Avatar and How We Consume or Fail to Consume a Movie

By Christopher Barr │POSTED ON JULY 09, 2015

Avatar was a visual spectacle that captured the hearts and minds of millions of people and then just went away.  Why?  Avatar was about a paraplegic former marine who was brought into negotiate the relocation of an alien species.  His twin brother died so he was asked to replace him as a Na’vi human hybrid called an “Avatar” in order to explore a forested habitable moon orbiting a massive planet composed mainly of gas.

It’s the year 2154 and Jake Sully is assigned to learn from the indigenous alien species, the Na’vi, learning their customs and beliefs about their world and their place in that world.  He is also covertly studying their infrastructure for a potential military attack on them.  Underneath their village exists a valuable mineral called Unobtanium that a militarized company called The Resources Development Administration, which Sully works for, wants badly. 

The Na’vi are these 10 feet tall, blue-skinned, sapient humanoids who live is this tranquil harmony, co-existing perfectly with their natural surroundings while worshipping a mother goddess they call Eywa.  The Avatar Program was set up to explore and adapt to Pandora’s biosphere.  Sully integrates himself as one of these Na’vi and falls for the female Na’vi, Neytiri that is assigned to initiate him to their society.  Sully falls in love with her and her people’s naturalistic way of life.

While Sully learns all these wonderful customs, the military plot an attack against them to get that mineral.  A war breaks out and Sully takes the side of nature and fights for the trees, the land and the people living there in harmony with it. 

Avatar is a cautionary tale about how we are killing our planet as we steam roll over ‘lesser people’ to get what resource we feel we want.  It’s about how the little man can fight back and win.  It’s an age-old story about good versus evil and for the most part has all but been forgotten.

Avatar is the most successful movie ever made but yet it never became a pop culture phenomena.  It grossed almost double than The Avengers, which is stapled firmly into the collective conscious of the pop culture population.  Iron Man, Captain America, Thor and the Hulk are everywhere.  They are on t-shirts, bumper stickers, tattoos, Coke bottles and are discussed in internet debates.  

Star Wars was the explosion that started most of what we identify as pop culture these days.  It might be from a galaxy far far away but here on earth, in the first world, we have anthropomorphized these aliens (yes Luke Skywalker and Han Solo would be classified as aliens) to exist with us in our 3 dimensional space.  We’ve made them tangible, we’ve reversed-engineered the virtual nature of their genesis, the movie screen.  We’ve invented Jedi religions and cosplayed them to death at comic-cons.  We so desperately wanted them to be real because what is real to us isn’t as exciting.

We 3-dimensionalized the Terminator, the Back to the Future series, Harry Potter and the Lord of the Rings but Avatar has been left with little to no cultural significance.  Unlike Avatar these other movies have become these everlasting cultural memes that have weaved themselves into the very fabric of modern first world society.

Avatar became a cultural sound bite of sorts.  It visually stunned people and captured their imagination like in a scene in the movie where a ship flies past floating mountains, but yet it was forgettable.  It can be blamed on all the 3D movies we are all subjected to today but what else has it done.  How can something be so enormously successful, more than anything else, and yet be all but forgotten?

Avatar wasn’t a horrible movie, it entertained and even had an environmental message, which was likely its gift but also its curse.  Environmental issues never happen in the Marvel universe, the Harry Potter universe, the Back to the Future universe, or the Lord of the Rings universe.  Our actual environmental plight on this planet is very real and is sadly being fought by very little.  Avatar attempted to juxtapose American environmentally unfriendly intervention on various nations around the world.  Most movie-goers lost that sentiment because they have been systematically trained to not process metaphor.  For them the crisis is fictional and sadly disposable after they leave the theater.

Philosophically the movie mildly explored the body and mind issue, Sully suffered from out of body fatigue.  He was loving being in the avatar and using his legs but was also losing parts of himself while in the avatar.  Falling in love and exploring this incredible world certainly didn’t help him reconcile with his virtual experience.  

In the end James Cameron, the movie’s director, achieved what he wanted.  His technology is now out in the world, his movie grossed just under 3 billion dollars worldwide, he’s the ‘king of the world’ again, but what of this legacy?  The question here is should we value something solely based on its pop culture significance and longevity?  Was Avatar a movie to be seen as a lesson to learn from or simply a bumper sticker throw-away meme?  Possibly more time will tell as all the sequels are released but for now the big question is 'do we really need anymore of these environmental lessons'?  I would think we absolutely do.