James Cameron: Avatar (2009)

James Cameron’s 3D science-fiction epic Avatar opens with a dream. We see a mist-draped jungle and hear words in voiceover: “When I was lying there in the VA hospital, with a big hole blown through the middle of my life, I started having these dreams of flying.” The camera races forward over the jungle canopy and the drums on the soundtrack start to beat louder and faster. The voiceover continues: “Sooner or later though, you always have to wake up….” Is this dream a premonition or a memory? Regardless of the narrative answer, its presence at the beginning of the film is instructive for the viewer.

Avatar is a cinematic prophecy. It offers a vision of a fantastic planet that reflects the greatest beauties of our own, while also showing this world beginning to be ruined by the leveling of forests, rapacious mining, and the destruction that advanced weaponry causes—all things that have already widely occurred on our own planet in 2022. The film’s narrative will play out much as a prophetic dream for its hero, the paraplegic Marine veteran Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), who becomes an avatar, a scientific marvel that allows his consciousness to inhabit the body of a 10-foot-tall blue alien known as a Na’vi every time he goes to sleep in a pod. The living dream of being a Na’vi teaches him a lesson about the importance of the natural world and the dysfunction of his own way of living. It implores him to wake up. And because Jake is our avatar, it implores us to wake up as well. Does it succeed? It depends on who you ask.

It’s hard to do justice to the impact Avatar had when it first premiered in December 2009. It did become the highest-grossing movie of all time, after all. It seems like every single person in every part of the world saw it. However, much ballyhoo has been made online about its so-called cultural irrelevance in the decade-plus since its release. If a prominent section of a Disney theme park, numerous novelizations and comic books, fanboy support groups (like the one depicted on How To with John Wilson), and a still-unmatched box office haul is “irrelevant,” then the word has no meaning. There was even an entire psychological phenomenon of people becoming depressed after watching the film because they couldn’t visit Pandora for real! Clearly, the film had an impact.

What I believe people mean by cultural irrelevance is that Avatar did not spawn a multimedia franchise in the same way that superhero movies have in the years since its release. We’re finally getting a solitary sequel 13 years later, with more to come if this one is a success. For comparison, between December 2009 and December 2022, Disney has released 28 feature films as part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, as well as dozens of television series and shorter projects direct-to-streaming.

But make no mistake, the impact of the latter should not discount the impact of the former. In fact, the lack of franchise-sprawl speaks to the film’s enormous impact as a film, first and foremost, not its lack of impact; “most content” does not mean “most-influential content.” What is the cultural relevance of Ant-Man or Captain Marvel or Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, aside from the future sequels that were on the Disney release schedule before the film was even made? What have they influenced, aside from the further commodification of Hollywood and blockbuster storytelling? What artistic and technological impacts have they made? I’d argue little to none, aside from their economic impacts.

In contrast, Avatar essentially gave birth to the modern, digitized cinematic universe. It laid the groundwork for tentpole blockbusters filmed on green-screen sound stages and nothing else. It freed the camera fully from the physical realm. It made 3D a craze (and finally proved it could be used effectively in a film) and solidified motion-capture as a fixture in blockbuster filmmaking. It made digital projection the norm in cineplexes across the world. But, like Star Wars and Jaws in the 1970s before it, the films influenced by Avatar and made in its wake learned all the wrong lessons from it.

Instead of investing in films that involved years of careful production in order to create actualized, fantastic worlds on screen, Hollywood studios saw Avatar’s production methods as outlining shortcuts to take advantage of. Ditch on-location filming. Ditch hiring on-set technicians with their hefty guild-approved fees. Ditch hiring famous actors. Digitize everything, turn a green-screen into a living room or a graveyard, make the sidekick a talking raccoon for kicks, why don’t we? Don’t film a movie in 3D, but convert it in post-production and add a surcharge on ticket fees to bilk moviegoers for all their worth. Make movies longer, but don’t expect them to be bigger or better; simply allow filmmakers to forgo tight narrative structures and avoid cutting any footage. Treat movies like fast-food meals or cheap electronics; make them bigger and more expensive and more all-consuming, but don’t bother with quality. There’ll be another one to buy next year when this year’s edition is forgotten about or breaks down.

Avatar was meant to usher in a new mode of blockbuster storytelling, but so few films made since 2009 have learned its lessons. Thus, its legacy is a complicated one, one tarnished by commercial exploitation and lazy artistry, by shortcuts and lack of ambition. But its impact, its influence, is undeniably enormous.

