Avatar: New Age Space Smurfs

James Cameron’s Avatar is set in the future. A corporation from a dying earth is seeking to exploit the mineral resources of the beautiful planet Pandora occupied by the indigenous Na’vi people whose major city lies above a huge mineral deposit. A scientific team launch a ‘hearts and minds’ campaign to try and persuade the ‘noble savage’ Na’vi people move and allow mining to commence. To break cultural boundaries, they create ‘Avatars’, artificially created alien bodies to be ‘driven’ by human operators. If the team fail, a large military force stands ready to force the Na’vi from their home. The story sees a former marine controlling an Avatar ‘goes native’ before he organises the Na’vi resistance in the inevitable battle to come.

3D Falling Flat?

Avatar was supposed to usher in a new era of 3D cinema. Instead shows both its strengths and weaknesses of this technology. Avatar is supposed to be an immersive experience, inviting you into the life of the tribe. To a certain extent, with the costly use of 3D animation as well as cutting edge motion capture technology, it succeeds. However, despite the huge expense, Avatar still looks like an animated film and when not jumping out at the viewer, the 3D effects often resemble a 1990s ‘Magic Eye’. Moreover, the design concept of the Na’vi people is weak. Although beautifully rendered, these 12ft blue aliens with strategically placed dreadlocks accompanied by ‘tribal music’ struck me as silly and possibly offensive. As of yet no technology can replace a good script and good characters.

Pandora v New Creation

Avatar carries heavy handed, if open ended, allusions to the war on terror, mission, colonialism and the ecological crisis. The new age Na’vi religion (a kind of theistic pantheism where everyone is connected to the mother god called Eywa) is prominent. It praises the power of nature and calls people to integrate with their surroundings rather than impose their will upon it. It stresses the importance of the collective rather than the individual (the Na’vi representing an ideal humanity in perfect relationship with each other and their surroundings). However, Eywa never lives among her people, remains impersonal, contactable only through strange ritual and interested only in maintaining ‘balance’. Whereas the idealistic world of the Na’vi can only ever be an aspiration in a fallen world, we have hope in a new creation characterised by a perfected relationship with ourselves, with each other, with the environment and with a personal loving God.

2012 Review: An American Apocalypse

Imagine you made a movie combining Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow. Then throw in a $200 million budget and a determination to make it ‘bigger and bolder’. You probably wouldn’t end up far away from 2012, Hollywood’s latest vehicle for a good two and a half hours of escapist CGI sequences. The result is probably as good as could be expected. The animation is impressive, if ultimately forgettable.

The incidental ‘plot’ sees the earth’s core warm due to an unexplained combination of the alignment of the planets and solar radiation. This causes huge tectonic activity threatening to end all life on earth. Global governments, aware of the coming doom build a series of Noah-esque ‘arks’ (complete with pairs of animals) to survive the flooding of the world due to huge tsunamis.

Despite the obvious biblical illusions about the Great Flood and the apocalypse, they are fairly peripheral to an expression of American conservative libertarian family values. Appealing to the Sarah Palin voter, governments are treated suspiciously. The ‘ordinary man’ becomes the hero while global destruction aids the reconstruction of a broken nuclear family. Although America has its own ark, it is one among others and built in China, perhaps demonstrating how the US is beginning to see itself as a global superpower among others.

References to organised religion are made throughout from the appearance of the Dalai Lama to the collapse of St Peter’s. Religions are shown respectfully and as having a vague common message affirming ‘faith’. Yet, religious leaders can do little more than die pathetically with their flock. Had the film been made on this side of the Atlantic, I suspect religious leaders would be treated far less sympathetically. Ultimately however, American pluralism seems little preferable to European secularism.