Avatar (2009 film)
Avatar (marketed as James Cameron's Avatar) is a 2009 epic science fiction film directed, written, co-produced, and co-edited by James Cameron. The cast includes Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver, Michelle Rodriguez, Stephen Lang, Joel David Moore, Giovanni Ribisi, CCH Pounder, Dileep Rao, Matt Gerald, Laz Alonso, and Wes Studi[6] It is the first installment in the Avatar franchise. It is set in the mid-22nd century, when humans are colonizing Pandora, a lush habitable moon of a gas giant in the Alpha Centauri star system, in order to mine the valuable mineral unobtanium.[a] The expansion of the mining colony threatens the continued existence of a local tribe of Na'vi, a humanoid species indigenous to Pandora. The title of the film refers to a genetically engineered Na'vi body operated from the brain of a remotely located human that is used to interact with the natives of Pandora.[10]
"James Cameron's Avatar" redirects here. For the media franchise that began with this film, see Avatar (franchise).Avatar
James Cameron
- James Cameron
- Jon Landau
- Stephen Rivkin
- John Refoua
- James Cameron
20th Century Fox[2]
- December 10, 2009 (London)
- December 18, 2009 (United States)
162 minutes[3]
English
$237 million[4]
$2.923 billion[5]
Development of Avatar began in 1994, when James Cameron wrote an 80-page treatment for the film.[11][12] Filming was supposed to take place after the completion of Cameron's 1997 film Titanic, for a planned release in 1999;[13] however, according to Cameron, the necessary technology was not yet available to achieve his vision of the film.[14] Work on the language of the Na'vi began in 2005, and Cameron began developing the screenplay and fictional universe in early 2006.[15][16] Avatar was officially budgeted at $237 million, due to the groundbreaking array of new visual effects Cameron achieved in cooperation with Weta Digital in Wellington.[4] Other estimates put the cost at between $280 million and $310 million for production and at $150 million for promotion.[17][18][19] The film made extensive use of new motion capture filming techniques and was released for traditional viewing, 3D viewing (using the RealD 3D, Dolby 3D, XpanD 3D, and IMAX 3D formats), and "4D" experiences in selected South Korean theaters.[20]
Avatar premiered on December 10, 2009, in London and was released in the United States on December 18, 2009, to positive reviews. Critics highly praised its groundbreaking visual effects, though the story received some criticism for being derivative.[21][22][23] During its theatrical run, the film broke several box office records, including becoming the highest-grossing film of all time. In July 2019, this position was overtaken by Avengers: Endgame, but with subsequent re-releases, beginning with China in March 2021, it returned to becoming the highest-grossing film since then.[24] Adjusted for inflation, Avatar is the second-highest-grossing movie of all time, only behind Gone with the Wind, with a total of a little more than $3.5 billion. It also became the first film to gross more than $2 billion[25] and the best-selling video title of 2010 in the United States. Avatar was nominated for nine awards at the 82nd Academy Awards, winning three, and received numerous other accolades. The success of the film also led to electronics manufacturers releasing 3D televisions[26] and caused 3D films[27] to increase in popularity. Its success led to the Avatar franchise, which includes the sequels Avatar: The Way of Water (2022), Avatar 3 (2025), Avatar 4 (2029), and Avatar 5 (2031).
Plot
In 2154, Earth suffers from resource exhaustion and ecological collapse. The Resources Development Administration (RDA) mines the valuable mineral unobtanium on Pandora, a lush habitable moon of Polyphemus, a gas giant in the Alpha Centauri star system. Pandora, whose atmosphere is inhospitable to humans, is inhabited by the Na'vi, 10-foot-tall (3.0 m), blue-skinned, sapient humanoids that live in harmony with nature.