Furthermore, what has come in the film’s wake since 2009 has obscured what Avatar truly is, which is a technical marvel above all else. It is a sentimental film, filled with some corny characters, dialogue, and emotional beats, but it’s also incredibly affecting and created with more attention-to-detail and emotional care than almost any other film made at its scale. In 2007, when Cameron finally began filming Avatar, it had been 10 years since he had made a feature narrative film. Thus, Avatar shows some rustiness in the finer details of storytelling; the dialogue, often the final thing to be polished on a film, and the cinematic element most refined by relentless practice, is particularly rough here. Characters speak what they mean in Avatar, and often clumsily; the themes and motivations are spelled out. There’s no room for subtlety.

But subtlety is sometimes overrated in cinema, especially when a filmmaker is working on the scale of something like Avatar. Avatar is enormous and universal. It’s designed to speak to everyone, is deliberately broad to a point of being nearly impossible to misunderstand. It is visual to a degree that it almost doesn’t need dialogue, or music, although the sound effects and the score by the late James Horner do a lot to support the emotional sweep of the storytelling. But the visual storytelling is so strong that no one can mistake its story, get lost while watching it, or misunderstand its lessons. Cameron may have become rusty when it comes to writing dialogue, but he lost none of his instinctual command of cinematic storytelling in Avatar. Rather, his command of emotion and imagery and visceral storytelling seemed to have only grown more considerable in the years since Titanic.

Avatar is a film that glories in creation, both that of the natural world and that of the creative process. Its CGI, which took over two years of hard work by Weta Workshop and other digital firms to create, remains the best computer effects in any movie. (It stands to reason that its own sequel, The Way of Water, will probably be the first film to improve on the effects.) Much of the delight of the film is exploring the environment of Pandora, the alien moon in the Alpha Centauri system that the humans are mining for resources, and which is the home of the Na’vi, Indigenous aliens that live a lifestyle in harmony with the natural environment.

Having spent the past decade exploring the ocean and making deep-sea documentaries, James Cameron brings a documentarian’s eye to his depiction of Pandora in Avatar. He explores the world as a teeming ecosystem, one bursting with life in every corner. The 3D cinematography, as well as the seamless computer effects, immerse us in the environment of this alien world, where every corner of every frame holds some natural curiosity to delight over. At moments, Avatar even acts like a nature doc, pausing to pay attention to the smaller details of animal life on Pandora, such as the elongated tongues of the native, six-legged horses, which slurp up nectar like hummingbirds. 

Other times, the characters pause with the filmmakers to gasp at the beauty of what they’re seeing, such as when Jake is bewitched by the sight of the fan lizards flying through the air, the bioluminescent disks on their backs spinning like a helicopter blade to levitate them through the air. The awe for nature here is sublime, even transcendent, as it carries spiritual dimensions, both for Na’vi in the film and for Cameron as the film’s creator.

None of this awe would be possible without the filmmaking technology that Cameron and his team developed to make the movie: the motion capture that transforms Sam Worthington into Jake’s avatar and Zoe Saldana into Neytiri, the Omaticaya clan princess; the 3D camera that provides enormous depth within a single frame; the digital camera that can follow the Na’vi running along tree branches or flying high over floating mountains on their ikran, the dragon-like mountain banshees of Pandora; and the physics engine that creates realistic shadows and lighting environments within the digital landscape. 

The result is a glorious artistic creation. Most scenes take place in full daylight, with no digital creations hiding in digital murk or shadow in order to disguise the seams; the film is seamless, so it need not hide. Even the night scenes lose no light or detail as the world is bioluminescent like Terran deep-sea creatures, glowing with an inward turquoise warmth that spills over the ground or air at the touch. As Josh Larsen writes in Movies Are Prayers, “Coursing through so much of the movie is a prayerful gratitude for natural…wonder.” 

Cameron and his team also take care to emphasize the physicality of the world they depict on screen. For instance, when Jake first connects to his avatar, he flees the lab and runs out into the open gardens of the human compound on Pandora. As he runs, he’s overwhelmed with ecstasy at being able to use his legs once again. The camera pays careful attention to the sensory overload Jake is experiencing. Jake digs his feet into the dirt as he runs—slow motion allows us to watch the dirt kicked up by his bare toes. Once he runs into Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver), the head of the avatar program on Pandora, who is also in avatar form, she throws him a fruit to test his reflexes. He catches the fruit and bites in, letting the juice spill down his lips. In Avatar, the digital world is tactile, sensory, real, which reinforces that Jake’s “dream” is real.

