(2009) This is a movie especially for tree-hugging liberals and enviro-warriors, plus an appeal to anyone believing in an all-encompassing mystical goddess-head, created by Hollywood liberals. I'd be surprised if hard-line conservatives could sit through, let alone make a repeat viewing of, this anti-American-military picture. ("How's it feel to betray your own race?" the colonel demands of the movie's hero.)

By the time I watched (in 2-D on DVD) director/writer/producer James Cameron's visually-spectacular, fun-tastic, box-office smash, with score composed by James Horner, nearly everyone else I know had already seen it in a theater in 3-D.

The storyline's development - a powerful alien force arrives on a distant planet's moon with the objective of relocating or destroying an indigenous people in order to extract a valuable resource - borrows from numerous sources and predecessors, including Dances with Wolves, The Matrix, The Wizard of Oz, The Emerald Forest, and the horrible history of the Cherokees on the Trail of Tears. The terrific computer-generated creatures are descendents of Jurassic Park.

The motion-capture figures, blending seamlessly with real actors - all of whom are pretty much stereotypically one-dimensional characters - have a cartoonish aspect, which works well in this comic-book, fast-paced action thriller with all the death- and physics-defying events. The incredibly beautiful, otherworldly CGI landscapes - the flora often having undersea features - while not credited to artist/designer Roger Dean (his cover-art illustrations appeared on Yes albums and elsewhere), display to my eye a strong influence from his signature style.

After his twin brother Tommy, a scientist who'd been training for three years for the project to Pandora, is killed during a robbery on Earth (a dying planet), Cpl Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) of the US Marines, a paraplegic as a result of being wounded in combat, accepts (sick of being told what he will never be able to do) the contracted assignment to become an avatar driver. Though he's confined to a wheelchair and hasn't done any training in preparation for the mission, because he's a match for his brother's DNA, he's sent off (placed into a cryogenic state for the space voyage) to where the head scientist of the program, Dr Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver), initially regards him as "some jarhead dropout."

On the brink of war with the humanoid Na'vi but hoping for a diplomatic solution, the scientific plan is to embed avatars into the aboriginal population to learn their language and customs with the objective of eventually earning their trust as negotiators. Regarding the nerds' enterprise as a "bad joke," Col Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), commander of the military force, and Parker Selfridge (Giovanni Ribisi), the chief of operations for the mineral-extraction company, neither of whom possesses an ounce of moral conscience, would just as soon wipe out the "blue monkeys," whose village rests above the richest deposit of unobtainium on Pandora, as wait (costing shareholders quarterly profits) for Dr Augustine's "limp-dicked science majors" to have a try at diplomacy.

Each human driver links through a special chamber to an avatar - blue-skinned, tall and lanky, large-eyed, with long, braided hair and a tail - which has been grown from a mixture of his/her own human DNA and that of a Na'vi and functions as a living being physically apart from the driver. (While the avatar sleeps, the drivers resume their normal identities to eat, sleep, and log a record of their activities.) Taking Jake aside, Col Quaritch makes a bargain with the marine to provide intel on the ground from inside the hostiles' camp ("Report to me") in exchange for a promise: "I'll see that you get your legs back."

While out on his first maneuver, Jake as his avatar accompanies the avatars of Dr Augustine and Dr Norm Spellman (Joel David Moore) on a reconnaissance mission into the Na'vi territory; when they encounter a hammerheaded beast and a ferocious thanatar, he gets separated and lost in the forest. Unable to find him before dark, Dr Augustine has no expectation of Jake's surviving through the night; and if not for Neytiri (Zoë Saldana), he wouldn't have.

Of the predatory animals she must kill to save him she says: "All this is your fault. They did not need to die…. You should not be here." So why, he asks, has she spared him from certain death: because, she replies, he has "a strong heart" and conducts himself without fear, though he's as stupid as a baby. The goddess Eywa, as a sign of favor, sends seeds (resembling delicate, white, floating jellyfish) of the sacred trees to cover Jake.

Taken into the village as a captive of warriors on horseback (each rider attaches his braid to that of his mount for neural communication), the dreamwalker is appraised by Neytiri's parents - Eytukan, the clan's leader, and Mo'at, the shaman - before being assigned to their reluctant daughter (who thinks of him as a moron) to cure his insanity, by teaching him the Na'vi language, customs, and skills of a warrior.

While Dr Augustine moves her team into the Hallelujah Mountains, away from the military's stronghold and influence on Jake, encouraging the marine to take full advantage of his fortuitous relationship ("Try to see the forest through her eyes"), Neytiri instructs him in the ways of the Omaticaya people: bonding for life with a winged ikran; appreciation of that fact that "all energy is only borrowed, and one day you have to give it back"; reverence for the Tree of Souls; and "seeing" into another person.

For Jake, life turns backward as he's initiated into manhood in a rite of second birth, becoming "part of the People," and given the privilege of choosing a woman for a mate - he feels more alive as his avatar than in his own crippled body. However, when the Sky People assault the Hometree, Jake's accused of being a "demon in a false body" all along; he becomes a betrayer, an alien to the Omaticaya, an outcast as Col Quaritch ("We will fight terror with terror") unleashes a shock-and-awe campaign - gunships against bows and arrows - upon the Na'vi. With the survival of the Omaticaya hanging delicately in the balance, their network of tree intelligence and the spiritual memories of their ancestors about to be destroyed, Jake - "I need their help, and they need mine" - takes on the mythical role of Toruk Macto.

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Copyright © 2010 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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