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.
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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.
<3
