Avatar, an Alien World with a Message

Avatar is not just a technically brilliant animation movie that could give an out-of-the-world experience to the audience. The brilliance lies beyond its great special effects and its grand budget. It lies in its ability to capture the essence of the universal truth that is beyond the comprehension of many humans. In fact, the specialty of the movie is hardly about its overwhelming graphics. The USP of the movie is its underlying emotional quotient that would connect well with the environmentalists, nature lovers and people who stand against oppression of any form.

The movie is about the larger issue of the human selfishness that is destroying the entire world to its crumbles. It is about the overpowering majority and their oppression against the minority, whose souls are soaked in the elixir of nature. It’s simple. The Na’vi tribe lives in harmony with nature in an alien planet called Pandora. And there we enter, humans, to capture their precious resource. And how do we that? Wage a war against them. Destroy the nature, their lives and the planet and run back with the resource to save your dying planet.

This plot involving aliens is definitely not alien to us. Because, it’s a universal problem that every country in this world would have seen during their years of development. Closer home, we have been witness to many of the tribes and aadivasis being literally driven out of their own homes for a larger purpose, that is, for the benefit of the majority of the population. How many dams, multi storeyed IT buildings and shopping complexes have been built around our country over their destroyed lives and homes?

There is something deeper the movie talks about. The connection with nature. How humans chose to ignore the harmony between their species and nature! How it is important not to play with that ethereal connection of harmony, for it wreaks only havoc. When the heroine, a Na’vi herself, refuses to accept the thanks form the hero, as saving him has cost the lives of so many wild dogs, there is something that should snap in each of us. It should take us to the truths of our selfishness, far into the dark spaces of Jim Corbett park and Sunderabans Islands. Did you get it? If many of us not have wriggled in our seats with a sense of guilt, probably it is an indication that the world has come to an end because this is a proof that humans have gone far beyond in their utter selfishness. The heroine drills a message into the male protagonist’s human head that if he had chosen to understand nature and not have provoked it, he would have escaped the ire of the wild dogs. And since, he hasn’t done it, he became the victims of their feral attack which had cost their lives. Because we all know that lives of human beings are “far superior” to any other living creature, don’t we? So, now what has driven all those tigers in our country to extinction? What has made many of them man eaters and tread into the human spaces only to lose their lives? Well, we all know the answer!

However, there is a slight discomfort in which the movie has handled disability and the way the story unfolds. It is quiet conventional in the way in which the human-hero has to emerge and belong to the Na’vi community in order to save the tribe from the dangers of his own race. Are there a scent of racism and a message of superlative powers of human beings in the movie? Despite these, the movie delivers quiet a strong message!

But, yeah, the message of destroying the lives of tribes may not be driven back to the many of our homes. Because James Cameron has chosen to set it in a futuristic and a fictional world and, quiet specifically, in an alien world. After all, it is the story of a bunch of aliens who do not even exist! May be we choose not to link it up with our opulent lives. But the message is open out there. Whether the earth lives or not, relies heavily on how we act upon the truth!