Something Alien Yet So Familiar

Something Alien Yet So Familiar

By Prospero Pulma Jr.

Marrying cutting-edge CGI technology with an engaging plot populated by likable characters is tall order in filmmaking. The current rule is for blockbusters to dazzle the audiences with over-the-top special effects that will distract them from flimsy plots and one-dimensional characters and for art films to bust their patrons' intellect when they ponder on their plots and the protagonists' motives such that watching a Cannes winner is comparable to studying a semester of Plato and Aristotle.

An exception to the parade of lowbrow CGI-heavy films and highbrow low-tech philosophical film fest winners (definitely not the Metro Manila Film Festival) is James Cameron's Avatar because it initially overwhelms the senses, well at least the eyes and ears, by taking moviegoers on the wildest safari adventure on the silver or IMAX screen, complete with very, very exotic flora, fauna, and natives, before it leaves the audience with questions about man’s insatiable greed.

Avatar begins with Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) heading to Pandora, an extrasolar moon that is largely habitable except for its toxic air, as a last-minute replacement for his twin brother who killed himself before embarking on a vital and expensive exploration project. A wheelchair-bound Marine who has few prospects outside of the military, he bites the offer of taking his brother's place, hoping that the end of one life will be the beginning of another.

On Pandora, Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) reluctantly accepts Jake into her team that is studying the moon's flora and fauna, as well as forging cordial relations between the Na'vi and the Sky People, the Na'vi's name for humans, upon the orders of Parker Selfridge (Giovanni Ribissi), the local honcho of Resources Development Administration that is mining for Unobtanium. Jake links up with his Avatar, a human-Na'vi hybrid controlled by an operator, and he thoroughly enjoys the freedom of moving independently again.

On his first trip with the researchers, he is separated from the group when a herbivorous Titanotheres and a carnivorous Thanator attack him. Jake escapes from the Thanator but battles Viperwolves in the forest. Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), a Na'vi hunter princess, rescues him and rebukes him for being a baby, but takes him to her clan, the Omaticayan, after she receives omens from their diety, Eyra.

The Na'vi are naturally hostile to Jake but Mo'at (CCH Pounder), Neytiri's mother and apparently a priestess, charges Neytiri with teaching Jake the Na'vi's life. As Jake learns more of the Na'vi's culture, particularly their immense respect for nature, he begins to wonder if Unobtanium was worth destroying Pandora's ecosystem, especially the Omaticayan's Hometree that sits on the moon’s largest Unobtanium deposit.

Back in the base, Grace envies him for going further than she had been, and Col. Quatrich (Stephene Lang , the security chief who recruited Jake into a covert recon operation in exchange for sponsoring his spine surgery, presses Jake for new information. Jakes, battered inside by his budding love for Neytiri and her home, wavers in his mission, expressing his growing affinity to Pandora by stating in his video log, “Out here is the real world...in here is the dream.”

Jake finally casts his fate with the Na’vi when he attacks a mining vehicle. Col. Quatrich arrests Jake and launches an operation to drive the natives out of their home. With Parker Selfridge’s permission, Jake and Grace last attempt to convince the Na’vi to leave the Hometree fails. Many Na’vi die when they fight back, and this time, Grace and Norm Spellman (Joel Moore) join Jake in the stockade. Trudy Chacon (Michelle Rodriguez) breaks them out of prison but Grace is fatally wounded in their escape.

Jake, in Avatar form, returns to the Na’vi mounted on a tamed Toruk, a feared and revered flying predator. Neytiri accepts him back and Tsu’ tey (Laz Alonso) allows him to speak. Jake rallies the Omaticayan and inspires other Na’vi tribes to join him for the final battle.

In the battle, the RDA forces nearly rout the Na’vi until Eyra, whom Jake pleaded to help them, unleashes the Titanotheres, Thanator, Viperwolves, and banshee on them and annihilates Col. Quaritch’s army. After a savage fight, Col. Quaritch, in an AMP suit, kills Neytiri’s Thanator and pins her underneath the animal. Jake arrives and fights the Colonel but it is Neytiri who kills him with arrows.

With the exception of Jake and a few others who volunteered to remain, Parker Selfridge and the other survivors are sent back to Earth. Jake finally decides to remain in his Avatar form permanently through a ritual that will transfer his consciousness to his Avatar body, the same ceremony that failed to save Grace.
Running approximately three hours, Avatar may feel like an overly stretched science fiction flick, but the passage of time is barely noticed as one watches Jake evolve from a Marine who signed in to earn money for his rehab, very much like the mercenaries he despised in the beginning of the film, to someone who truly cares for people, not people, but aliens to the point that he is willing to abandon his earthly body and become a Na’vi.

Jake’s physical helplessness against the RDA thugs contrasts with his task of carrying the weight of two worlds on his shoulders, one world stripped of its natural beauty but still hungry for resources and the other still virginal because of the Na’vi’s immense respect for their home. Given with the nearly impossible task of preventing war from erupting between man and the Na’vi as the former lusts for Unobtanium as a Thanator lusts for its prey and the latter determined to fight war machines with arrows in defense of their home, Jake must choose between his loyalty to his race and its boundless greed or follow his human nature that dictates compassion for the weak.

For all the Titanotheres, Thanators, Viperwolves, banshees, Toruk, and a host of exotic flora paraded by James Cameroon that elevated Avatar to the Mt. Olympus of science fiction filmmaking, the film is strangely familiar. Just imagine Pandora to be some still pristine but resource-rich spot on Earth, the Na’vi as the locals, the RDA as a soulless corporate entity, and Jake Sully as the corporate henchman who switches sides, and you will see that Avatar feels more like a documentary than a sci-fi flick.