Avatar movie overview

Avatar arrives swathed in hyperbole. It’s meant to be the most eagerly awaited film of the last few years. The most expensive movie ever. The film with the wildest, most breathtaking and out-there digital effects any director has ever hatched up. It’s the envelope pusher, the film that redefines the possibilities of cinema, the work whose trickle-down effects on other artists will be felt for decades to come. At a point in the decade when critics are looking back, this is a film that is meant to be looking forward and boldly going where no film has gone before.Some people love movies to be talked up in this way. They respond to the drama and buzziness of it all. Others — including you? — perhaps feel a little bullied and coerced. What if you neither knew or cared about how Avatar was the long-drawn out follow-up to director James Cameron’s Titanic? Does that make you any less of a film lover? Movies as aggressively marketed as this feel less like art, and more like maximum-impact juggernauts.

Avatar is set in 2154. The world is dying. Its energy resources are almost spent. Its inhabitants, represented by the US military, have travelled to a distant planet called Pandora where they hope to extract a valuable mineral called Unobtanium (My sides! My sides!) that will save the earth. In their way stand the Na’vi, fierce, proud and very blue-skinned tribespeople who are determined to resist the rape and plunder of their precious eco-system.
The earthlings, led by bull-headed Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), aren’t able to handle the atmospheric pressure on Pandora. Helped by star biologist Grace (Sigourney Weaver), they create an avatar — a half-human, half-Na’vi hybrid — to go on information sorties and to act as a cultural diplomat.