The film is about the majesty of nature. And to fully appreciate that majesty, you have to respect it, and protect it. Avatar is a science-fiction epic, but it’s also an environmentalist, anti-imperialist story. It wants to entertain, but it also seeks to expand the mind of the viewer. It’s a cinematic wake up call. But the entertainment is key to the film’s moral lesson. The entertaining story makes it easier to wake people up; the emotion of the former carries over into the latter, conveying the message that if you love this world, care for these people, you should care for your own.

Avatar is framed as an experiential odyssey for viewers. The 3D cinematography—a novelty at the time—the cutting-edge CGI, the immersive visual style, the use of sweeping emotional storytelling—this is all meant to make the film a visceral experience for viewers, and that immersive, affecting experience was much advertised during the film’s release. To carry the audience on the journey, Cameron aligns us with Jake and his experiences unfolding on screen, often in the first person. Jake is our avatar, a rather ordinary stand-in for the average viewer of the film. He’s not that remarkable, but he is brave and he is willing to learn, much as a viewer is curious to engage with the film they’re watching. The film features Jake’s voiceover narration at various points, which is, in the movie’s world, the audio from video logs he makes for avatar research purposes. However, it’s clear he’s speaking to us, the viewer. It’s evident that the opening lines of the film, about his dream, are never tied into a video log as in other moments. By the film’s end, we hear his voiceover once again detached from the video logs. The film starts and ends with a direct message to the viewer. Over the course of the film, Jake learns the lesson; we’re supposed to as well.

At times throughout Avatar, Cameron uses POV shots to put us in Jake’s shoes, or to replicate his experiences. When Jake first arrives on Pandora, the camera cuts to a POV of the various Marines exiting the landing vehicle onto the planet for the first time. We’re not tied to Jake here, but the experience of stepping onto Pandora for the first time is conveyed through the first-person to make clear this is our first time on the planet as well. Later, when Jake first enters his avatar, we experience his mental vision of going down a rainbow tunnel, following his psychic transfer from his human body to his Na’vi one.

All of this is to make clear that Jake is us and that the film’s overwhelming, totalizing visual approach is meant to sync us to him, like he’s our avatar. Then, when Jake learns the lessons about throwing off the shackles of empire and living in harmony with nature, the lesson is meant to extend to us as well. It’s common in science fiction storytelling to incorporate such narratives about awakening. For instance, The Matrix implores viewers to wake up in its final moments as Neo speaks to the machines and promises the liberation of the imprisoned humans within the simulation; the entire film is a postmodern call-to-arms with an incredibly subjective moral and political message. Even going back to classic science-fiction literature, Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land is meant to help readers “grok” the deeper realities of life, such as love and harmony with the natural world. Science fiction is often conveying these sorts of ideas, encouraging viewers or readers to wake up and experience reality for what it is.

But unlike The Matrix, Avatar does not reveal our current Earth as the “desert of the real”—although Jake does mention that there is no greenery left on Earth. It does not rely on a Cartesian dualism that favours the reality of the mind, not the body. And unlike Stranger in a Strange Land, it’s not about liberation from conservative morals or modes of living. It’s about a restoration of reality, not a breakthrough into a new reality. As Jake tells us, once he starts to believe the Na’vi’s lessons, “Everything is backwards now, like everything out there is the true world [referring to Pandora], and this is the dream [life as a human].” Jake experiences a transformation, but the transhumanism that makes it possible makes him more human (or more of a person, if we want to get technical) than before, not less. It’s a baptism, a death to the old, a rebirth of the new. Jake dreams as an avatar and the dream is real, but the challenge is bringing that lesson into the waking world, making his avatar his true self.

