Avatar takes second place in the overall box office charts
Posted by The Skyliner on January 27th, 2010
Jessicah Peters
Staff Writer
Blue people, bright colors, and “blockbuster” are Avatar summarized. Writer and director James Cameron, famous for directing Titanic, the Terminator series and many other well known movies, took 12 years to develop Avatar.
According to IMDb.com, Cameron wrote an 80-page script back in 1995 and the movie was originally labeled “Project 880.” He waited for advancements in technology to produce the movie and was the first to use photo-real CGI, computer graphics imagery.
The Avatar program made clones of the American people to reach and study the culture of the Na’vi people of the distant world, Pandora. The Na’vi people are blue and giants compared to humans. They believe in a god named Eywa, located in the center of a tree, who they chant to for help.
Since Cameron did portray the Na’vi people as having one god, a correlation between the Christian faith and Eywa can be found. Christians believe in one God, whom we cannot see. However, we can see the Creator in His creation, plants and human beings. The Na’vi have a god they cannot see, but the people see this god in the creation, such as the animals and flowers falling from the huge tree, the center of Eywa.
Avatar features many well known actors and actresses. Sam Worthington plays the main character, Jake Sully, who is a crippled marine replacing his deceased twin brother on the crew of the Avatar Program. Zoe Saldana plays Neytiri, the Na’vi princess who saves Jake’s life. Sigourney Weaver, who has not appeared in a James Cameron movie since Aliens, is Dr. Grace Augustine, the scientist who leads the Avatar Program.
Originally, Jake only agrees to participate in the Avatar Program because the military has agreed to pay for the cost of his legs to be fixed, but Jake begins to love the world of Pandora. “Everything is backwards now, like out there is the true world, and in here is the dream,” he says in a video log.
The colors of Avatar are unreal. The movie begins by showing the vast green lands of Pandora, and the colors only become brighter as the movie progresses. The flowers and vibrant glow of the grass have the effect of making the audience long to touch them. Because of the use of photo-real CGI and other technologies that make it fascinating and intense, Avatar has become the biggest blockbuster since Star Wars.
Politically, Avatar gives people something to ponder. In the past and currently, oil companies are bringing in ex-marines to tribes in Malaysia and Ecuador to “help with the people of the land,” but more importantly to secure the money of the shareholders. These people will even go as far as genocide to bring in the profits, something similar to how the marines in Avatar reacted to the little rock, unobtanium, which was to sell for millions.
Cameron did an amazing job correlating the Avatar world and the world today. Avatar is definitely one of the best movies of 2009.
Avatar is rated PG-13.
Tags: Spring 2010, Vol. 110 - Issue 1