The Avatar alternate body/life fascinates more than anything else

Rating: 10/10 (10 March 2010)

The story is pedestrian, the characters simple, both stolen from several obvious sources. To me it doesn't matter.
Two things stand out for me in this movie: visual spectacle and the very idea of an Avatar alternate life. The visual spectacle is obvious even to the most jaded film goer. What most people miss, maybe even those involved in the film, is the very idea of the Avatar life/reality. There is evidence that sub-atomic particles (wave-vicles) may exist together/separately in various alternate realities at the same time. What if that's also true of us in the macro world? What if we can connect with our alternate bodies in an alternate life/reality? What if we do that in some of our dreams every night? Alternate bodies/lives are not completely new in the movies. The Matrix is the best example. However, that was a digital world with digital human bodies living in a human like world, however enhanced. Surrogates, a newer movie, is another example. This time the bodies are in our everyday world, but robotic and enhanced. In both cases, the main characters exist in a world more or less as we know it now, but with enhanced abilities. They manipulate that world, but never really connect with it.
In Avatar, the bodies are humanoid, but alien, living in an alien world, with a connection to that world profoundly different than we normally experience. Avatar isn't just an enhanced human, manipulative experience, but an alternative reality experience. The characters slip into and out of that experience, as perhaps we really do in dreams and daydreams.
Like particles, perhaps we are also waves (wavicles), perhaps we connect to other realities, selves, bodies. It's as if our sense of self and our bodies are but one bead on a string of beads. All connected, yet normally not consciously aware of the other beads. Avatar evoked, and is still evoking, that possibility for me: our/my overall connection to selves in other realities/times/places which aren't places.
Avatar's Pandora is certainly a place which isn't a place. It isn't real, by our definition of reality. It's fantasy like Santa Claus or to some, like God...any god.
Yet what is reality but that which we influence and in turn influences us? A simple example: many people think that small breed dogs behave as they do (nervous, yipping, snapping, cowardly, etc.) because that's they way the breed behaves. Cesar Milan points out that most small breeds behave badly, not because that's the reality of the breed, but rather because humans make them that way by not respecting their true nature, their true reality: animal first, dog second, breed last. The dogs become a bit crazed because of their humans NOT because that's their dog reality. What if the world as we know it is NOT because it is that way, but rather as we have altered it, both externally and in our minds? Avatar suggests a new interaction with reality, through new eyes. As adults, not just as children. Fiction influences us, sometimes more than fact. But is it just fiction? Is it a suggestion of realities only poorly perceived on the string of beads? Avatar opens the bonds keeping the beads, the worlds, apart. Just a little. It's something I hope breaks wide open for me to be born again into a new expansive life/reality on the string of beads of my realities.
Even though I know that hope is just fantasy.