When Jake Sully’s (Sam Worthington) twin brother is killed in a mugging, he is recruited to travel to the planet Pandora. There he join RPA’s scientific team and will use a genetically engineered hybrid ‘avatar’, which resembles the native inhabitants, known as the Na’vi by humanity. A rapacious corporation has a massive mining operation on Pandora, extracting unobtainium, which is key to an energy and economic crisis on Earth. The corporations scientific team is trying to win the ‘hearts and minds’ of the natives, while at the same time employing heavily armed troops to protect themselves from both the natives and the violent wildlife on the planet.
While on his first mission outside the mine, Sully is separated from the rest of his team and forced to spend the night in the harsh jungle. While fighting off a pack of vicious predators, he is rescued from the wildlife by Neytiri, a Na’vi hunter. She is convinced to bring him back to her clan’s home, the Home Tree. There, he is given a chance to join the tribe if he can complete the same rituals as other warriors. As soon as Sully informs his superior, the ultra gung-ho Colonel Quaritch (Stephen Lang) of this event, they expect him to spy on the Omaticaya clan’s home, as it sits on the biggest deposit of unobtanium in the area.
Neytiri takes Sully under her wing and begins to show him their way of life. At first, he is both skeptical and reluctant, but over time, both Neytiri and the simple pleasures of the Na’vi way of life lead Sully to question his mission. The question soon becomes, to whom does Sully owe his allegiance?
Avatar has been compared to other films like Pocahontas and Dances with Wolves. For sure, the metaphor of ecological collapse and industrialism run amok is heavily presented in this film, with references like ‘Earth is a dying planet’ and ‘where the humans come from, there is nothing green’, and so on. Certainly, the RPA corporation shows that it is much like some greedy corporations today, in...
[ Continued ]
