Avatar, the movie

Avatar is not just a state-of-the-art 3D movie, it’s the right movie to sum up the first ten years of the 2000s. After almost 3-hours of screenplay (and God Almighty, please let the director have stored another two hours for a special DVD-edition, even if only for me), it’s not hard to figure out why it took so long for James Cameron to realise his masterpiece. It wasn’t only a matter of digital technique (which was superb, indeed); it has been mainly, I guess, a matter of good timing. The world simply wasn’t ready for Avatar.

So, why is the timing right now? Well, we have had Obama (even though after the first year we may have woken up from the big dream..), the ‘green economy’ boom, some minor events, but basically a new season of Hope has begun: and Hope is the message that seems to underpin, eventually, the movie. One might say: so what? Hollywood makes two ‘Hope movies’ a year, and, you know what, ‘Hope sells’!

Indeed, this is not the case: in Avatar, there is not the fictional hope that falls from the sky, as a gift from the Almighty, which shines on defenceless men’s lives (and mostly makes theatres sold out, as mentioned). Avatar’s and James Cameron’s Hope is the result of a dirty, heavy and bloody path of awakening from the collective dream we’re all experiencing; the dream by which we made them able to take our lives away from us and use them at their will. Avatar is, precisely, about self-consciousness after moral annihilation, and this leads to the very question that arises from the movie: do you know what are you doing, and the consequences of every one of your actions? ‘Do you see’?

At least three strands through the movie which build this theme: firstly, the Avatar dimension, a fairytale by which it is not difficult to understand a metaphor upon how the internet and virtual reality have changed our lives. Sergeant Jake Sully’s wild run at the very beginning of the adventure is anything but a means to express how nowadays what we can feel has gained supremacy upon what we can actually experience. Virtual reality is a separate world no more: it is a new dimension of our real lives, and nobody knows, on the long run, whether it will affect our lives in a positive or negative manner. Cameron sides with the former: it is through the Avatar dimension that we can wake up ourselves.

Secondly, there is the relationship between mankind and nature. No surprises, without any rhetoric, men (and their modern leviathans, enterprises) are pictured for what they are, both natural and nature destroyers, who believe that money can replace everything, even the vital lymph which, by the other hand, the Na’vi worship as divine. The point is neither new nor different to many others: but when we see the huge tree of Pandora coming down under the fire of the enterprise bad guys, we realise that it takes only a few minutes to annihilate what Mother Earth did for it through thousands of years. And you don’t need weapons, just plastic, by the way.

This leads to the third and final point: we can choose as Jake Sully and the rest of the team did. We can choose, basically, whether to behave in the right way or not in our everyday routine; we can choose whether we give our vote to the last conservative on earth or try to mobilise the perspectives of every one of us, by voting for people who do not believe that money and self-interest are the answer (there are few left, true, but they exist: just go looking for them); we can choose whether or not to waste fundamental resources for everyone as, primarily, water and energy, or continue to act as if we were alone in heart (basically that is what most of Western countries people do). We can still choose what kind of world we want to live in.

Mankind, Cameron says, it’s all about choosing, something that men seem to be always less aware of (delegation is the deep cancer of this millennium’ society). With his visionary masterpiece, he asks each one of us to step up and take up our responsibilities. In this sense, Avatar is by no means merely an entertainment movie: whoever leaves the theatre without a growing pain in his stomach and in his heart did not see the movie with the right glasses.