AVATAR: Pocahontas in Space

So, my brother brought over James Cameron's hit space/corporate pig trough/enviro-preach movie Avatar to watch awhile back. Now I officially got that out of the way.

Hooray. I am complete for being all the more hip to something I guessed at being the theme of such movies. I think.

Anyhoooo......No doubt most of my readers have seen the movie by now. But I'll toss in my take just for shiggles.

Yes, an interesting flick (or interesting enough to keep the attention span required for almost three hours of sitting before snoring on the sofa) albeit another variation on an old theme, this time spiked with the absolute best graphics available; graphics that in previous movie-making ages a few short years ago might've ruptured the fastest supercooled, multi-roomed, warehoused supercomputers.

And ah, the grandeur of this theme!  Well, of the tropes, in any case:  The year is 2154. Humanity has finally lept the surly bonds of our own solar system and discovered another world teeming with life: Pandora. But the theme is really eternal in the narrative of the Green Movement. The Earth Goddess idea--transferred to another world as "Eywa"--rules supreme.  Nature is sacrosanct.  Humans are for the most part heartless, greedy critters who don't think things all the way through. Religion is found not in funny robes worn by grave, morose hypocrites, or from stone tablets slung to the ground by angry old bearded dudes complaining about adultery and golden calves, or hanging around mountain tops at all ungodly (snark) hours of day and night, but rather in the loving and peaceful neural networks of the hippy-dippy interplanetary Cosmic Consciousness.

The paramilitary guard of a particularly nasty interplanetary corporation doing the "wet work" on mineral-rich stops in the cosmic neighborhood is an unrefined--albeit technologically clever--evil.

Capitalist greed leaves Earth a wasteland of despair, war, and environmental ruin in the greedy Hobbesian struggles for wealth, vital resources, and power beyond basic sustenance. Earth is basically shot to a parched hell with resource depletion, pollution, and general "ecocide". Yet the psyches of many if not most humans assigned positions of power and decision are apparently no wiser for the trauma, but singed with cynicism. They've learned little beyond the logistics of the next hunt for bounty and profit.

Between now and then, like the author of Ecclesiastes said, it seems that for most of humanity collectively, there is nothing new to behold under the Sun hemming in the bounds human depravity. Or, for that matter, under other suns near our own. Science has opened new doors to the Cosmos and new windows to the very matter of human mind. It has not, however, made many inroads to the human heart.

I will not argue or belabor this point. We see it today--the outstripping of ethics by sheer weight of physics made available by sheer presence of modern science unlocking both exhilarating and disturbing secrets. The substitution of sensibility with sheer ability. The chasm of the Is-Can/Ought dichotomy is not yet sealed, and no easily traversed bridge is anywhere in sight.

As with the film's valuable but hard to reach fantasy element--laughably called Unobtanium--of much science fiction lore and mirth, found in the Pandoran ground that humans need to mine as an energy source for their very survival in these dark times back on a ruined Earth, ethics in this dystopian future seem about as difficult to come by as the fantastical $20-million-a-kilogram power chunks, and are about as expensive to life and limb to successfully process.

By predictable contrast, behold Cameron's glossy brochure for the Green movement's latest Nirvana:

Welcome to Pandora--a lush, greenish, bioluminescent, Earth-like moon world of a larger planet in the Alpha Centauri star system, where forests glow at night like a festival of Halloween light sticks. Earthlings may have fouled their own nest, but in the 22nd century have made some significant technological progress beyond NASA's current budgetary woes by then. (Presumably private enterprise has filled in some if not most of those gaps.) Technology in this age has advanced to the point where we can download, scan, and collate entire brain functions of both ourselves and other beings to duplicate their appearance, functions, and moves in order to make cultural "outreach" programs to alien natives (think "missionary" work, sans the Bibles and Jesus coloring books) and can make trips to neighboring star systems relatively cost-efficient on the checkbook, if not terribly quick on the time frame for such travels.

 

 

The natives? Well, yes, it seems Pandora is home to a wild and "free-range" host of odd and often inhospitable animals, as well as sentient 10 foot tall bluish beings called the Na'vi, who just happen to live in harmony with the native wildlife as well as--per the humans--squatting around near the astonishingly valuable superconductor mineral that brought the "Sky People", as the Na'vi call them.
In what is obviously portrayed as a homology to North American Native rituals and practices, the Na'vi are likewise supposed to have a zookeeper's affection for the native flora and fauna of their home world--though notably uncaged and risky--and are not so much proprietors of the land, but part of the land itself. An harmonious outgrowth of the presiding spirits through which all life flows and is thus given. The Na'vi are likewise organized into regional tribes of presumably differing habits and rituals, but share the commonality of protocol in everything from mating to the ceremonial strength trials requisite in attaining warrior or honor status in most native cultures.

