James Cameron’s ‘Avatar’ is a blockbuster with purpose. Set in the future and extraterrestrial planet Pandora, the film has a very terrestrial and present – almost nostalgic – message about war and nature. More than the usual sci-fi, Cameron’s feature is well grounded in history, with references to American Wars (such as the Vietnam and Gulf Wars, as well as the Pocahontas story). As spectators, we are with marine Sam Worthington, in a wheelchair, on the way to Pandora, to be part of Program Avatar. We travel inside the virtual reality body of a member of the Ma’vi race and explore the inhabitants of Pandora, its delicate ecosystem, which has been colonised for the extraction of a precious mineral (a McGuffin as Hitchcook would have called it). This, however, proves inhospitable for the terrestrial human race.
The film is all about experiencing a digital primordial ecosystem with irony and contradiction. We became part of the Ma’vi population, we live in Pandora, we breath every bit of the Weta Digital (NZ) environment that looks so much as Earth. This becomes discomforting. Pandora digital world is the true main achievement of the film. The feeling of displacement it provokes is a work of conceptual art. This is made possible through the repetitive references to real animals and organisms, often from the ocean, or from the African continent. Cameron subtly works on our mind and senses, bombarding us with a zillion images. References to real nature become redundant; the simulacrum we host in our mind takes prominence.
The last part of the film (where the eco-digital war take place) is a mixed bag of digital horror, with references to Goya’s “The Horror of War” and Miyazaki’s “Nausicaa”. What is ludicrous in the final message is that the Ma’vi has to become humanly violent to save the neck. Nevertheless, this is an important film, since it witnesses the triumph of digital fetishism over photographic reality, which has become the real lacking object in cinema.
On the ecological flipside, Avatar is a little thing compared to Miyazaki’s animated masterpieces, which are often quoted in the film. Cameron must have seen at least “Nausicaa and the Valley of the Wind” (the war scenes) and Princess Mononoke (the idea of the tree), but he hasn’t come close to Miyazaki’s subtlety and poetry in handling ecological concerns.
AVATAR (160 min./ Stati Uniti) – written and directed by James Cameron, with Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang and Giovanni Ribisi.
Popularity: 3% [?]