When Neytiri first meets Jake, she saves him from creatures in the nighttime jungle of Pandora. He is carrying a lit torch and fighting the various animals that hunt him. She defends him at the behest of Eywa, the Na’vi goddess, who leaves a sign for her when a seed of the sacred trees falls on her arrowhead as she lines up Jake in her sights. When she kills a jackal to save Jake, he thanks her, but she curses his thanks, bemoaning that it’s “Your fault! You are like a baby, making noise, don’t know what to do.” Jake has not awoken yet, and so he is ignorant, foolish. But that ignorance also makes him capable of learning the right way of things. When Neytiri brings Jake to meet her parents at Home Tree, the Omaticaya home, her mother, Mo’at (CCH Pounder), the tsahik or shaman of the tribe, warns that “It is hard to fill a cup which is already full.” But Jake’s cup is half-full, at best, and so she tasks Neytiri with teaching him to be a man, a member of the tribe and a full person: “And we will see if your insanity can be cured.”

This insanity turns out to be our modern way of human thinking: our environmental destruction, our consumerism, our individualistic selfishness, our imperialism. In short, our sinful nature. It doesn’t take long into Avatar to realize that Pandora is meant to be a reflection of Earth before the environmental crisis; it is a kind of Eden. In fact, the first time we see Pandora, it is in reflection in the solar panels of a spaceship, a literal reflection of human creation. Once we land on the surface, we notice how the machines devastating the world are similar to our own: a shot of a massive harvester cutting into the earth looks very similar to the mining machines that dig through the ground in Germany and other parts of the world, extracting precious coal. The machines in Avatar are simply bigger.

In the film’s Extended Collector’s Edition released on Blu-ray, we see life back on Earth, where Jake inhabits a cyberpunk vision of metropolitan earth. There is no nature, no life beyond neon and chrome. Jake lives in a tiny apartment with little but a bed and a massive television screen; on the screen, we hear a newscaster talking about “The Bengal tiger, extinct for over a century…”. We learn that procedures exist to fix his broken spine, but he cannot afford it; economic precariousness is still the law of the land. In voiceover, Jake mentions that if “you want a fair deal, you’re on the wrong planet.” 

On Pandora, when we meet humans, they’re remarkably contemporary in their attitudes and even their dress; people wear slacks and collared shirts. The company manager, Parker Selfridge (Giovanni Ribisi), even practices his putt on the office floor the first time we see him, seemingly unimpressed with the gorgeous Pandoran jungle just outside the window. It’s clear that people in this world of 2154 are simply living in our own capitalist system that has progressed further along the trajectory we’re currently on.

The Na’vi themselves are literally alien, but they resemble a combination of Indigenous human cultures and attitudes. It’s no accident that Cameron cast black and Indigenous actors as the Na’vi, everyone from Zoe Saldana and CCH Pounder to Wes Studi as the chieftain Eytukan. The Na’vi are alien, but they combine the reverence for the natural world, subsistence lifestyle, and pantheistic spiritualism of many Indigenous cultures, from Masai to Plains Cree to Maori. In all but name, they are human people before the rise of technocapitalism. The Indigenous themes in Avatar again link into Cameron’s obsessions with technology and its dangers.

An instructive reference for the film’s presentation of Na’vi personhood is Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Word for World Is Forest, one of her mid-career short novels about Terran colonists on an alien world, Athshe, where the natives are small, green-haired primitives. The story is told from the protagonist of an aggressive Terran logging camp captain, who does not view the Athsheans as people. Because of this perspective in the early going, it takes a while for the revelation to click that the Athsheans are not only sentient humanoids, but they are in fact as human as the Terrans. They were seeded by the same forebears as the Terrans within Le Guin’s fictional Hainish universe; they have simply adapted to being shorter and green over the millennia. In the novel, the reader awakens to a proper understanding of the reality of Athshe, and, by connection, the humanity of its people.

Cameron does not reference The Word for World Is Forest in any public interviews about Avatar, unlike his common references to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars series and David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia, but Le Guin’s novel shares a similar approach to Cameron’s film. Both works share a dawning realization for the viewer (or reader) that the humans do not see the natives as people because they are poisoned in the mind, not because the natives are actually less-than-human. Le Guin’s novel even has the Athsheans treat their world as an interconnected living being; the title is in reference to their word for “forest” being the same as their word for “world.” We see similarities with the Na’vi, who refer to Pandora as Eywa, their goddess; the two are the same in their worldview. In fact, Grace even says that the trees on Pandora are linked together and that the number of these connections is greater than the number of neural connections in a human brain. She might well have said: “On Pandora, the word for ‘world’ is ‘forest.’” Le Guin’s novel helps us understand the ways that Avatar shows how human conquest perverts the mind, damages the relationship with the world and others, and transforms human beings into creatures more akin to demons than people.