Humans can't breath the dense, carbon dioxide infused air of Pandora, nor safely navigate among the Na'vi-human hybrid bodies called "avatars", operated by genetically matched humans who can interface with the brain of their avatars from remote stations. Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a paraplegic former marine, replaces his dead twin brother as an neurally networked operator of an "avatar" being, and works with Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver), head of the Avatar Program, as her bodyguard. Sully is also given the task of helping Dr. Augustine in convincing the natives that the humans are there for friendship and fun times all around--and so to leave their sacred, mystical Home Tree, which just happens to sit over a particularly large deposit of Unobtanium.

While protecting the avatars of Grace and a scientist Norm Spellman (Joel David Moore) as they collect biological data, Jake's avatar is attacked by something large and hungry that thinks Jake is next on the menu, and so Jake flees into the forest, where he is rescued by Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), a female Na'vi. 

So, Captain John Smith meets his life-soul-heart saving Pocahontas. 

From there, we see love in the woods, some soul searching on both sides of the alien-human divide, and the nasty corporation with its paramilitary hotshot combat vets feeling itchy trigger fingers, getting itchier by the minute, when they find out Jake is not doing his job in convincing the Na'vi to split and leave the vicinity where mining for Unobtainium is to commence.  It seems the Na'vi are "on" to what the humans are really after, and have made it known they're not falling for the proverbial Wampum for Manhattan trick. Sully tries to warn his human comrades that it just isn't gonna happen. Alien-human relations predictably go downhill from there, and Sully's love interest in Neytiri and alliance with the Na'vi has him finding himself (literally) on the wrong side of the big guns of a big corporation's greed affliction.

 

The Beautiful People Myth runs thick in this film. The natives' religion is a type of primitivism or animism common in Green movement's "ecosophical" ponderings . There is no Father God for the Na'vi, or an "Abba" figure, as the Hebrew tongue would utter. Nay, in the Na'vi religion there is the womb, hair, body, and bosom of Mother Earth--or rather Mother Earth's homologous cosmic domestic partner--4.3 light years distant. 

There is a Holy Communion, but no breaking of bread.

 

 

"Take, Eat, this is My Body, but not for eating--so eat somewhere else--then hook your USB port-like Na'vi ponytail up to the Native Neural Net, and do your groovy rhythmic worm dance incantations In Remembrance of Me."

 

 

You can sorta figure out the rest, no?

I will not be retelling the whole story for those 12 or so people back here on Earth who've not seen the movie, so suffice it to say the plot is basically when we humans find an unspoiled yard to take a poop in, the poop is not far behind after we tap on the fence gate. If you're looking for a valuable resource, but meat eaters larger than Earth's own mighty T. Rex, all manner of snapping pterodactyls, amazingly large trees, ten trillion glowing ferns, and funky blue people get in the way of one's stock options, you know it's all downhill from there for the natives until/unless a hardheaded, disabled, disoriented (but determined) hero rises past his past--and to the occasion demanded.

To continue: Avatar features nasty asides/mocks about "Shock and Awe" of Bush Iraq and Afghan War fame against putatively innocent indigenous peoples who merely wish to live in peace and harmony with Gaia, or, more accurately for the same effect, her Centaurian sister Eywa over on Pandora.

Of course, we also have the obligatory Bush Bash of faux quotes never actually said nor justified by anyone at the Pentagon (e.g."fighting terror with terror") in support of anti-terror operations, but most often inferred as moral squalor by Bush Doctrine (presumably meaning--depending on the pundit, the article, and the memoirs of kiss-n-tell books from former administration officials--pre-emptive actions against those who just growl at you or just overthrowing people who tick us off, among other alleged bad news and psychological shock storms) detractors. But, as some figure, this is close enough to get a cheapjack jab in below the belt, even if horribly inaccurate, and well-stripped of context.

OK. So Hollywood can sling most anything against the wall and make it stick long enough to make a point or two, especially if WETA Graphics is the undergirding of your painter's pallet. Besides, flying dragons are always in fashion. And let's give credit to director James Cameron and his philosophy that if you don't plan to do it "Epic" multi-hundred-million-turning-into-billions style, you just need to stay home with your equipment and props.

As some friends of mine quipped about this movie recently, Cameron's "Pocahontas in Space" has some really neat "eye candy".  And there is honor in this film. That some of the scientists and military types alike in this movie find the inner conscience and the will to buck their standing orders, and do what they deem is right against horrific odds--is clearly inspiring.

Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang, Joel David Moore, and Michelle Rodriguez and hosts of others real and imagined in the computer, make for a good of cast as any that might be assembled by the masterful director's hand of Cameron.

Fair enough. So pop some popcorn, get some blue Skittles, and enjoy the show.

Question: Do tree spirits give you any inalienable rights as does the Creator--at least according to TJ.