Avatar

James Cameron didn’t spend three-hundred million dollars on a fresh story or good actors. He spent three-hundred million creating a beautiful, luminescent natural world that we should all feel bad destroying with capitalism.

The film opens up with a bird’s-eye-view of Pandora, a magnificent new world, explained as the moon of some other large planet. Quickly we realize why Pandora is valuable: unobtainium. A fake resource that the U.S. seems to want a lot of. There are references to a green-less earth back home, destroyed by America’s rape of the planet. The Army has established a base and a mining corporation partners with them to exploit Pandora for her precious unobtainium.

Enter Jake Sully, an ex-jarhead who lost his legs in combat. His brother was part of a project to make peace with the Na’vi, the native blue tall people of Pandora. Sigourney Weaver is the head scientist of the project and she’s not too happy to have another dumb gun on the planet to replace Sully’s now dead Ph.D. brother.

Weaver’s character, the treehugging and aptly named, Grace, has grown hybrid clones of the Na’vi with human DNA, and has found a way to mind meld with them. That’s where the title, Avatar, comes in. These copies can be inhabited “wirelessly” by people in coffin-like containers. Jake plugs in and is amazed to be able to walk and run again, and even have blue-people sex.

Then the story turns Fern Gully, er, I mean spy-falls-in-love-with-the-natives-and-changes-sides. Jake is sent on a mission by the grunting, white-haired Army commander to try to convince the Na’vi to move out of their tree village that sits on a large quantity of unobtainium. Jake goes, falls in love with blue princess, and conflict ensues.

Like I said, the plot isn’t too fresh or even interesting. But the world is. Pandora is a rain-forest by day and a fiber-optic glow show by night. It is a romanticization of the natural world that we have, a fossil of what may have once been on Earth. The Na’vi, blue people, are intimately connected with their world. I don’t mean that metaphorically. They can actually connect with some kind of organic internet that “flows,” like The Force, between all living things by taking their pony tails with nerves and attaching themselves to different animals and trees.

The Na’vi culture is an indigenous mixture with Native American leanings. They are a symbolic culture whose destruction Westerners mourn because of careless colonization and exploitation.

When Jake’s peace mission seems to fail, the caricature Army man decides to hit the massacre button. Cameron is unflinching in his accusations of America. Massacres like Wounded Knee, Sand Creek, and My Lai, are something that we tend to amnesiate into the academic periphery of our collective memory. But Cameron won’t let us forget.
The Army man goes painfully George Bush, “We have to fight terror with terror, we have to use pre-emptive strikes.” This blatant evoking of Bush-era rhetoric seals Cameron’s markedly green and blue message.

Avatar is preachy and romantic; the plot and characters are bland; the dialogue is spotty and cliché. But the message needs to be heard. Cameron used three-hundred million dollars to convince me that the Earth is something beautiful and bravura that we can lose through our undaunted avarice.