Accents
The allure of Avatar
SACRAMENTO, California, US, Jan.9—The chill of winter was no match to the crowd’s determination to get to the ticket counter of the IMAX Esquire Theater for the Avatar show time. The line continued to lengthen viewed from inside the theater’s waiting room where we were cozily ensconced. My daughter Raileen had the foresight to purchase tickets online to assure seats for us. It was a weekend and sale was hot. People who couldn’t make it to the 3:30 p.m. show went their separate ways or bought for the evening schedule.
What is this movie that is expected to top all other films in the box office till? What’s behind this huge grosser, already nearing a billion sale? Is it the animation that raised the bar for special-effects? Not being a movie aficionado, I can’t remember when I last wore 3-D glasses that bestow full impact—the depth, breadth, and height of a story. It is said production cost of the movie was $300 million, and Avatar, as of this writing, has already tripled that amount in sales. One movie reviewer commented on the theme of the “clash of cultures,” common enough in many a science-fiction film and no guarantee as a crowd-drawer.
David Brooks of The New York Times discerned the White Messiah fable. Says Brooks: “Every age produces its own sort of fables, and our age seems to have produced the White Messiah fable. This is the oft-repeated story about a manly young adventurer who goes into the wilderness in search of thrills and profit. But, once there, he meets the native people and finds that they are noble and spiritual and pure. And so he emerges as their Messiah, leading them on a righteous crusade against his own rotten civilization… It rests on the stereotype that white people are rationalist and technocratic while colonial victims are spiritual and athletic. It rests on the assumption that nonwhites need the White Messiah to lead their crusades…”
The fellow beside me (who else but the significant other) viewed Avatar on a different light. Activists and progressives like Rudy are likely to go back to history to show how our country had its own flourishing civilization even before the white man came to our shores. Rudy saw the undercurrent as to how foreign exploration redounds to exploitation. The 2154 setting repeatedly appears on the screen to stress a far-away time in the distant future. A country’s resources have depleted, and it must explore—a less offensive term than exploit—other lands for its needs. Planet Pandora is the answer. It has Unobtanium, a handful of which will provide energy worth $20 million. The mission is for ex-Marine Jake Sully (Sam Worthington, not your popular Hollywood actor) to make way on planet Pandora for the mining of the said superconductor.
In his Avatar body, Jake is charmed by Pandora, a Garden of Eden imagined from biblical pages. A forest primeval delights Jake who, with the curiosity of a child, finds the flora puffing off at the touch of his fingertips. Young and old alike will gape at the animations. Creatures that make you cower as they rush forward in 3-D projections, mighty birds that could down a helicopter, horses with wings, trees vines, and floating mountains. Fancy me so close to a translucent jellyfish-like spirit that hovered in the rich vegetations. I wished then it would perch on my head so I would thus engulf Pandora’s Na’vi people love for nature, their reverence for the Tree of the Souls, their understanding of the interconnectedness of creations. The movie cheers for the environmentalists, too.
The Avatar environment and the precious Unobtanium deposit it contains are not the only attractions for Jake. More than that, he falls in love with Neytiri, the Na’vi princess. Theirs is love pure, simple, tender. “I see you” they utter for each other, goes beyond the physical. It is soul mate meeting soul mate. Love always wins, don’t you think? Especially in the box office, one might say. Insert the love theme be it in action, adventure, drama, comedy or tragedy, and love will always win the day. Thus Avatar, despite the pre-conceived violence and clash of cultures, is a feel-good movie, hence for general patronage, therefore attractive to a wide audience, grossing $900 million as of this writing, and counting.
The undertone can’t be glossed over: how one country invades another in search of raw materials with Big Business playing a major role. In the movie, it is the RDA (Resources Development Administration). The war factories of the huge military-industrial complex incessantly hum with the manufacture of weapons. Meanwhile, soldiers die. The natives die. What the heck, war is good for business, for the “corporate evil-doers” and their vested interests. Nonetheless, try as they might, firepower cannot subdue a people determined to defend their homeland against all odds, opined the fellow beside me to which I say amen. I am thinking Viet Nam.
When Col. Quaritch, the head of the expedition, called the Na’vis “blue monkeys,” the fellow beside me (Rudy again) remarked how in the long past we Filipinos were belittled by the whites as “brown monkeys.” Again I say amen, yes, denigration most unfair whether fictional or not! The colonel shouts at Jake, “How does it feel to betray your own race?” In his Avatar self, Jake has moral ascendancy. He stands on a high moral ground juxtaposed against immoral, human greed typified by Quaritch.
The character of Grace, the scientist in the Pandora exploration, is to be admired for her stand: collaborate and share. What all scientists’ standpoint should be, for that matter. The spirit of collaboration and sharing and the reply to the racism jab, I find in a quote from writer/director James Cameron: “[The film] asks us to open our eyes and truly see others, respecting them even though they are different, in the hope that we may find a way to prevent conflict and live more harmoniously on this world. I hardly think that is a racist message.”
Indeed, live and let live, and not live and let die. (Email: lagoc@hargray.com)
