Minding The Avatar

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(picture source: www.collider.com)

Quite a few years have passed that Director James Cameron disappeared from cinematic gig and almost made Project Avatar another movie myth. On this holiday season Cameron allows anticipating viewers to unwrap this long awaited gift box of his.

On its background, Avatar is a corporate interplanetary mining expedition, that when found out its richest mine site is the very habitat of the planet Pandora, threatened to go south. This means that its inhabitant relocation plan approach may either be military or science-backed in nature (it’s a toss-up). Avatar revolves around the latter, in which a team of science is on the mission to persuade the natives --the Na’vi-- to migrate from the mine site. To do so, the team utilizes DNA-based-engineered Navi-Human hybrids as vehicles, so to speak, on which a human can live through by the process of neural sync-ing, a biological version of virtual reality ride (That’s where the term "avatar "comes in, in case you’re wondering. Very genius!).

Through these hybrids the team attempts to diffuse with (or infiltrate, if you prefer the military lingo rather than the sociology) the Na’vi. As light was shed to the military team that its scientific counterpart falls for the ecological nature of the planet, they begin to realize that their bonus package is in jeopardy and thus take a hostile initiative. And so the Human-Na’vi conflict goes. The details --the characters, the drama, the visual effects (which practically is within the whole movie)-- are definitely things worth of you experiencing them yourselves, instead of through any strangers’ words.

The plot makes Avatar multi-faceted*. It is 50% sociology, with a 5% touch of biology, another 5% taste of evolution, 20% pack of action to ridiculously kindle your eyes, and --thank god-- only 0.001% romance (but with quite a delectable make-out scene). But to me the most capturing portion is the 20% of the mind science: the neural sycing of the avatars (a scientific cosmetic that Bruce Willis’s The Surrogates picked up in miniscule size) and the people-animal-plant integrated neural networks of the Pandorans. The notion that the planet is literally one whole organism is quite a tease, or at the very least, geopolitically relevant to the current global issue (like I said, quite a tease). That’s 100.001% in total but who’s counting**

Cameron has been known to having a big interest in science (check his IMDB records) and this science-fantasy blend in Avatar is quite a dance. It is what you would have in a hybrid channel of Discovery-National Geographic-HBO. This approach may just be the next standard for Hollywood flicks in the coming years, and setting a new movie production standard has always appropriately been Cameron’s main specialty (remember The Abyss, Terminator 2, and --yuck-- Titanic). Cameron's cinematography experiments during Avatar production, too, have been a trend on its own, a googling adventure worth trying.

Avatar speaks for itself that during his absence, Cameron had been doing some real out-of-the 'Hollywood'-box thinking. It takes 15 years to make, 2.5 hours to witness, but potentially years and years ahead to linger. Suffice to say that this season that Cameron came back home to Hollywood land, he hits a homerun.

* Cameron's Titanic --still isn't my favorite movie-- is bi-faceted: history and romance.
** All percentage estimation are roughly and recklessly mine

PS: Are those Jake Sully's atrophy legs real?