Avatar

"Avatar" is James Cameron's newest film, since disappearing post Titanic. Cameron has a history of producing good scy-fy flicks from the original "Terminator" and the ground breaking "Aliens" and now "Avatar". I don't think that "Avatar" is quite as ground breaking for the current road scy-fy exists on as "Aliens" was for in 1979, I do think that "Avatar" prevails in some sense of the word over "Alien" because it probably creates a new road for the genre. The movie is really more epic than anything we have seen since "Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring", but different because all of the leg work for that movie as far as the world and languages had already been developed by J.R.R. Tolkien when he wrote the books. "Avatar" is unlike anything that has ever been tackled before which is developing a world, like the ones we would imagine in our minds if "Avatar" had been a novel, a real speakable language, and people. This movie came with so much hype, that the theme song for this movie might as well have been Public Enemy's "Don't Believe the Hype". Luckily for Cameron the hype was all very real. The real budget for the movie is questionable; some $150 million dollars for marketing, previously that number alone was a large budget for a big blockbuster movie. From the very minute the movie starts it is very different, the specially designed cameras were used to the fullest of their capabilities. Cameron started this movie in 1994, it was released in 2009 that’s a lot of development time. Cameron solicited the help of a linguistics professor from the University of Southern California to help develop the language of the people of the fictional planet, Pandora. So the world proper, Pandora. The world is full of beautiful backdrops, it lights up at night-literally glowing, and the people of Pandora the Na'Vi's have a connection with the world and glow also. Cameron created creatures, vegetation, and landscape that all feels just perfect for the world. The world is massive; it exists on the ground and in the air. The Na’Vi’s and every creature on Pandora have a connection to the planet. The film is very much about the world being a living, breathing, sentient creature that is personified through its inhabitants. The Na'Vi are a people that are very conscious of all of the decisions that they make including taking the life of another creature to survive. Every moment that a Na'Vi is on screen everything that they do is very heart felt and warm. On the surface they are savage trying to survive but beneath that they are everything that we strive to be, compassionate, unconditionally loving, and thoughtful. This is very much a movie about what we can all strive to be, part of the cycle instead of just consumers. The Na'Vi don't live luxurious lifestyles with extravagant things and food but they survive and are happy doing just that. After all of that, you would think this movie was about a bunch of aliens and at the core of the movie it is about aliens, or at least aliens to our planet. In the movie we, the humans, are aliens on Pandora. There is a faction of humans trying to mine something out of Pandora for monetary gain, and a group of scientists, our main human characters, that are trying to learn about the Na'Vi and integrate our culture in to theirs and vise a versa. The films star, Sam Worthington, is a paraplegic marine whos brother was one of the scientists going to Pandora but has died. The scientists have what can best be described as external bodies, or avatars, that they inhabit via some sort of machine. So the scientists lay in a tube, get stuff hooked up to their heads, and have control of these avatars that are molded in the image of the Na'Vi. Jake Sully(Worthington) gets brought in to the picture because he is a twin to his brother who had an avatar developed for him, so Sully's DNA matches that of the avatar and he is able to control. Sully is charged with the mission of infiltrating the Na'Vi learning about their culture and way of life so that the marines and some private corporation can get the Na'Vi to give up this natural resource that is worth lots of money. During this Sully falls in love with the Na'Vi and Pandora, war ensues and that’s kind of how the movie goes down. My discussion of the movie doesn't do it justice, I haven't read one that does. It's epic, it's a love story on so many levels, it has cool war scenes, amazing action scenes, but above all this is a story that may never be told again on this magnitude. Avatar is a movie that everyone should see, it was one of the best movies of the year, probably top 5 but I feel safe saying top 10. Good viewing. JP