To explore Pandora, genetically matched human scientists control Na'vi-human hybrids called "avatars". Paraplegic former Marine Jake Sully is sent to Pandora to replace his deceased identical twin, who had signed up to be an operator. Avatar Program head Dr. Grace Augustine considers Jake inadequate but accepts him as an operator. While escorting the avatars of Grace and Dr. Norm Spellman, Jake's avatar is attacked by Pandoran wildlife, and he flees into the forest, where he is rescued by the Na'vi princess Neytiri. Suspicious of Jake, she takes him to her clan. Neytiri's mother, Mo'at, the clan's spiritual leader, orders her daughter to initiate Jake into their society.
Colonel Miles Quaritch, head of RDA's security force, promises Jake that the company will restore the use of his legs if he provides information about the Na'vi and their gathering place, the giant Hometree, under which is a rich deposit of unobtanium. Learning of this, Grace transfers herself, Jake, and Norm to an outpost. Jake and Neytiri fall in love as Jake is initiated into the tribe, and they choose each other as mates. When Jake attempts to disable a bulldozer threatening a sacred Na'vi site, Administrator Parker Selfridge orders Hometree destroyed.
Despite Grace's argument that destroying Hometree would damage the biological neural network that encompasses all Pandoran life, Selfridge gives Jake and Grace one hour to convince the Na'vi to evacuate. Jake confesses that he was a spy and the Na'vi take him and Grace captive. Quaritch's soldiers destroy Hometree, killing many, including Neytiri's father, the clan chief. Mo'at frees Jake and Grace, but they are detached from their avatars and imprisoned by Quaritch's forces. Pilot Trudy Chacón, disgusted by Quaritch's brutality, airlifts Jake, Grace, and Norm to Grace's outpost, but during the escape Grace is shot and fatally wounded.
Jake regains the Na'vi's trust by connecting his mind to that of the Toruk, a dragon-like creature feared and revered by the Na'vi. Supported by new chief Tsu'tey, Jake unites the clan, telling them to gather all the clans to battle the RDA. Quaritch organizes a strike against the Tree of Souls to demoralize the Na'vi. Before the battle, Jake prays to the Na'vi deity Eywa via a neural connection with the Tree of Souls.
Tsu'tey and Trudy are among the battle's heavy casualties. The Na'vi are rescued when Pandoran wildlife unexpectedly join the attack and overwhelm the humans, which Neytiri interprets as Eywa answering Jake's prayer. Quaritch, in a Amplified Mobility Platform suit (AMP), escapes his crashed aircraft and breaks open the avatar link unit containing Jake's human body, exposing it to Pandora's poisonous atmosphere. As Quaritch prepares to slit Jake's avatar's throat, he is killed by Neytiri, who saves Jake from suffocation, seeing his human form for the first time.
The RDA is expelled from Pandora, and Jake is permanently transferred into his avatar with the aid of the Tree of Souls.
Additionally, Alicia Vela-Bailey appears, uncredited, as Ikeyni, the leader of the Tayrangi clan, Saeyla, one of the young Na'vi hunters who accompany Jake during his Iknimaya and a harassed blonde woman in a bar that Jake defends. Vela-Bailey served as the stunt double for Zoe Saldana and would later portray Zdinarsk in Avatar: The Way of Water. Terry Notary, who performed stunts as well, plays the Banshees via motion capture.
