Avatar (2009)

Avatar (2009)

6/10

Starring           

Sam Worthington

Zoe Saldana

Stephen Lang

Michelle Rodriguez

Sigourney Weaver

 

Directed by James Cameron                                           

 

I, for one, liked the movie Avatar, even though I believe the movie is not as great as many have carved it out to be. I think Cameron has made far better films than this.

Who else can beat Cameron’s highest-grossing movie, Titanic, but Cameron himself with his 2009 film Avatar? Cameron has a knack for always breaking barriers and setting new feats for others to follow, and he did so here in this film too. Other than the record-high production cost, Cameron used stereoscopic filmmaking to make the movie feel more real than it should.

This feeling the movie had led to one massive cult base, and that alone was the main power behind this film’s reign. The movie is written, produced, and directed by Cameron himself, and the massive cult following is the reason this movie is now the highest-grossing film of all time. It was beaten once in 2019 by Disney’s Avengers: Endgame, but it regained the title when Disney re-released the film in 2021 during the COVID pandemic.

We have people out there believing that such a place as Pandora exists and that Cameron has had one glimpse into the future.

The movie is set in the far future of the 22nd century, when humans are lacking new energy sources due to depleted resources on Earth. Humans have now been able to travel beyond the stars and have colonized a moon in the Alpha Centauri star system called Pandora. The aim is to mine a mineral called unobtanium, which is the new energy resource that humans rely on. The continued mining of the moon, as we humans always seem to overdo, is threatening the existence of the aliens living there, the Na'vi. The Na’vi are 10-foot-tall, blue-skinned, sapient humanoids. In order to explore Pandora, scientists use avatars, which are shaped like Na’vi and controlled by a genetically matched human from a safe place.

The main character in the movie is Jake (Sam Worthington), an ex-marine and paraplegic whose identical twin used to operate one of the avatars. Jake was assigned to protect Dr. Grace (Sigourney Weaver), the head of the avatar program, who is an advocate for the Na'vi and is working to establish peaceful relations between them and humans.

Unknown to Grace, Jake was given a second assignment to infiltrate the Na'vi and locate the hometree of the Na'vi, which sits upon a huge deposit of unobtanium. We soon learn through Grace that the tree and the Na'vi have a neural link, and destroying it would be the same as killing the Na'vi. Jake’s attempts to gather more information on the Na'vi lead to him meeting and falling for one of the Na'vi women, Neytiri (Zoe Saldana). She is the daughter of the leader of the clan, who is the focus of this movie.

When Disney bought Fox, they gained, along with their purchase, this film. Cameron had already been working with Fox to make (I think) three more Avatar movies, and Disney is still on board with the idea. I don’t know how many more Avatar movies Cameron is going to make, but the production cost for these movies is probably close to a billion.

What we do know is that many of the cast from this film will return for the sequels, though we don’t know the capacity of their presence in them. Cameron, for me, will forever be a revolutionary filmmaker, and for that reason, bankrolling the new Avatar movies will definitely not be a loss for Disney.

Even I, to be honest, will be seeing all of them, even though I rate this one a 6/10.