When it comes to Imagination, I’m willing to pay any price. And so there I was, standing in the queue at a Multiplex and shelling out hard earned dough to buy tickets for the premiere show of Avatar !
Sci-fi has come a long way. It really has. So far we were witness to Aliens and Predators trying to annihilate Humans/Mother Earth. With Avatar you have the Humans trying to take over the reins of other extraterrestrial tribes. Yes you heard it right. For a change we are the culprits !
Plot - Jake Sully (played by Sam Worthington) is a handicapped marine who replaces his twin bro in the Avatar mission. The mission, which is guided by Grace, a scientist (remember Sigourney Weaver in Aliens), aims at taming the Na’vi, a humanoid race inhabiting Pandora, a faraway satellite for different reasons. While the corporate that is funding the mission is after a rare metal called Unobtanium, the scientists are more interested in collecting samples for their study. As for Jake, the carrot is - a chance to get rid of his handicap by getting an expensive operation financed. The Na’vi are a race of physically superior humanoids with outstanding warrior qualities (they stand ten feet tall like Saboo) but are otherwise primitive in their evolution cycle. Jake takes control of a Na’vi look-alike hybrid by remote methods and joins the Na’vi to win their confidence for talking them into peaceful evacuation. He is initiated into the tribe by Neytiri (played by Zoe Saldana). Jake soon falls in love with her and suddenly everyone realises that their plans are going haywire....
The movie seems to subtlely raise the issue of futility of war and the maddening extent of corporate greed that seems to override all considerations in ’Kalyug’. And it doesnt talk about saving ourselves from Aliens. Rather it talks about saving Aliens from ourselves. Or better still ourselves from ourselves !
Lets first talk of the things I liked. No prizes for guessing. The tall trees, the oversized dense foliage, the hanging mountains, the grotesque rhinos/cats, the huge touch-me-nots, the "Garuda" like flying dragons (this seems to have become a favorite with "visionaries"), to say nothing of the blue skinned, cat eyed, mouse eared giant muscular Na’vis. The animation was a treat. The acting wherever present (discounting Na’vi-time) wasnt too bad either. Perhaps the most memorable dialogue of the movie was when Neytiri in a moment of hightened extra sensory perception, says "I see you" and Jake replies "I see you". We instantly feel like adding "And we see the both of you". But I guess the buck stops here.
Now for the things that didnt go down well with me. Storyline was a bit thin and unimaginative, especially when you consider that the movie belongs to the fantasy genre. So much so that towards the climax, the object of pursuit, namely Unobtanium was completely forgotten. Besides storylines with protagonists doing a turncoat are a tad hackneyed nowadays. Music ? No Sir, it often reminded me of the pathetic sound-effects in our Indian soaps.
Also, remember that we have had more than our mouthful of grotesque imagination in many movies in the last decade including the Lord Of Rings Trilogy, Transformers, Harry Potter series, Narnia, etc. Not all of them have been smash hits. Its come to a bend where you require more than just adapting an inspirational work of a famous author. There is nothing of the sort worth copyrighting here.
Many of the ideas used in the movie reminded me of the ’Colossus of Fantasy’, HP Lovecraft and his brilliantly vivid stories that he wrote almost a century ago. In ‘The Call of the Cthulhu’, Lovecraft underlines the assumption that mankind is lucky to be hyposensitive with respect to other cosmic/extraterrestrial lifeforms and therefore inable to correlate the various constituents/incidents that occur in the cosmos. The day our understanding/sensitivity improves, we would be knowing a lot which we may not be able digest easily. The idea of extra sensory perception is also the focal point of the scientific advances that Avatar illustrates and is based on.
If you have seen Aliens by Cameron, Avatar will probably disappoint you. It just has a good dose of imagination, nothing more. Nay, not even imagination, more of special effects. And sadly, given the tolerance that we have developed these days, this dose somehow isnt enough to give us a ’high’.
So if you are the kind like me who adores sci-fi/occult/theosophy/vivid imagination, you had better spend your money on buying up Lovecraft. In the event of you being unable to get an illustrated book, you can probably watch Avatar to help you wash it down.