After watching Avatar for the fourth time, I was sure of one thing - James Cameron is an incredibly rich man. Cameron’s best yet has smothered all box office records to teeny weeny sub atomic particles. So what exactly is it about the movie that makes audiences all over the world go ga-ga? Here’s a highly opinionated post on just that!
First off, like most well executed rolls of reel, the movie has several layers to it. Depending on factors like IQ, worldview, state of mind and location of your seat in the theatre, you will peel one layer off this delicious onion. Not all of us will perceive the movie as the director sculpts it. Not all of us can walk in Mr Cameron’s shoes. But, what we can do is switch off our mobile phones while watching a film. It is really annoying to those of us trying to watch the darn thing!
Secondly: Packaging! The creative team must have smoked reefers the size of kutub minar to cook up such high intensity visuals!
For those of you zooming ahead on the fast track of your careers (or reading this from office in stealth mode!) - Here’s the executive summary of my four attempts at appreciating Avatar:
I) The Avatar Virgin
• Blown away by the Graphics and 3D
• Combed hair several times to keep it from standing erect.
• Felt like I had traveled back to the time when as a teenager I discovered porn.
II) Been there, done that
• There was something I didn’t quite understand about the story, and that’s when I stumbled on my “wow” moment.
• Wow moment!
• Wow!
III) Ava-Yaaaawn!”
• Stayed awake to watch Jake and Neytiri “connect”!!
IV) The ticket checker – Aravind - hails from Coimbatore. We’re friends now.
• Observed many finer audio visual delights of couples making out in the theatre.
• Chastised myself for being a perv.
• Defended myself by asserting “Hey! They are the pervs!”
As the rabbit hole didn’t get any deeper, I stopped watching. Wife’s requests to “Grow up!” had absolutely nothing to do with it. I swear!
The detailed report:
(Reader Alert: An Oversimplification speed breaker and several generalization pot holes ahead. Please read with headlights on.)
The second time I was watching the movie, I felt I was outside of my body and inside the movie. As this happens quite often, I’m quite aware of these sensations. From inside the movie, for the briefest of moments, I looked back and saw myself sitting in the theatre, wearing glasses upon glasses and drooling over Neytiri.
Then suddenly out of nowhere, a thought cloud rained on me.
Human beings, including MBAs, Phds and other such pompous lot, meander around life, wading in our own piss and fart, performing what we believe to be THE MOST IMPORTANT activity on the planet. A client presentation here, a conference paper there - the list is long. We’re so enamored and enmeshed in our man made surroundings that we are mostly unaware of the forces of nature that constantly interact with us.
Do we really know who we are beneath our skin and bones? What if – gasp – we all are somebody’s avatar? What If the one called Sunil Krishnan, known for his unremarkable wit and questionable sentence construction is Jake Sully? What if we are puppets controlled by puppeteers living on some other planet? What if I’m completely losing it?
This view dovetails nicely into the “WHO AM I” question sages have asked themselves for sometime now. Who are we really? And what are we doing this dance for? We have forgotten how to adapt to the environment we live in, and instead, in a gross middle finger salute to Mother Nature, adapted our environment to ourselves. Did Science and society make us weaker? Is man, the social being, the gatherer better off from the hunter he was?
All the insanity apart, I salute the detail and effort woven into every frame. In once scene, where the choppers take off from the military base, a soldier is shown waving and cheering. As the camera follows the choppers, a gust of wind blows the soldier’s cap away. This little detail does not add to the overall plot, but it assures the observant viewer of the level of thought given to each and every second of the experience. The packaging of the movie is so good that it has something to offer for all age groups. As one of my good banya friends said, “Yaar! Poora paisa vasool”.
During the fourth viewing, while wrestling with deep thoughts of planet Earth being the real Pandora and all living creatures being illusionary and what not, I observed a couple, seated couple of rows ahead, lost in each other’s embrace and passionately making out.
To them, I believe, Avatar was just another excuse to enjoy each other’s Avatar.
Image courtesy: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2009/12/17/avatar-public-service-announcement-global-warming
