Avatar has been touted as a success for being incredibly sophisticated in its use of computer graphics and editing methods to create a realistic, believable, 3D universe that blends seamlessly with actual footage. While it is undeniable that Avatar sets a precedent for realistic computer graphics in cinema like many other Hollywood movies before it, the reason for Avatar’s box office success and acclaim is not entirely because of its use of computer graphics. Avatar is a familiar story which combines themes important to our world and the problems of today, that are woven together in a way that appeals to a wide audience and that highlights the flaws and depravity so prevalent in the aggressive, militarized industrialized human society today.
The scientific background of the the Avatar universe is an obvious extrapolation of modern crises in industrialized mining and mineral extraction operations, which seek to exploit a region’s resources without maintaining ecological balance. Avatar’s setting is a planet a few light years away from the earth, where a mineral extraction exercise is being aided by future human society’s technological and military might. The environment is not convincingly and otherworldly futuristic, but a mere rehash of existing technology and visualization, which it seems has not changed much in a hundred and fifty years time. The humans and the technology of Cameron’s Pandora, set in 2154 seem reasonably contemporary, and in fact, so contemporary technologically, that I’d be happy if we were to push that date forward by another fifty years. The use of a solar sail for propulsion (as shown in the beginning of the movie) begs the question of whether humans in the future have an energy crisis at all – and while the movie is silent on exactly what the uses of “unobtanium” are, it is clear that the mineral extraction project here is a small cog in the larger military-industrial complex of future human society and that it doesn’t have an intimate understanding of how self-organizing biological systems are characterized by a sort of harmony between their different parts, although Grace Augustine is working on just this.
Grace Augustine (played by Sigourney Weaver) runs the Avatar project to assimilate humans into the society of the Na’vi, a race of indigenous, intelligent species on the planet Pandora, the fictitious planet which is the setting of the movie. She runs a school where humans interact with the Na’vi through their “avatars” – a genetic blend of Na’vi and human species created by hard science and wired to the brains of their genetically similar humans. The humans who contributed their DNA to create the avatar are then able to experience the world from within their avatars when integrated to the equipment that makes this technology possible. The idea is eerily similar to the concept of internet avatars – aliases one assumes online in order to experience the internet and provide experiences to others also using their avatars. The concept of Second Life, a social networking platform, is fundamentally similar to the concept of the avatar as envisaged by Cameron, except the characters we run in Second Life are virtual versions of ourselves or what we wish to see ourselves as. Tsu’te, one of the Na’vi tribe’s warriors in the movie, remarks that the avatar of the lead character Jake Sully, is “a demon within a fake body”, which is not far from the truth, although ironically, this fabulous, “fake” world that Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) experiences, seems more real to him than his own. Jake Sully’s crippled human body is in stark contrast to his agility in a Na’vi body. Jake Sully’s existence in Pandora as an avatar is a real, visceral existence, where he is better enabled than in his crippled human body, and his emotional experiences with Neyteri, the female protagonist of the story and the Na’vi clan’s future seer, are as real and visceral as one can get.
The movie presents two stereotypes, which are surprisingly concrete and deep inasmuch as their realism – one of these is Parker Selfridge, the main administrator of the Avatar and the mineral extraction program company, the RDA. He is a bureaucrat who has to make difficult decisions that allow a limited budget to be used for accomplishing his objectives of mining minerals and ensuring the success of the Avatar program. He is portrayed as a manager with no focus on things other than those of immediate importance, the manager stereotype. He comes across as this guy who doesn’t know better because he doesn’t have to learn any more – an unfortunate product of a materialistic society that rejects most substantial ethics in favour of profit and all possibility in favour of power. The second stereotype that the movie offers is Colonel Miles Quatrich, the hardened Chief of Security who epitomizes the phrase “military intelligence” in its form as an oxymoron and as a dangerous, capricious manifestation of the worst form of military belligerence. With little or no respect for benevolent alien (or human) life, but blessed with bravado and a hard-as-steel attitude, he is a reasonably believable antagonist – except for the fact that you’d wonder if such antagonists would exist in the time period – apparently human social evolution has stood still for James Cameron – or at the very least, he chose a character that was necessary to tell his story. To be sure, Colonel Quatrich represents an older generation of heroes in American cinema and a veritable hero in medieval British books, where the legendary, all conquering warrior led crusades without regard for indigenous cultures. Now that the world has changed, or rather, because the West has changed, Cameron pits him against the conservationists and the scientists – the heroes of our day. Perhaps this shift in American popular culture over the last twenty years or so, is itself best portrayed by Avatar than other recent movies.
