Avatar

I saw "Avatar" yesterday. What a wonderful movie! My expectations were quite high, but the movie surpassed them! We saw it in the 3Dof course, well worth the extra 3 bucks. I think I would enjoy seeing it again, even with the 3 hour length, it didn't seem long. It was such a beautiful movie. The movie critic from The Salt Lake Tribune was very complimentary about the beauty and the technique. He also felt the plot was predictable. While it's true, the plot was prdictable, it's because the plot is a classic "quest of the chosen one." It's like an archetypical story within man's racial memory. That's why, even with the predictability, it draws us in. In fact, if it got too far from the pridictable course, people would have been disappointed.

The title, Avatar, is because the only way humans can live and work on the moon, Pandora, is to live through an Avatar, a being created artificially from Pandoran dna and the dna from the person who is running the avatar. Humans can't even breathe the atmosphere and only survive within their base or within their machines. They are on Pandora, basically to strip it of a natural resource that will produce huge amounts of energy for Earth. It's implied that Earth has used up it's own resources. At one point, when the protagonist, Jacob, is praying to the Pandoran diety,he states that where he comes from, there is no green, that humans have killed their "mother", alluding to Gaia, our own mother earth.

Pandora is not an easy place to live, the natives must be strong and brave, there is always something that can kill you. The world's life forms live in balance  and the world teems with beautiful life. The scientific team, who taught the natives English and developed the avatar program is run by Dr Augustine, played by Sigourney Weaver. She believes there is an energy on the planet that connects the trees and life forms. She's a scientist, so she doesn't actually believe that Pandora is alive in any other form but the way viable planets are alive, but my feeling was that Pandora was sentient, in a way.

The Pandoras are very large, they make humans look like children, small ones at that. They have blue skin that sparkles in the dark. They are tall and lean and strong with tails and have a long braid that protects a sensory organ that allows them to communicate with the animals that they bond with, as well as with the sacred tree.

The humans are not our best specimens. There are those with open minds and hearts who see Pandora's beauty, but they are few. The leader is a typical corporate leader, beholden to the company brass and the stock holders, though even he becomes concerned about the lengths the military will go to remove the Pandorans from the area the company wants to mine. The security head is good to his men, at least when they obey orders, but he concludes that the Pandorans are not technalogical, therefore, not worth saving.
The sad thing is, that I can see much of the behaviors and ethics of our own society that can be extrapolated with time and greater technological advancement, especially in the ways of conquest and war to be capable of doing such things. Still, a very enjoyable 3 hours!