Reception
Critical response
On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, 82% of 337 reviews are positive, and the average rating is 7.5/10. The site's consensus reads: "It might be more impressive on a technical level than as a piece of storytelling, but Avatar reaffirms James Cameron's singular gift for imaginative, absorbing filmmaking."[204] On Metacritic—which assigns a weighted mean score—the film has a score of 83 out of 100 based on 38 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".[205] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A" on an A+ to F scale. Every demographic surveyed was reported to give this rating. These polls also indicated that the main draw of the film was its use of 3D.[206]
Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times called the film "extraordinary", and gave it four stars out of four. "Watching Avatar, I felt sort of the same as when I saw Star Wars in 1977," he said, adding that like Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, the film "employs a new generation of special effects" and it "is not simply a sensational entertainment, although it is that. It's a technical breakthrough. It has a flat-out Green and anti-war message".[207]
A. O. Scott of At The Movies also compared his viewing of the film to the first time he viewed Star Wars and he said "although the script is a little bit ... obvious," it was "part of what made it work".[208][209] Todd McCarthy of Variety praised the film, saying: "The King of the World sets his sights on creating another world entirely in Avatar, and it's very much a place worth visiting."[210] Kirk Honeycutt of The Hollywood Reporter gave the film a positive review. "The screen is alive with more action and the soundtrack pops with more robust music than any dozen sci-fi shoot-'em-ups you care to mention," he stated.[211] Peter Travers of Rolling Stone awarded Avatar a three-and-a-half out of four star rating, and wrote in his print review: "It extends the possibilities of what movies can do. Cameron's talent may just be as big as his dreams."[212] Richard Corliss of Time thought that the film was "the most vivid and convincing creation of a fantasy world ever seen in the history of moving pictures."[213] Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times thought the film has "powerful" visual accomplishments but "flat dialogue" and "obvious characterization".[214] James Berardinelli of ReelViews praised the film and its story, giving it four out of four stars. He wrote: "In 3-D, it's immersive – but the traditional film elements – story, character, editing, theme, emotional resonance, etc. – are presented with sufficient expertise to make even the 2-D version an engrossing 2+1⁄2-hour experience."[215]
Avatar's underlying social and political themes attracted attention. Armond White of the New York Press wrote that Cameron used "villainous American characters" to "misrepresent facets of militarism, capitalism, and imperialism".[216][217] Russell D. Moore of The Christian Post concluded that "propaganda exists in the film" and stated "If you can get a theater full of people in Kentucky to stand and applaud the defeat of their country in war, then you've got some amazing special effects."[218] Adam Cohen of The New York Times was more positive about the film, calling its anti-imperialist message "a 22nd-century version of the American colonists vs. the British, India vs. the Raj, or Latin America vs. United Fruit".[219] Ross Douthat of The New York Times opined that the film is "Cameron's long apologia for pantheism [...] Hollywood's religion of choice for a generation now",[220] while Saritha Prabhu of The Tennessean called the film a "misportrayal of pantheism and Eastern spirituality in general",[221] and Maxim Osipov of The Hindustan Times, on the contrary, commended the film's message for its overall consistency with the teachings of Hinduism in the Bhagavad Gita.[222] Annalee Newitz of io9 concluded that Avatar is another film that has the recurring "fantasy about race" whereby "some white guy" becomes the "most awesome" member of a non-white culture.[223] Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune called Avatar "the season's ideological Rorschach blot",[224] while Miranda Devine of The Sydney Morning Herald thought that "It [was] impossible to watch Avatar without being banged over the head with the director's ideological hammer."[225] Nidesh Lawtoo believed that an essential, yet less visible social theme that contributed to Avatar's success concerns contemporary fascinations with virtual avatars and "the transition from the world of reality to that of virtual reality".[226]