A common feature of all animals on Pandora is a cache of neuronal connectors that emanate from their heads, that pass through their plaits or their extra appendages and that are available to them to establish a physical connection with animals in the world around them. The trees are also similarly interconnected, as an experiment by Grace Augustine and Norm Spellman (Joel David Moore) indicates. The animals of Pandora were, to me, one of the most fascinating aspects of the movie. The Palulukan (or Thanator, named for Thanatos, the Greek God of Death) is one of the most awe-inspiring creations of the visual artists who created Pandora. Resembling a tiger, a jaguar and a cheetah, it is nothing short of regal in its aggressive bearing. The huge, hammerhead equipped rhinoceros is a delight to behold, as it crunches the exosketons and powered combat suits used by human soldiers. This creature is especially satisfying to watch when it charges on the human contingent that attack the “Tree of Souls” later in the movie. Less satisfying is the equine, six legged horse called the Pa’li. If there’s one animal I loved best in the movie, it would be the Ikran or the Banshee – a sort of Pterodactyl combined with an Entomopter, a four-winged beast capable of incredible feats of aerobatic prowess, actively aggressive and decidedly shrill in its cry. There’s something to be said for the impressive, large, red Ikran called the Great Leonopteryx, that Jake Sully pilots towards the end – and it has a fitting and impressive moniker given by the Na’vi – Toruk, The Last Shadow.
Cameron draws on the legends and ideas present in a lot of world mythologies to create the world of the Na’vi. There are unmistakable strains of Hindu beliefs right through the movie – the concept of Ewah – inspired from the concept of Devi or Brahman in Indian philosophy; aspects of the language of the Na’vi that indicate social harmony, the indoctrination rituals of the Na’vi which resemble the puberty rituals of certain African tribes, the use of totems and face paint as in Africa and Native America, the use of the bow and the arrow as in Indian myth and legend – such as the story of Rama’s prowess in archery. There are also less obvious parallels that exist between our contemporary world and Pandora. The Na’vi’s belief in the Tree of Souls, their ability to store memories in it and their ability to leverage it’s collective intelligence are all representations of how an interconnected network such as the internet could potentially evolve as we provide it more direct methods of interacting with the human world. Phenomena that currently fascinate scientists – such as self-organizing systems and synchronization in networks are illustrative of how networks can manifest intelligence in ways we have not imagined before – Avatar gives Cameron’s version of how such ethereal possibilities may exist on ordinary and even primitive-seeming worlds far away.
The military-industrial complex has been responsible for a lot of human technological advancement in the past hundred or so years, but is faced with problems of ecological integration. The disadvantages of the way we do science and the way our scientific advancement is tied to our society’s military prowess are highlighted – that we have to destroy and establish our own society and methods somewhere, rather than integrate into an existing society or culture. A case in point is how India has handled syncretism and integration and the stark contrasts with the Portuguese and Spanish conquistadors who destroyed indigenous civilizations in “Latin” America ( now attributed more to their filthiness and infestation with pathogens than to their military prowess). Avatar is probably the only movie made in Hollywood where humans are pitted as an aggressive race and who conquer other races. This is probably somewhat true, as well – humans seem to be more competitive than harmonious, if our own environment and other species living in them are anything to go by.
Does Avatar carry a message? Avatar comes at a time when the Copenhagen summit called on to discuss climate change issues failed spectacularly. It comes at a time when indigenous cultures are being wiped out by globalization and when fast environmental degradation is leading to a loss of biological habitat for many species that may not make it through the next few decades. Our dispirited militarization and industrial callousness has messed with the balance of life and environment that sustains us all, and we often do this without full knowledge of what we deal with. The militarism is not necessarily a good thing either, and despite being a very connected world, more than ever before, there’s hostility in our world on a large scale. In conclusion, Avatar is a must-watch, not merely because of the great movie-going experience and the stunning imagery, but also because it carries a message for each of us.
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