It’s no coincidence that the Na’vi refer to the human avatars as demons at first, terrified that the “sky people” have possessed their flesh to corrupt their world. In fact, the avatar technology allows humans to “possess” Na’vi bodies. They do and they have, as the imperial mindset that motivates them has made them eager to displace the Na’vi and mine their world for “unobtanium,” a super rare mineral alloy (named after the engineering-phrase used for any hard-to-get, but incredibly valuable natural resource).

In fact, for the film’s villain, Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), the head of security for the human colony on Pandora, Pandora itself is a monstrosity. During his opening security briefing to new colonists, he warns:

If there is a hell, you might wanna go there for some R&R after a tour on Pandora. Out there beyond that fence, every living thing that crawls, flies, or squats in the mud wants to kill you and eat your eyes for jujubees. We have an Indigenous population of humanoids called the Na'vi. They're fond of arrows dipped in a neurotoxin that will stop your heart in one minute—and they have bones reinforced with naturally occurring carbon fiber. They are very hard to kill. As head of security, it is my job to keep you alive. I will not succeed. Not with all of you. If you wish to survive, you need to cultivate a strong mental aptitude. You got to obey the rules: Pandora rules.

Quaritch hates Pandora, he hates the Na’vi, and he hates that he has to treat the Na’vi like equals. His speech is ridiculous, but it’s also fitting for Cameron’s storytelling in Avatar. In Quaritch’s mind, he has transformed it into a hell. But that hatred fails to understand the ways that Pandora is simply Earth before its environmental degradation, a prelapsarian world. Pandora is meant to simply extrapolate and exaggerate the natural aspects of our own world. It’s no accident that some of its most stunning visions, such as the floating Hallelujah Mountains, which are suspended in the air by a strong magnetic field, are inspired by the cloud-draped, karst spires of the Huangshan Mountains in China. Cameron doesn’t let us miss the point. Late in the film, as Jake prays to Eywa for guidance, he mentions that humans, “They killed their mother.” The hope of Avatar is that the film can inspire people to avoid that natural matricide.

The environmentalist and anti-imperialist bent of Avatar is one of its pronounced elements, but it’s surprising how little attention was paid to these aspects during its initial release. Critics and viewers were more caught up in debating the Indigenization of the Na’vi and the film’s potential white saviour complex than in examining how it critiques our modern way of operating, both environmentally and politically. 

In retrospect, it’s hard to overlook these elements of the film. So many elements of Cameron’s storytelling, from exposition to plotting to key speeches by the characters, make clear the environmentalist and anti-imperialist message. In Avatar, corporate and military streams have aligned on resource extraction. In voiceover, Jake explains how the security forces on the Pandoran base are ex-Marines working for a private paycheque—we get echoes of Blackwater mercenaries and the military-to-operator pipeline for American war veterans in our time. Later, in a conversation with Jake, Quaritch references conflicts in Venezuela and Nigeria, two oil-rich areas, suggesting that America has gone to war to extract resources from the global south. This is all in addition to the central conflict of the film, which is that the human colonists want to get at a large unobtanium deposit located beneath the Omaticaya village, Home Tree, a giant tree the size of a skyscraper.

Jake’s moral struggles and the human-Na’vi conflict reach a head when Quaritch orders an attack on Home Tree to drive out the Na’vi in order to access the resources. It takes place a little over halfway into the film and represents a hinge point in Cameron’s deliberate narrative structure: it’s the point of no return, for Jake and for the human conquerors. Jake tries to convince the Omaticaya to flee Home Tree, confessing to spying on them for Quaritch in the process, and ultimately decides he stands with the Na’vi over his fellow humans. While Selfridge may quibble that “killing the Indigenous looks bad,” he thinks the Na’vi are little more than “blue monkeys” and “savages.” He ultimately backs Quaritch’s show of force and we watch as Quaritch flies in with dropships and helicopters, shoots tear gas to drive out the Na’vi men, women, and children to guarantee “minimal casualties”, and then proceeds to blow Home Tree to hell.