Critics and audiences have cited similarities with other films, literature or media, describing the perceived connections in ways ranging from simple "borrowing" to outright plagiarism. Ty Burr of The Boston Globe called it "the same movie" as Dances with Wolves.[227] Like Dances with Wolves, Avatar has been characterized as being a "white savior" movie, in which a "backwards" native people is impotent without the leadership of a member of the invading white culture.[228][229] Parallels to the concept and use of an avatar are in Poul Anderson's 1957 novelette "Call Me Joe", in which a paralyzed man uses his mind from orbit to control an artificial body on Jupiter.[230][231] Cinema audiences in Russia have noted that Avatar has elements in common with the 1960s Noon Universe novels by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, which are set in the 22nd century on a forested world called Pandora with a sentient indigenous species called the Nave.[232] Various reviews have compared Avatar to the films FernGully: The Last Rainforest,[233][234] Pocahontas[235] and The Last Samurai.[236] NPR's Morning Edition has compared the film to a montage of tropes, with one commentator stating that Avatar was made by "mixing a bunch of film scripts in a blender".[237] Gary Westfahl wrote that "the science fiction story that most closely resembles Avatar has to be Ursula Le Guin's novella The Word for World Is Forest (1972), another epic about a benevolent race of alien beings who happily inhabit dense forests while living in harmony with nature until they are attacked and slaughtered by invading human soldiers who believe that the only good gook is a dead gook".[231] The science fiction writer and editor Gardner Dozois said that along with the Anderson and Le Guin stories, the "mash-up" included Alan Dean Foster's 1975 novel, Midworld.[238] Some sources saw similarities to the artwork of Roger Dean, which features fantastic images of dragons and floating rock formations.[239][240] In 2013, Dean sued Cameron and Fox, claiming that Pandora was inspired by 14 of his images. Dean sought damages of $50m.[241] Dean's case was dismissed in 2014, and The Hollywood Reporter noted that Cameron had won multiple Avatar idea theft cases.[242]
Avatar received compliments from filmmakers, with Steven Spielberg praising it as "the most evocative and amazing science-fiction movie since Star Wars" and others calling it "audacious and awe inspiring", "master class", and "brilliant". Noted art director-turned-filmmaker Roger Christian is also a noted fan of the film.[243] On the other hand, Duncan Jones said: "It's not in my top three James Cameron films. ... [A]t what point in the film did you have any doubt what was going to happen next?".[244] For French filmmaker Luc Besson, Avatar opened the doors for him to now create an adaptation of the graphic novel series Valérian and Laureline that technologically supports the scope of its source material, with Besson even throwing his original script in the trash and redoing it after seeing the film.[245] TIME ranked Avatar number 3 in their list of "The 10 Greatest Movies of the Millennium (Thus Far)"[246] also earning it a spot on the magazine's All-Time 100 list,[247] and IGN listed Avatar as number 22 on their list of the top 25 Sci-Fi movies of all time.[248]
Legacy
Despite the film's financial and critical success, some journalists have questioned Avatar's cultural impact.[b] In 2014, Scott Mendelson of Forbes said the film had been "all but forgotten", citing the lack of merchandising, a fandom for the film, or any long-enduring media franchise, and further stated that he believed most general audiences could not remember any of the film's details, such as the names of its characters or actors in the cast. Mendelson argued Avatar's only achievement of note to be its popularization of 3D cinema. Despite this, he still felt it was a quality film, saying, "A great blockbuster movie can just be a great blockbuster movie without capturing the lunchbox market."[315] He further reflected and reversed his stance in 2022 after the box office success of the re-release, saying, "The very things that made Avatar sometimes feel like a 'forgotten blockbuster' have inspired a skewed renewed nostalgia for its singular existence. It was just a movie, an original auteur-specific movie that prioritized top-shelf filmmaking and clockwork plotting over quotable dialogue and memes."[321]
Some have questioned if there is an audience for the film's planned sequels, believing there to be a lack of interest in the face of the multiple delays of their release dates.[318][319][322] Writing for The Escapist, Darren Mooney acknowledged that the film had not been broadly remembered in the pop cultural subconscious and had not found a fandom in the same sense as many other popular media, but argued that this was not a negative point, saying, "its defining legacy is the insistence that it lacks a legacy."[323]
In 2022, in response to the trailer for Avatar's upcoming sequel and the film's re-release, journalists again questioned the cultural relevance of the film, particularly Patrick Ryan of USA Today, who said the film had "curiously left almost no pop-culture footprint".[324][325] In contrast, Bilge Ebiri of Vulture called others' opinions that the film had left no cultural impact "narrow-minded" and said that the film still held up well.[326] A detailed overview of the Avatar franchise was reported in The New York Times in December of that year.[327]
