I saw Avatar 1 for the first (and only) time when it was back in theatres in 2022. I missed it when it first came out. And since the special effects and the 3D were such integral parts of the appeal of the film, I figured there would be no point in watching it at home. And I still mostly think that. The film was meant to be seen in a theatre in 3D, that was James Cameron's vision.
I liked it fine. It was, by all means, alright. I really did like the special effects. And I really liked Pandora, I thought it was very imaginative. The creature designs were great. I loved the alien horses and the monkeys and the dogs and plants. The Na'vi looked great from a VFX standpoint.
I want to write more specifically about a motif that I noticed in the film. That is, the motif of dreams. The film opens with the camera flying above a forest, while Jake narrates "I started having these dreams of flying. I was free."
He continues, "Sooner or later though, you always have to wake up." Sometime later, he gets put into cryosleep to be sent to Pandora. It takes like 6 years to get to Pandora from Earth, so they just cram people into cryo chambers. He wakes up and opens his eyes. He narrates, "In cryo, you don't dream at all." He also has some dim blue light shining on him inside the chamber, foreshadowing his blueness later on. Jake enters his Avatar body. Being put inside the Avatar machine is kind of like going to sleep. You're inside an army base. And then you go to sleep, and you wake up as a blue elf warrior. The Na'vi people call the Avatars "dreamwalkers". Jake starts getting accepted by their society. At first, the world of Pandora feels like a dream to Jake. His real self is back in a lab, and that's the real world, and this is just a dream. He's still obeying the RDA and giving them intel about the Na'vi people. But over time, he starts spending more and more time out there. One time, he spends 16 consecutive hours in his Avatar body. The line starts to get blurred. Which one is his "real" life? Which one is the dream? How do you decide which portion of your life is the real one? How you act in which scenario is your real self? Jake starts finding a feeling of belonging in Pandora, more than he did so on Earth, more than he does so with the RDA. And it's about self-actualization too. As a marine, he's some lackey trying to make rich people richer. As a Na'vi, he finds community, he starts living his best life and being a version of himself that he likes being. And he learns to fly with the ikran, something he had literally dreamed of doing.
Three months in, he narrates "Everything is backwards now. Like out there is the true world, and in here is the dream..." "...I can barely remember my old life. I don't know who I am anymore."
After Jake defects from the RDA, they pull him out of the Avatar machine. "I was a warrior who dreamed he could bring peace. Sooner or later, though, you always have to wake up."
When Jake is having his final confrontation with Quaritch, Quaritch tells him "You think you're one of them? Time to wake up."
At the end, Jake's consciousness gets fully transferred from his human body to his Avatar, and we see him waking up to his real life for the final time in the film.
This is the final shot of the film, and it's probably the most iconic shot from it. Which might be why they recreated it for the final shot of the second film 13 years later (though I saw it in theatres within like 3 months). Except the second film doesn't have this dream motif, there is nothing about dreams in that film at all, so the inclusion of this shot is meaningless. They just did that because they had done it in the first movie.
This motif really stuck out to me when I first saw the film, and is honestly the thing that I remember the most about it. I feel like this concept is applicable to a lot of things in life and relevant in a lot of different contexts, so I tend to recall it a lot and think about it frequently.
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