Avatar — James Cameron
Rating: 5/5
I’m not sure which of three Avatar movies I should review:
- The heroic tale of the disabled Marine corporal who is sent to spy on and betray the native Na’vi aliens on the distant world of Pandora in the service of a rapacious, soulless corporation. He eventually learns to understand and love the alien people, finally becoming both their liberator and truly one of them at the same time.
- The horribly tragic story of the death of humanity, desperately seeking vital resources at exorbitant cost from an unimaginably distant, completely hostile world, only to be betrayed by one of their own after diplomacy, nonlethal combat and psychological warfare have all failed to appeal to the alien savages. In the final scene, the heroic and loyal colonel confronts the traitor, after the humans, who could obviously easily destroy all the Na’vi if they truly wanted to, are being soundly defeated as a result of their restrained, humane warfare. He asks the traitor the cutting question “how does it feel to betray your race?” But the traitor is too far gone to even speak at this point, and just hisses like an animal as he continues his work of selling out his species and destroying humanity’s last hope for survival, condemning billions to freeze in the dark back on the mother planet.
- The epic saga of a round of Starcraft 2 gone bad, as the Terrans squander a huge early tech and resource lead by trying to overexpand and create a secondary base, allowing the other side to tech to air and eventually zerg them down via an ambush in an unexplored area of the map. If you’ve ever wondered how massed Mutalisks can take down a Yamato, this is the how-to video. Message to Terran player: Grow a pair. And build more Ghosts.
I’m pretty sure James Cameron intended movie #1, which is kind of a shame, as the others would have been a bit more fresh from the perspective of plot originality (and let’s face it, this was a better Starcraft movie than any conceivable Starcraft movie could ever be). Fortunately, the somewhat formulaic plot of movie #1 was still executed quite well, with decent acting and truly amazing cinematography and visual effects. I saw it in IMAX 3D, which I highly recommend to anyone else who sees the movie. The 3D is unobtrusive for the most part, but really adds to the immediacy.
Avatar is also hard science fiction, which is very unusual and very impressive for science fiction movies these days. By “hard” science fiction I mean science fiction that sticks very closely to known physical laws as far as possible. The space travel is sublight, with cryogenic stasis used for the passengers due to mass and life support issues. Although “unobtainium”, the room-temperature superconductor that is the main reason for the human presence on Pandora, may not truly exist, it probably could, and its presence could explain the “floating mountains” on Pandora that otherwise seem wildly farfetched. Really the only piece of technology that has no reasonably extrapolated physical basis is the projection unit that projects human consciousness into an Avatar body. It looks like an MRI machine, but apparently operates on some sort of psychic basis.
In Avatar, Jake Sully, a Marine corporal whose legs were paralyzed in combat, replaces his dead brother on a mission to Pandora. The brother was a science PhD who had trained for years to be one of the Avatars — teleoperators of hybrid human/Na’vi bodies who were supposed to study, communicate with and build ties with the Na’vi population of Pandora, a near-human-habitable moon of a gas giant in the Alpha Centauri system.
In his Avatar body, Jake has the use of his legs again, but on his first trip out into the wilds he gets separated from his group by the attack of a wild animal and is lost in the bush. He is rescued by Neytiri, a young Na’vi girl and the daughter of the clan leader. She wants to kill him but decides to take him back to their home, where — although he is distrusted — the leaders are intrigued enough by his “warrior” background to try to educate him in their ways, under Neytiri’s tutelage.
Jake then learns the Na’vi way of life, one of oneness with nature, as he learns to use the biological apparatus all Pandoran life possesses to commune with horse-analogues and pterodactyl-like flying mounts the humans nickname “Banshees”. At the same time, the corporation in charge of resource extraction on Pandora is using the information Jake is learning to plan a relocation of the Na’vi away from their home, which happens to sit on a gigantic unobtainium deposit.
When push comes to shove, the Avatar crew, including Jake, switch sides, helping the Na’vi fight the human encroachment and protect the unique planetary network that all Pandoran life partakes in.
The worldbuilding here is fantastic. The alien landsape, flora, fauna, and natives all look and seem completely real, and the artistic vision represented in the portrayal of Pandora is nothing short of staggering. Details of alien physiology are consistent in many cases, and you can make interesting speculations based on the species observed as to what evolutionary paths the Na’vi took compared with other species in their world.
The human technology, also, is extremely well-realized and very believable. Computer technology is ubiquitous and used casually in very sophisticated ways, military hardware looks advanced but operates on believable principles — even the mining hardware and the starship that starts the movie off were obviously thought through in painstaking detail.
Although the movie is over two and a half hours long, it doesn’t feel like it. It’s well-paced and well-acted, and there is always something compelling happening on screen. If you don’t have some sort of racial or political axe to grind, and you like science fiction at all, it’s one of the most enjoyable experiences you’re likely to have at the theater for quite some time.