Technomaly

By the time you finish reading this sentence, Avatar will have made another million dollars.

The high-tech fairy tale is already the fourth highest grossing film of all time, and will take the third place spot (Pirates of the Carribean: Dead Man’s Chest) within days.

Much has been written about the technology of Avatar – the hundreds of cameras used to capture live performances, the quarter billion special effects budget – but the interesting thing is that it’s an anti-technology film. Spoilers ahead.

The word “avatar” refers to the cloned natives of a distant planet whose resources we’re plundering. Humans can upload their consciousnesses into these bodies, and walk around as if they were the planet’s inhabitants, the Na’vi. It’s an interesting bit of wish fulfullment – if only we could warp into the bodies of Afghan’s or Iraqi’s, we’d be able to better understand them, right?

Well, wrong – the Na’vi hate these avatars. Turns out it’s not what what we look like, it’s how we act that bothers them! The message being: all the technology in the world isn’t going to convince people to like us.

In the film’s climactic final battle, helicopter gunships and mech-suited marines are overrun by flying beasts and charging rhinos. In our villain’s last moments, his mech-suit fails – both examples of the fragility of technology when faced with nature itself.

Finally, the film’s follow character, Jake Sully, chooses in the end to permanantly merge with his avatar through the magic of trees, which is a lot more poetic in the film itself. This final abandonment of humanity is also a rebuke of technology – he’s casting off all his human comforts and getting back to nature.

All in all, sharp ironies from a film whose construction exists entirely within a computer and that cost more money to make than the GDP of some countries.