Avatar--Film Review

Avatar is a Hollywood science fiction film written and directed by James Cameron. It is a very successful movie in commercial terms, as it has become second highest-grossing film of all times worldwide within three weeks of its release.

My Comments

• It is a movie with a heap of visual technology on the back of a very ordinary, plain, predictive and formulaic story. The story is stereotype, and can be summed up as the following.

There are two groups of people in the movie. Good people and bad people. There is a treasure hidden in the dwelling of good people, but they don’t know it. Bad people want to get this treasure at any cost. They send some of their spies to the dwelling of the good people. One of the spies, Jake Sully, falls in love with a girl from among the people of good ones. Good people admit Sully in their group. Bad people attack good people out of their brutality. Sully takes the side of good people. In the last war between the good and the bad people, bad people are defeated, in spite of all of their technological advancement over the good people.The story takes a mild turn when the confidence of good people on Sully is shaken, but very soon it is restored again.

• The story and the science fiction in the movie could not be integrated successfully. A person can sum up the whole story without referring to anything related to that part which could be called science fiction, as I have done above.
• The environment of Pandora, its creatures: hominids, animals and plants, landscape etc all are shown very intelligently. Obviously a lot of imagination, hard work, state-of-the-art technology and huge budget is involved. But all that was created, though unique and imaginative, was not pleasant. The overall impact was unpleasant and dreadful.
• Like most of the stereotype movies of Hollywood it was full of violence.
• It seems that the movie alludes towards an attempt of Americans, on subconscious level, to try to analyse the unexpected and surprising resistance faced in Afghanistan.

Scientific Facts
The movie is about invasion of Americans in Pandora. At a distance of 4.37 light years (41 million million km) there is a triple star system called Alpha Centauri. They are the nearest stars from earth, after the sun. Pandora is a hypothetical moon of some hypothetical planet of this system.

Apollo 11, which carried first man to our moon in 1969, had an average speed of 5,500 km/hr (or 1.53 km/second). Average distance of the moon from the earth is 384,403 km. Apollo 11 can cover this distance in 69.9 hours. Avatar is a story of 2154 AD. Suppose in 2154 we have a spaceship with a speed 10 times greater than that of Apollo 11. With this speed our spaceship will reach Pandora in approximately 85,750 years.

Some of the Reviews the Film Received
Most of the reviews are generally positive.

Culture Kiosque wrote, “But the really depressing aspect of the whole saga is still more fundamental. The Navi may be tall, strong, nimble, eco-savvy and intelligent (for the sake of our human "heroes," some even conveniently speak English). But the plot inevitably requires an American Earthling (or rather his virtual avatar) to come to the rescue, taking charge of his new-found exotic friends in order to save them.”
Hollywood Reporter wrote, “A dozen years later, James Cameron has proven his point: He is king of the world.”

The National Business Review wrote, “Avatar is saddled with the oldest and most predictable plot in the world, but still delivers an astonishing spectacle.”

In The New York Times a letter is published which criticising the movie opines, “Instead, “Avatar” is Cameron’s long apologia for pantheism — a faith that equates God with Nature, and calls humanity into religious communion with the natural world.”