The scene of Home Tree’s destruction picks up where Steven Spielberg left off in his War of the Worlds, using imagery that mines the collective trauma of 9/11 and the destruction of the twin towers. As the tree falls and a giant dust cloud billows out on the forest floor, the connections are impossible to miss. However, unlike Spielberg, Cameron is not simply mining the visual association for emotional impact. He goes one step further and actually associates the Americans with the aggressors, using 9/11 imagery, but placing Americans as the bombers and Indigneous peoples as the victims. Quaritch solidifies this connection when saying “We will fight terror with terror.” This again implicates American institutions, much as he did in Terminator 2: Judgment Day. It’s also one of the most brazen moments of anti-American imagery in a major blockbuster, especially if you go as far as Felix Biederman does on an episode of the sardonic leftist podcast Chapo Trap House and argue that this moment in Avatar shows how American imperialism “does 9/11 every day.”

You don’t have to take the anti-imperialist argument as far as Biederman does to understand the scene’s impact. It’s a devastatingly emotional scene. Smoke, dust, debris fills the screen. We watch a shockwave, hear horns blare on James Horner’s mournful score, watch the Na’vi men and women and children flee or die. The human characters watch the terrorism through Quaritch’s cameras on the screens back at camp. To them, it’s a show, just as it is to us; they too are helpless, but have to witness atrocities done on their behalf, on our behalf. It’s 9/11, but it’s also the napalming of Cambodia, the torching of the Amazon, the dynamiting of coral reefs. It’s a totalizing, dehumanizing destruction of humanity and the natural world. It makes clear the endpoint of imperial domination: “its end is the way of death.” Jake explains the imperialist impulse perfectly when he says that “When people are sitting on shit you want, you make them your enemy, then you’re justified in taking it.” Again, the bluntness of the dialogue is as much a strength as a weakness in Avatar.

In the aftermath, the battle lines are drawn and the film works towards the ultimate confrontation between the Na’vi and the human colonizers. Quaritch plans to destroy the Tree of Souls, the sacred connection to the Na’vi’s ancestors. He wants to “blast a crater in their racial memory so deep that they won’t come within 1,000 klicks of this place ever again.” Quaritch is a master of colonial domination and intends to lead a “shock and awe” campaign to finish the conflict once and for all. Again, the film uses terminology that are blunt reminders of American racism and imperialism in events such as the Iraq War, which links the film to our present and reminds us of our culture’s missteps.

Meanwhile, Jake rallies the survivors of the Omaticaya and gathers surrounding tribes to make a stand against the humans. In the immediate aftermath of the battle, Jake reawakens in his avatar body and finds himself alone in the ashen embers of Home Tree, now an underworld devoid of colour. The totalizing greyness of this moment stands in such stark contrast to the vivid colours of the rest of the film. It’s as if Jake has awoken in a hellscape; earlier, Quaritch calls Pandora a hell and he makes it look like one through his destruction. When Jake finally makes his way back to the Omaticaya, now riding Toruk “Last Shadow,” the mightiest dragon of the sky, he is like Hercules returned from Hades.

As this is a Cameron film, there’s a tension between the destructive capabilities of human technology and their potentially liberating quality. The mechs and dropships and bombs allow Quaritch and Selfridge to conquer Pandora, kill the Na’vi, and mine the natural resources. The avatar technology allows them to breathe the poisonous Pandoran air and infiltrate the Na’vi tribes. But the avatar technology also allows Jake to experience a new way of life and comprehend what his human life lacks and his Na’vi life does not. He knows that the Na’vi are “not going to give up their homes. They’re not going to make a deal. For light beer? For blue jeans? There’s nothing we have that they want.” Comprehending that lack of want is key to Jake’s ultimate spiritual awakening. By dying to material want, he is born anew to a proper harmony with the natural world.

Thus, it all comes back to awakening and rebirth. Jake’s experience as an avatar and learning alongside Neytiri is a baptism. His love for Neytiri plants the seeds of his conversion, as if the seeds of the sacred tree that land on him in mystical portent dig into his soul and blossom once he consummates his love with Neytiri. During a montage of Jake’s training, we hear him discuss what he’s learned from Neytiri, how “She’s always going on about a flux of energy, the spirit of animals…. She said that all energy is only borrowed, and one day, you have to give it back.” 

Cameron is an arch-materialist, so he creates a biological spirituality with Pandora, a literal neural network in the natural world that not only connects one tree to another through electronic pulses, but a pantheism of ancestors and souls embedded in the living planet itself. The planet is the goddess is the people. A dissolve cut makes clear the connection. After Jake’s ceremony of acceptance into the Omaticaya, the people all move as one in religious rhythm beneath the Tree of Souls. The shot of the people linked by arms dissolves into a view of Pandora and its gas giant: they are one.

