Avatar (2009) by James Cameron

By Muhammad Ali Hashmi

“Braille for my eyes,” I said to myself,  after watching James Cameron’s epic.

“Avatar”, set on the moon Pandora which orbits Alpha Centauri A,  as a visual fable revisits planet earth— a place that we have forgotten in an eyes-wide-shut existence— with a fresh eye. Pandora, as depicted in “Avatar”,  is a deluge of color and form with its luminous flora— comprising a color scale of violets, purples, and greens—and its multifarious fauna. The mystical floating mountains of Pandora, inspired perhaps by Huangshan mountains in China, appear breathtakingly real.  

Set in the year 2154, “Avatar” narrates the story of Jake Sully, a paraplegic former marine, dispatched to the moon Pandora  to replace his twin brother, a scientist trained as an “avatar” operator.  Scientists use “avatars”— Na’vi-human hybrid bodies— to study Pandora and its inhabitants, the Na’vi. Behind this soft mission, a corporation called RDA aims to plunder Pandora’s environment for a valuable mineral unobtanium. Colonel Miles Quaritch, the leader of the RDA's private security force, promises Jake new legs in exchange for logistical information about extracting unobtanium.

Jake falls in love with a Na’vi native, Neytiri, and begins to understand and appreciate the ecologically connected and conscious life of the Na’vi people. Jake soon finds himself trapped between the choice of supporting his people or the peace-loving Na’vi people. Quaritch, eventually, decides to use violent and destructive means against the people of Na’vi, forcing Jake to take a stand with the people of the Na’vi. Jakes leads the Navi to victory in an epic battle and humans are forced to leave Pandora.

“Avatar” announces the birth of environmentalism as new religion, which sees everything connected in a total-field image of the biosphere. It makes a case for a philosophy that should not privilege one species over the other within the ecosystem.

“Avatar” is also an implicit critique of American imperialism. There are many parallels in Avatar about the U.S invasion of Iraq and the RDA’s invasion of Pandora. For example, the film makes an explicit reference to the shock and awe method, a military tactic that was used during 2003 invasion of Iraq. Unobtanium on Pandora can be seen as a reference to oil, which was one of the driving motivations behind the U.S invasion of war.

That being said, one can still accuse Cameron of pushing the white-colonial imperialist stereotypes, which depict white people as rational and scientific, while colonized non-white victims are depicted as primitive and spiritual. What is more, in the fight against colonization, the salvation for non-whites must also come from the “White Messiah”,  Jake Sully in the case of “Avatar”.