Avatar - Some thoughts!

Avatar is no new release, I know. But well, I got the tickets to watch that very recently and so here are some of my views on it. This might be a very very late review (if you can call it so), but I felt like writing about it.. so here goes. :)

Just when you thought that the greatest movies were those with the most complicated scripts, or story lines with layers and layers behind each frame, here is one to trash all that!

You go in there expecting grandeur, but what hits you is simplicity! It is not a wonderfully fresh story line, or refreshingly brilliant characters, it is the sincere and simple narrative. Everything is simply put there, point blank for all. But very few always get it, so instead of the usual narrative; James Cameron uses 3D, to make you feel one with an imaginary world, in parallel with the one we are already living in. He uses a new species The Na’vis. And unfolds a brand new Avatar of cinema!

All this while, we expected twists and turns, something spectacular that made those bucks you spend in the cinema hall worthwhile. In Avatar, except for the new technology that has been used to make the film, for a layman it is as lucid as it is for a 4-yr old. Good vs Bad, where the Good ultimately wins.

Here we also get to see how things work when there are a bunch of individuals who work for themselves, for their own motives. How their interests take precedence over everything, over lives, over peace, over The Right!! There is an irony that is brought out, when the tiny humans try to overcome the giant Na’vis, using the machines and technology that is far too superior and powerful for the native people of Pandora. How arrogance and greed overcome us humans, how we get blinded for our s
selfish motives!

But as in any film, there are a few things that linger unexplained. Why this perfection in everything in the Pandora? Pandora.. the name itself seems ironical. The people, if they were meant to be of another world, are more like us. The same two eyes, one nose and one mouth. I forgot the two ears! :P

Why is the stretch of imagination never going beyond that part of it? I’ve been waiting to watch a movie that depicts aliens in a different way, but somehow, they always get to what we have already seen or experienced. Speaking in the physical terms, of course.

Coming back, really, why the perfection? The Navis have perfect bodies, the old, the children everyone! Living in harmony with nature makes you perfect!? Is that what James Cameron wants us to believe? Even in the tribes there are fat people. But nope not here! Now that was one thing that made me wonder, what message this is actually sending out. But there is good, bad and ugly in Pandora. The dog-kind-of hunters that almost hunt Jake Sully, predators, herbivores that are almost equivalent to goats, monkey-like creatures. But there were exceptions. The lizard like creature that flies with its own wings that spread out like a spiral fan, the spiral plants that withdraw into themselves when they are threatened. The luminescent forest itself. It has taken many a creative mind to come up with all these things!!!

There is a never-say-die villain here. He is the right match for our ‘It is not over until it is over’ hero of course. But is it right to call him the Hero? Doesn’t Neytiri actually save him twice? Isn’t she the one who has the real guts to go against her own people for an outsider?

There is a deviation though. The money-guy who never understands any other language other than money, is for a change right on the site of action. He is along with the people who are working for him. Quite odd! Coz usually u find these guys teeing off with a Bluetooth on. Maybe that is the reason, Bluetooth doesn’t work across planets.(I know that was a really bad one.. sorry couldn’t help :P)

The indigenous communication devices, technology that brings images in thin air, (though falls short of providing an automatic wheelchair for Jake Sully) could make you scratch your head. But again you are diverted from these by the magnificence of the world. The hanging mountains is one such. Every frame in the movie is significant, and you’ll know that each creature has a role to play in the end by the time you are 15 minutes into the movie. They surely can’t waste their time sketching and creating such creatures just for a 1 minute scene! And sure enough you get to see all of them in the end doing justice to their part, pulling at your heartstrings right when you could let your mind wander about.

Good against evil. Acceptance vs alienation. Man vs woman. Nature vs humans. Navi’s vs humans. In the end you learn love triumphs. Love for everything around you. Even the smallest dandelion seed (fluffy things in the air, whatever they actually are), even the tiniest blade of grass, loves you. If you love it back, you win! Seems absurd doesn’t it? :) Well, that is the toughest thing James Cameron tries to convey. Very few take it back along with them though. The message could get overshadowed by the expectation for special effects and 3D, cinema like never before experience.