As the people are the planet, the planet eventually comes to the rescue in the final battle with the humans. Just as the Na’vi tribes seem on the edge of defeat, with Tsu-tey (Laz Alonso) and Trudy (Michelle Rodriguez) and other brave warriors dying in the fight, the wildlife rise up to attack the humans and turn the tide of the battle. Earlier, Neytiri had told Jake that Eywa doesn’t take sides, but she has also said that Eywa maintains the balance of the planet. She has not comprehended the full truth that Jake eventually does: they are Eywa, they and the world are one, and if that’s the case, if the existential threat is against the Na’vi, of course the natural world will defend them as it’s defending itself. Restoring balance might mean driving out the humans.

Cameron’s embrace of violence in the climax draws sharp contrast with The Word for World Is Forest and other anti-colonial works of science fiction, although there are cinematic parallels in films such as Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke. But this is a James Cameron film, after all, and he conjures an action extravaganza of dazzling destruction and heroic sacrifices. The sequence is also one of the rare cases of James Cameron employing parallel editing during an action sequence, the other being the climax of Titanic. It’s also Cameron arranging not just combat and chases, but actual large-scale battles. 

Quaritch loads the shuttle with a massive bomb to drop on the Tree of Souls and defend the shuttle with waves of attack helicopters. Jake gathers the nearby Na’vi clans to mount a multi-frontal assault. The horse clan will lead a cavalry charge on the ground against the Marines armed with mechs; the ikran clan led by Jake will assault the helicopters and stop the bomber in the air. Cameron establishes clear geography and stakes in the battle, as well as distinct stages that increase the tension and amplify the catharsis of the eventual victory. There’s the initial attack, which leads to a human riposte, and a Na’vi retreat. Heroes are killed. The humans seem to win, but Pandoran wildlife come to the rescue, eventually overwhelming the humans and destroying the shuttle before it reaches the Tree of Souls.

It’s a rousing sequence, with more than a few stunning images. The shot of a horse on fire, running through the Pandoran jungle in a last gasp of life, is particularly mythical and haunting, an image of freedom on fire. The finale makes the Na’vi and the natural world one within a narrative framework, aligning them against the human conquerors, making them indistinguishable from each other. This thematic and narrative confluence makes the climax so emotionally powerful. It conveys the themes of the movie in such a visceral manner.

Eventually, after destroying the shuttle, Jake faces off against Quaritch in a mech, who, even in defeat, wants to kill Jake’s human body before he himself goes down. Neytiri kills Quaritch and saves Jake in the nick of time. Selfridge and the other humans have to go back to Earth, although he warns them that the fight is not over. (Avatar: The Way of Water makes clear this is exactly the case.) As Jake says, “The aliens went back to their dying home.” His perspective has shifted, but it is not a matter of ordinary dualism, of Jake choosing the alien over the human or the mind over the body. No, he has been baptised and died to an old life and born to a new one. In the final moments, we watch as his spirit is permanently transported to his avatar body, the technological creation made real. The baptism is complete.

During his training, Jake mentions that “The Na’vi say everyone is born twice.” This is metaphorically true of the viewer as well. Cameron, in his earnest, environmentalist, Hollywood hippie hubris, has created a film that seeks to provide a rebirth for the viewer. The genius of Avatar, and the thing that also drives some viewers crazy, is that it weds its blockbuster theatrics with its hippie environmentalism, its anti-imperialism, its spiritual pantheism. It wants the viewer to have a visceral, emotional, life-changing experience watching it. Cameron wants to “blow our minds” with gorgeous imagery, state-of-the-art special effects, exciting action, and sweeping romance. But he also wants that visceral experience to lead to a spiritual awakening.

Thus, Avatar is the blockbuster-as-conversion experience. There is a “before Avatar” and an “after Avatar”—for CGI, for theatrical distribution, for blockbuster cinema, for Cameron, for the viewer. Like so many baptisms, its influence may be intangible, but all-permeating. It changed nothing; it changed everything. Whether it’s one or the other all depends on your perspective, whether you’re dreaming or you’ve woken up.

10 out of 10

Avatar (2009, USA/UK)

Written and directed by James Cameron; starring Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Stephen Lang, Sigourney Weaver, Michelle Rodridguez, Giovanni Ribisi, Joel David Moore, Dileep Rao, CCH Pounder, Wes Studi, Laz Alonso.

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