'Weekend Box office records broken', 'Avatar grossed $1 billion worldwide' was the news delivered by Yahoo today. For a film, whose budget far exceeded anyone's imagination (including, I'm sure, the director's), and which opened on a snow-storm weekend in the United States, it has done rather well. Another contributing factor could be attributed to my dragging my entire family of six, at 9, on a foggy (visibility 20 meters) Sunday morning to watch this movie. I have to admit, although my contribution of $ 5.50 total (for 6 people), was a drop in the ocean, the fact that I was party to a group of people earning disgusting amounts of money makes me want to cry.
The movie, as with all James Cameron's movies, is a story of love, hate, greed, creed, fight for survival and ultimately winning. The story is based in the future, as opposed to his best known film; Titanic, on a distant planet named Pandora. Seriously, who would name their planet Pandora? It sure as hell weren't the natives! Only humans are capable of coming up with completely unimaginative names for things they think they can explain. Every element of the story, the action, the emotion, the picturization are all human, which is weird, since the movie deals with 'aliens'.
The aliens of Pandora are depicted as unsophisticated, backward, nature-loving tribes, very similar to those of sub-Saharan Africa, Native American or Australian Aboriginal tribes. Which begs the question: does all life evolve the same on all planets, considering the aliens looked nearly the same as humans? This could have been easily explained by the 'Panspermia Theory', which suggests that all life on Earth was seeded from distant planets, thus life on Earth would be relatively similar to that on 'alien' planets. But the two and half hour story was too busy explaining other things.
Overall, the movie was brilliant. The story was the same-old, same-old, with a twist. Humans were the bad guys, which seems very plausible. But the fact that the alien clans needed a human-turned-alien (aka Avatar) to lead them into battle and eventually win was a little to self-righteous. I personally liked the way Cameron managed to make nearly all aspects of the alien world look human, yet give it a 'je ne sais quoi' feel to it. The movie has plenty of messages for those paying attention, and many of them were not subtle, like humans are total gun-totting, egotistical, unrelenting morons. And those of us who aren't gun-totting are in an infinitesimal way capable of emotion and achievement for the greater good. But the one thing that really hit home was the connect between nature and being, human or alien. The green message was very well delivered, which will make environmental activists all around our world very happy. Shame, acting on it will cost us many times more than the income of this movie.
Avatar is not Titanic, in that, it is not of the same epic movie proportion. But what it is, is an idea of epic proportions, which if even a handful of people get, would make us more....human.
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