that looks and acts like a Na’vi, Pandora’s indigenous humanoids. The avatar is ten feet tall and blue, with zebra stripes and phosphorescent freckles. He has the body and limbs of an earthling, the ears of a hippo, and the tail of a lion. He moves with the grace of a cat and the strength of a droid.
His mission is to infiltrate the Na’vi culture, to learn their ways, and to share that intelligence with the company so it can move the Na’vi off prime mining terrain—by persuasion .. or force.
Jake-the-avatar’s guide is a female Na’vi named Neytiri, and their first trips through the forest are a delight. Jake is like a newborn, seeing everything for the first time in a world that is truly wonderful.
Massive trees, epiphytes, and ferns, apparently supported by earth-like photosynthesis, form a base palette of green. Other plants shine constantly with bioluminescence, and still others glow when touched. Towering spirals of delicate leaves in graduated shades of orange behave like tropical sensitive plants, retracting at a touch. Thick, long, Tarzan vines drape from great chunks of rock that float in the sky, a weirdly dislocated bit of geography called the Hallelujah Mountains.
Then there are the animals, odd Frankenstein creatures that display characteristics of terrestrial fauna in astonishing variations and combinations. Insects appear as radiant flying things. Shiny, purple, cheetah-like creatures run in dangerous packs. Herds of giant triceratops-rhinos, with hammerhead skulls and crests of colored feathers, crash through the underbrush. A solitary armadillo-beetle-pit bull menaces with enormous pincer-like jaws. Soaring pterodactyl dragons are tamed, and ridden, by the Na’vi. This fairyland comes alive further with the depiction of the Na’vi culture. Members of Pandora’s aboriginal race honor Mother Nature and move through pristine spaces as lightly as Tolkien elves. Their language, created especially for this project by a linguist, contributes to the portrait of sentient beings, some of whom also speak charmingly accented English. (The few earthlings who have learned Na’vi also sound like non-native speakers, another nice touch of realism.)
After the getting-to-know-you overture, though, the story stalls. A mundanely simple plot just doesn’t provide much fuel: Boy meets girl, her world rocks him, he’s faced with a life-altering choice. It’s really quite stunning that Cameron didn’t invest more resources into developing the narrative, which pales in comparison with the obsessively thought out visual components.
It doesn’t help that most of Cameron’s characters are cartoon stereotypes—the rabid military commander and his mindless grunts, the slime ball industrialist, the tree-hugging botanist (Sigourney Weaver), a heroic female kamikaze helicopter pilot, and the generally noble Na’vi savages.
The tale is a mishmash of subthemes lifted from sagas of cowboys and Indians, spy thrillers, Star Trek, Star Wars, The Matrix, Sigourney Weaver’s work in the Alien saga three decades ago, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Apocalypse Now, and 9/11 news clips. The much-trumpeted 3D projection is more of a marketing gimmick than anything. People and objects that pop in and out of the foreground, half formed, are often annoyingly intrusive. As the film wears on, the black-framed 3D glasses start to feel heavy and uncomfortable. So go see this film for the gloriously imagined Pandora, the mesmerizing Na’vi, and all the special effects. They are the first-rate results of great talent and time and financial backing. But don’t expect a tale that’s out of this world.
-A.R. Williams
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Comments
Dec 20, 2009 9AM #
We have had the ability to distance ourselves from Nature. We have concrete, cars, roads, lights, steel, TV, internet. We have forgotten. We have taken for granted, what was given to us for free. Can we put a price on a magnificent sunset? Can you exchange it for something else? No.
Avatar didn't wake me up, because I was already awake. But I kept praying while walking out of the cinema, hoping that all of the viewers got it. That they understood that we are allowed and have to reconnect and respect what was given to us.
In the movie, they define the human race as primitive, greedy for resources, money. Having no care for what they're missing out now.
There is something deeper than cash, and power. There is us, our nature, our connection to this amazing world that we're in, the animals, the biodiversity, the trees, the oceans, the continents, and the cultures.
The message conveyed by this motion picture is priceless.
Dec 20, 2009 9AM #
We have had the ability to distance ourselves from Nature. We have concrete, cars, roads, lights, steel, TV, internet. We have forgotten. We have taken for granted, what was given to us for free. Can we put a price on a magnificent sunset? Can you exchange it for something else? No.
Avatar didn't wake me up, because I was already awake. But I kept praying while walking out of the cinema, hoping that all of the viewers got it. That they understood that we are allowed and have to reconnect and respect what was given to us.
In the movie, they define the human race as primitive, greedy for resources, money. Having no care for what they're missing out now.
There is something deeper than cash, and power. There is us, our nature, our connection to this amazing world that we're in, the animals, the biodiversity, the trees, the oceans, the continents, and the cultures.
The message conveyed by this motion picture is priceless.
Dec 20, 2009 9AM #
This movie was a true pleasure, not just for the visual part but because of the message of what we here on Earth have somehow missed when it comes to the importance and beauty of nature. The movie never dragged for me, never felt long and I never noticed the 3D glasses. The classic characters are unfortunately all too classic (or stereotype as put in the article) due to the fact that the destruction of our planet is all too real and there really are "rabid military commanders" battling it out with "tree huggers" unfortunately and we truly are heading down a path that can lead to our planet no longer having green on it.
Dec 20, 2009 9AM #
cultures are unique and they must be preserved, that’s for sure, but in this age of globalization we also know that some universal standards apply because is on them that we get interconnected by trading ideas, goods and services that benefit the entire system, the flow of trade can be both ways but not necessarily, it can also go like a stream from one point to another to another… in the case of Pandora we humans go for some valuable resource to disturb that world, however by the year 2154 I can’t barely believe we’re so naïve to go all over again such a fundamental mistake, I mean to find a world like Pandora is a gold mine in itself, I mean it is like the case to make a profit of the potential of the undeveloped cultures of today’s earth, china and India are emerging, and with them another alike developed countries, this last phenomenon made poor people less bad hit my the last recession, this same potential I see in Pandora, one instance; it was not the gold of Moctezuma and Atahualpa that it was a trillionth the value of Today’s America what make worth the conquest of new territories, I just think that more than a century later we’ll know a lot about how to bring all cultures together into a universalization being brought for us or to us from the cultures of our reality.
Dec 20, 2009 9AM #
I do not know who A.R. Williams is, but it appears most of us are wrong about this movie. As i recall from my learnings there are theames to tales and stories, these themes are there to teach us somthing. Do you think the theme of Avatar has a lesson for all of us ??????
Dec 20, 2009 9AM #
Avatar is the sci-fi version of that excellent movie DANCES WITH WOLVES. I prefer the movie with Kevin Costner, it is more credible. Avatar is complete predictible since the beginning.
(feel free to make the necessary corrections)
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