AVATAR

Yes, the James Cameron movie.  Yes, the movie that’s Fern Gully: The Last Rainforest meets Thundercats meets Pocahontas meets Dances with Wolves.  I freely admit that the storyline isn’t that original and at times seems rather contrived.  But, my friends, I love this movie.  Yes, I really do. 

I rewatched AVATAR again recently and every time I see it I fall more and more in love with it.  The characters have grown on me.  I love Jake and Neytiri’s relationship and how it evolves from distrust to acceptance, trust, and love.  I didn’t really come to appreciate Jake’s personal journey until recently, and I admire the writers’ ability to hint at Jake’s internal conflicts subtly and to not insult our intelligence by having long, drawn-out scenes of his agonizing over what he should and shouldn’t do.  In fact, I think if the storyline had been more complex, it would have bogged down the movie.  Cameron was already trying to introduce us to a complex world with complex rules, creatures and peoples, and to have a complex plot on top of all of that would have been too much for the average audience.

Not only do I enjoy the storyline itself, but the artist in me swoons (seriously, ha!) every time the forest lights up at night.  I remember when I was at the midnight premier, sitting there beside my friends with my 3-D glasses on, completely immersed in the word of Pandora, I literally gasped—as did the rest of the audience—when we saw the bioluminescent forest for the first time.  I still stare in wonder at the radiant beauty of it, at the shades of vibrant blues and greens and lurid purples and oranges of the foliage, of the creatures (especially the dragons) and of the alien people themselves.  

Yeah, they kind of look like Thundercats, but they are gorgeous in their alien way, with their huge golden eyes, long, thick black hair, their slender bodies and lyrical language.  I wouldn’t mind being one of them for a day or two, running along tree branches bigger than anything I’ve ever seen, flying on dragons amid floating mountains, being able to bond and communicate with all life on Pandora.  Cameron’s Pandora is incredible and to see such amazing detail come to life makes me believe that there has to be a world out there like it.  I’ve always believed that if we can imagine it, it has to exist somewhere in the universe, and so I want to believe that something like Pandora is out there among the distant stars.

Needless to say, I’m excited about the sequels that will be released in the next few years.  (Yes, I’ll be at the midnight premiers.)  Cameron has already said he wants to explore the oceans of Pandora…I can’t even imagine what they will be like—they’ll probably be just as exotically beautiful as the bioluminescent rainforest we were introduced to in the first movie.  

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