Avatar and Nature Spirituality

Abstract

“To put it mildly, the world is a mess.” Madeleine Albright, former U.S. Secretary of State, 27 July 2014 James Cameron’s Avatar (2009) was the first film to combine stereoscopic imagining and motion-capture animation for a flawless 3-D presentation. It was nominated for nine Academy Awards, including Best Director and Best Picture, and won three, for Cinematography, Art Direction, and Visual Effects. It was also the first box-office hit to gross more than $2 billion, and it remains the highest-grossing film to date. It made cinematic history. But it was more than an aesthetic triumph. Avatar is also a cultural critique and an intellectual provocation. It’s a science-fiction about Earthlings fighting with extraterrestrials—tall, blue humanoids called the Na’vi—on a forest world called Pandora. The conflict is the old battle of good against evil, but with a twist: in Avatar, it is the aliens that are good. The human hero, the soldier Jake Sully (played by Sam Worthington), deserts his unit and switches sides to fight with the Na’vi against his own colony and ultimately against his own civilization.