James Cameron has created a film that has bested his own Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991) and brought the fight to influential sci-fi masterworks Alien (1979) and Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back (1980). And that's saying something.
History tends to repeat itself. In the past, sailing ships embarked on intercontinental travel first out of curiosity then out of greed when it was discovered that money could be made, and lots of it. Flags were planted, territory claimed, and Pandora's Box got sprung. Today, sailing ships have been replaced by corporate flagships and though less blatant, the principles of territoriality and making money, and lots of it, remain.
Avatar takes place in 2154 AD, a time when humankind has unravelled the secrets of outer space travelling and has embarked upon interstellar exploration in spaceships. In fact, all of that is old news and technological advances have been made to serve the more mundane and immediate aspects of life, like making money, and lots of it.
Cameron, as director and co-writer, deployed a Chrichtonian storyline where the idealistic scientific world finds itself in strife against the evil corporate world. But he did so with a twist. The science is never explained properly. And how could it be? Or more importantly: why should it be? The film isn't about the science. In fact, it has nothing to do with it. The science is a mere vehicle for Cameron to introduce you to the world of Pandora.
Pandora is an Earth-like moon of a Jupiter-like planet. It's a place pristine and virgin, breathing with life, throbbing with vitality. It's a phantasmagoria bathed in hues of blues, purples, violets, whites, and greens. It's Paradise; it's the stuff of myth. And, indeed, in creating Pandora, Cameron must've had borrowed freely from mythological lore.
For starters, as in many a myth, trees play an important role in the lives of the Na'vi, the native people of Pandora. On Pandora grows the sacred Tree of Voices, which to the Na'vi forms an important part of the "soul" of the rainforest. It's where the Na'vi comes to pray and connect with their ancestors.
Which is akin to Australia's Aborigines mythology, which tells of a force that is left latent within the earth by ancestors and that is accessible to their descendants in the form of djang, stored-up primal power which collects in sacred places (e.g. a tree or rock). Djang allows the Aborigines to tap into their people's whole spiritual resource at an instant's notice. It can also be evoked by the rituals and dances which reunite the people with the ancestors. The Na'vi has something akin called Eywa and they can literally and physically tap into this power.
The ancients saw nature as full of divinity and the Na'vi too reveres the natural world. When the Hometree of the Omaticaya (the Na'vi clan central to the movie) got felt by human forces, you sense that tribe members are deeply grieved and that they have been wronged. Hometrees are these massive, massive trees that house the many Na'vi clans. It is where the clan members sleep, eat, work, and learn. Each Hometree is located above a rich deposit of unobtanium, an extremely valuable mineral (with a rather tacky name: unobtanium, unobtainable?), that will become the root cause of the strife between the human mining outfit RDA (the Resources Development Administration) and the Na'vi.
Linkages are made to the Maya and Norse mythologies, both of which recognized the existence of a World Tree (which, according to the Maya, held together the cosmos and, according to the Norse, linked the worlds of the gods, mankind, the giants, and the dead). The Na'vi have instead the Tree of Souls, a giant willow that, moon-wide, contains the highest concentration of Eywa, and which forms Pandora's heart and brain that controls the global biological network -- each being on Pandora is a synapse of a global nervous system, making the moon a living breathing entity in its own right. Which bears resemblance to what the Aborigines believe with their creation mythology Alcheringa or "Dreamtime", in that the land is as much part of the spiritual plane as the physical. A land, or so the Dreamtime stories go, where at the age at the world's dawn a giant ancestor race had walked the land.
The Na'vi people, a sentient hominoid species, are ten feet tall. They are fair and sensual, elfin and feline, bright blue of skin, and evoke resemblance to the Masai in their elegance and warrior culture. Cameron brings the Na'vi to life through ground-breaking photorealistic motion capture animation technology, and he's gone so far as to give them a unique language, much like JRR Tolkien did for his elves.
A key Na'vi character is Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), princess of the Omaticaya clan, who befriends Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and through whom we will get to know the Omaticaya. Sully is an ex-marine, and paraplegic, and who has taken up the offer of high pay to replace his slain scientist twin brother on Pandora as an avatar controller in the Avatar Program. He's offered the job as he has a genetically-compatible human's mind to his late sibling, a prerequisite for the expensive avatar technology to work.
The Avatar Program is a creation of the RDA, the largest single non-governmental organization in human space, which has identified a method to mix Na'vi DNA with human DNA to create hybrid bodies called avatars. Humans can control these avatars through a telepathic link. This allows humans to explore the alien inhospitable world and to blend in.
With their avatars, botanist Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver, yes of course Sigourney Weaver) and biologist Norm Spellman (Joel Moore) are going to the wall in their effort of identifying what makes the Omaticaya tick, until Sully arrives. In avatar mode, Sully is physically transformed. To his delight, he can walk again. But after the first tentative steps into the alien world, he's also mentally transformed, and as he gathers intelligence he becomes more and more attracted to the Na'vi and their way of life, while the corporation, represented by fierce Chief of Security Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang) and ruthless SecFor administrator Parker Selfridge (Giovanni Ribisi), are growing more and more impatient.
Humans are portrayed as the bad guys, and the Na'vi as more humane than the humans themselves. Which is by design. Cameron portrays the Na'vi as humans should be ideally, who are then juxtaposed against humans as is. And this is what underpins the movie, and it's powerful, what in the context of today's world where everything seems to go down the drain. The dreamscape imagery only amplifies this visceral emotion. And seen in this light, Avatar is not only a sci-fi actioner, it's also a fable.
When I took in Avatar (in 2D, but I may see it again in 3D), sitting in the row directly behind me was a bunch of boys, kids really, with voices barely broken, heckling and being a general nuisance. They weren't bored or anything, but, and it takes one to know one -- boys being boys -- it really is just their defence mechanism against strong emotions springing into action.
Avatar is rumoured to have been fourteen years and $350 million in the making. They were well spent indeed.
(Running time: 162 minutes)
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