I have been dreaming in phosphorescent blue ever since I saw Avatar in 3D. This is not a sign of insanity; it is the intended result of a visionary director who has seen the future of film-making and is not shy about sharing it with us. James Cameron, though a thoroughly commercial Hollywood director a less discernible viewer would quickly dismiss as “just another Michael Bay”, is a headstrong, uncompromising artist who dreams BIG. His Aliens and The Abyss shaped my teenage fantasy world; the 90‟s Terminator 2: Judgment Day redefined the SF genre in such a way it left other SF directors with little room to manoeuvre (does anyone even remember what Terminator 3 is about?). The year is 2009 and Cameron has finally unleashed his blue dream on our colourless world. And what a dream it is.
Very little should be said about the film‟s pioneering use of 3D (never mind that Robert Zemeckis claimed he had used it first in The Polar Express). Enough articles and blogs have been written about the special effects. Critics near and far all agreed that the film offers some of the most astounding visual effects moviegoers have witnessed since the beginning of cinema. What marks Avatar, for me, as an effects-laden film quite different from, say, Transformers 2, is its ingenious fusion of the visual and the cerebral. While you are being bombarded in your plush theatre-seat by eye-popping effects, you are also being challenged - via convincing, absolutely satisfying characterisation - to ponder on humanity‟s quirky ways. In other words, James Cameron is not Michael Bay.
The hero always saves the day. Just sit down and watch any Hollywood-produced adventures and you will see this notion hammered home again and again. Viewers never seem to tire of this: the testosterone-charged alpha male, usually not blessed with eloquence, whips out his big gun at all the critical moments and the whole world sighs with relief. We are a species obsessed with the raw power of the male; we equate strength with Superman and Conan. The weak - especially the fairer sex - are forever marginalised and scorned. They are best removed from sight lest they remind us of our inherent frailties. Thankfully, Cameron does not see it this way.
It started with Aliens, which gave birth to the ultimate space heroine Lt. Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver). The Ripley character had already appeared in Ridley Scott‟s Alien, as an inexperienced, introverted warrant officer. The surprisewas great, then, when she was the only character to survive the alien‟s relentlessness. Cameron saw this and understood the character‟s potential to be iconised. For Aliens, he made Ripley the central character, the one to lead a tough crew of soldiers into the lair of the aliens. She was their chief advisor, their “mother figure”. When things eventually slid from bad to worse for the crew, Ripley picked up her own machine gun and had her, by now infamous, showdown with the Queen Alien.
Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) is the hero in Avatar. If you had not been too baffled by the effects that helped transform him into a blue giant, you would have noticed he had intentionally been written as an anti-hero. Our first impression of him is that of the underdog, the black sheep. He is invited to join the Avatar project because his brother, an expertly trained, PhD-holding biologist, has been killed. Since he and his brother share the same genes, he is considered a convenient replacement - even though he is paraplegic, an ex-marine, and has no scientific background (which Dr Grace Augustine, leader of the project, emphatically underlines for us in the first thirty minutes of the film). As the film progresses, we see how Jake integrates into the Na‟vi community on Pandora. He is initially seen by them as a “moron”, a clumsy member of the Sky People whose cup is already too full to be filled. To win their trust, he has to start from zero: he learns their impossible language, their hunting skills, their communal unity, their oneness with their Mother Nature.
Through it all, he is guided by two prominent female figures: Dr Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) and Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), the daughter of the Na‟vi chief.
Grace is Cameron‟s answer to the Earth Mother. She represents diplomacy, knowledge and humaneness. It is thanks to her thirst for knowledge that the Na‟vi culture is less of a mystery to us “Sky People”. She believes that mutual understanding between alien cultures is the key to universal peace. Guns are never a solution, a point that she brings up time and again in educating our hero. Her relationship with Jake is awkward from the onset (like the Na‟vi, she sees him as a gun-toting moron), but she learns in time, just as Neytiri does, that Jake has a “strong heart”, that he is perhaps the missing link between the two cultures. That Grace in the end dies and sparks the ultimate battle in the film is to be expected. Her death, or return to Mother Nature, is part of the natural process, and enables Jake to fulfil his destiny as hero-warrior.
Neytiri is no ordinary princess in the Disney sense: she kills her enemies with poisoned arrows, swings from tree to tree with the agility of a trapeze artist, flies an ikran like nobody‟s business, and when she has to, stands up to her parents in defence of her illicit love for Jake. Being the first to recognise the warrior qualities in Jake, she embraces him and introduces him to all things Na‟vi. She teaches him the secret language of the forest and the importance of the Tree of Souls to her people. Jake is initially referred to as a “baby”, stupid and clumsy, but under Neytiri‟s expert tutelage, he grows into a fierce warrior who will save Pandora from the destruction of the “Sky People”.
But our hero would have died twice over had it not been for Neytiri‟s lightning moves. In the final battle between man and machine, Jake would have met his maker if Neytiri had not, in timely Hollywood fashion, shot her deadly arrows at the iron-clad Colonel Quaritch. And moments later, when Jake‟s actual body is on the verge of dying of asphixiation, it is she who gives him the oxygen mask in time and keeps death at bay. When that scene closes with her cradling Jake‟s human body in her arms like Mary did Jesus, the conventional understanding of heroism has been thoroughly smashed.
As if subverting heroism were not enough, Cameron also had to tackle that age-old devil: accountability, racial and ecological. Pandora is, of course, a metaphor of sorts for Planet Earth before human intervention. Its verdant treasures, like Earth‟s, benefit its inhabitants as long as they agree to accord them with the highest respect. The “Sky People”, or simply Earthlings, have no understanding of this sort of high-brow reverence and can only view Pandora‟s natural wealth through monetary lenses. Their goal is to plunder its resources. If the “primitive” inhabitants get in the way, you just roll them over with a tank. This is Cameron‟s futuristic interpretation of that curious phenomenon we have come to know as colonialism, where a supposedly “superior” race helps civilise an “inferior” one while draining it of every drop of dignity and worth. The “Sky People” are hellbent on owning Pandora, even if it means eliminating its indigenous tribes. If this sounds overly familiar to us, it is because it is a historical reality, not a figment of Cameron‟s imagination.
The ecological aspect of the film is also its most pertinent. Despite global warming having recently been exposed as a global hoax, it remains hard to ignore the fact that the human race will not think twice about stripping Mother Nature bare for a few dirty dollars. In Avatar, Mother Nature strikes back with teeth and claws, alongside Jake and the tribes. The lesson is this: bite the hand that feeds you and you will find yourself mauled alive. In reality, Mother Nature punishes her violators with landslides, floods and toxic air. The landslide tragedies that have marked the lives of thousands are poignant in that they could easily have been avoided had it not been for the indiscretion and avarice of contractors and politicians. My former hometown, for instance, has been marred beyond recognition by countless so-called “exclusive home projects”. When I take a drive along the once deserted road leading to Batu Ferringhi, all I see are newly cleared hillsides waiting for more “exclusive home projects”, courtesy of the unconscionable local government that will sign away any piece of land under the shade of self-gain. The human greed Cameron portrays is thus more universal than anyone of us would like to admit.
In Avatar, this generation of moviegoers has seen the new, breath-taking possibilities the SF genre can offer. It is capable of both wowing with state-of-the-art digital magic and re-shaping perspectives by appealing to our intellect. Even though the real world is falling apart all around us, at least in art there is still the possibility of dreaming in impossible colours.
