Avatar

I watched Avatar yesterday. Was really impressed by the movie. Awesome animation! After coming home, I read the Wikipedia article on the movie, which quoted its director James Cameron as saying that though he had had the idea since the 90s, he could make the movie only now because the technology needed to catch up!

What appealed to me in this movie is also what makes me go in awe about good science fiction- the writer's imagination. It is a wondrous talent to be able to create a whole world just out of your own brain!

The movie is set on a distant moon Pandora which is inhabited by a humanoid species called the Na'vi. Now, while I admired the imagination of Cameron in thinking of concepts like the avatars, one-mind-in-two-bodies, each Na'vi having his own bird, hanging mountains etc, I also noticed that Pandora and the Na'vi were too much like the Earth and the humans respectively. The Na'vi have the same anatomy as the humans (the only exception being their tails. Someone in the movie calls them 'blue monkeys'), their blood is red too, they too feel the need to cover up their private parts, their females too have breasts and a softer voice, they too are organized into families and villages, in their society too, the chief is succeeded by his own son, and even, their women wear big ear studs! The ecosystem of Pandora also has trees and flowers and mountains and waterfalls and dogs and horses and hippos. The gravity too seems to be similar because the Na'vi do all the things in exactly the same manner as the humans on the earth.

Whereas that need not be the case at all. The life that inhabits a far-away planet or moon may be nothing more than microbes, but who may be so vicious that they make it impossible for humans to survive on their land. And that land itself may be so different that the human technology becomes redundant there.

What I am trying to say is that there is much greater scope for imagination for a story that is set in a faraway moon.

I saw Avatar as an allegory for imperialism and that is how I reacted to it. Because Pandora was so much like Earth, I saw it as Earth itself. And because the Na'vi were so much like humans and were victimised by invaders, I saw them as the indigenous populations of all non-European continents. The men in the movie then became the Imperialists and Colonists of Europe.

When we read history, we just read facts. A few days before, I was reading V S Naipaul's 'The loss of El Dorado', the central theme of which is ruthless colonialism. But when you watch a movie, you feel the pain of what happens.

From the beginning of the movie, our sympathies are with the innocent Na'vi. We fall in love with their idyllic life, their beautiful forests and their trusting hearts. So, when the marauding military planes burn their whole village, and blow up their sacred trees, we feel the horror of the act. I felt it. The Na'vi however do not get dispirited and mobilize support from other clans to fight the humans unitedly. The military commander of the humans reacts to this by launching a pre-emptive strike on them. These are the words he uses to inspire his men, "They are trying to terrorise us. But, we will fight terror with terror!" And all the men nod vigorously in support. How familiar that philosophy is to all of us today!

Because Avatar is a movie, the good-hearted Na'vi win in the end and send the evil humans back to where they came from and live happily ever after. They got so lucky only because it would have been terrible for us to see them getting so unfairly killed. In actual history, Colonialism won in every corner of the world and mercilessly wiped out the indigenous populations.

There's another thing. The ending is too optimistic. Just because the Na'vi have defeated the humans once doesn't mean the humans have given up their quest. The Na'vi have only won a battle. The war may just have begun. There is no reason why the humans would not attack them again. That perhaps is the realm of sequels.