Avatar: The Truth in Reality

As everyone knows, James Cameron’s Avatar has become quite a sensation. His groundbreaking half animated, half real life movie has been sweeping the awards show this season and raking in incredible amounts of money in the theaters. It can easily be said that Avatar is one of the best pictures both animated and real life to come out in not only this year, but in the last decade to be sure. Cameron has shown the world how far computer animation has come. The technology to create his beautiful blue world took somewhere around fifteen years to develop. As I sat watching the movie, I myself was in awe. I felt as if I could reach out and touch this fantastical world. James Cameron creates more than a splendid blue planet that amazes the eye, but also challenges the mind. Even as a semi-animated action movie, the story is not without merit. The story certainly rings close to home. Cameron challenges the viewer to look not just on this fantastical world as a cinematic adventure that pulls us from reality and leaves us captivated by the graceful Na’vi’s of Pandora, but portrays a very real situation in our own lives. The race for resources affects people around the world in a shockingly identical way to the Na’vi people. The blatant truth rings clearly throughout the movie. As a view, I was almost ashamed to see the direct parallels between Cameron’s Pandora and the world we live in. How often we overlook the worlds and lives of people we consider ourselves distanced from in the quest for natural resources. The ethnocentric attitude of the Americans in the movie was alarming yet a lesson, an understanding of truth. Needless to say, Cameron has taken his viewer on a cinematic adventure that amazes and dazzles, yet leaves the viewer with an important message to think about.